~~~

Back January 26.

Polish emigrants

While the skilled German is seeking new openings abroad, the unskilled Pole is drifting into Westphalia to do the work for which the native German’s standard is too high [which he is too proud to do], so that the Immigration statistics at present outbalance those of Emigration.

[...]

Polish unskilled labour has supplanted the native German in Westphalia, permeated to Odessa on the Black Sea, and found its way in increasing volume to the United States.

Polish diaspora (Wikipedia)

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915 (footnote)

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Hungary and Serbia

The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with the free principality of Serbia [1817-82, when it became a kingdom, which lasted until 1918] of the same Slavonic nationality. This drove Serbia in 1913 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust war with Bulgaria [Second Balkan War] and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of Salonika.

Greece and Bulgaria had competed for Ottoman Salonika in the First Balkan War. Greece got it, and held it in the Second. Bulgaria had been liberated from Ottoman rule in 1878. Summary of the Balkan wars.

Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien, only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both states is perverted to the futile and demoralising work of “Magyarising” and “Serbising” subject foreign populations [Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Croats, Germans, Jews, Macedonians, Magyars, Montenegrins, Roma, Romanians, Ruthenes, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Vlachs], and they have not even been successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the present catastrophe.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Rome’s discordant founders

The numinous mana of a Rome that was the sepulchre of Peter and Paul had retained all the potency bequeathed by this second pair of discordant founders when the volatile political power of the pagan Rome of Romulus and Remus had ebbed away [...].

Romulus killed Remus. In the incident at Antioch Paul quarrelled with Peter.

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954

On Board Ship

“It’s like him, of course,
this little pencil portrait.

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,
the afternoon magical,
the Ionian Sea around us.

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.
He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,
and this highlighted his expression.
He appears to me better looking
now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago –
the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.”

___

On Board Ship, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com.

Syracuse, Nicea, Trabzon and Arta

The degree of the enemy pressure [Persian, Arab, Slavic] on fortress-Constantinople in the seventh century can be gauged by the remarkable facts that in 618 or 619 even the heroic Emperor Heraclius was with difficulty deterred from evacuating it, and that in 662 Heraclius’s grandson the Emperor Constans II did transfer the Empire’s capital to Syracuse. However, after Constans’ assassination at Syracuse in 668, the capital immediately reverted to Constantinople; and it reverted again in 1261 from Nicea – the seat of the refugee-capital of the principal surviving fragment of the East Roman Empire after the capture of Constantinople and the seizure of the major part of the Empire’s European dominions by the Venetians and the French in and after 1204.

Constans’s twelve-day visit to Rome in 663 was the first by an Emperor since the fall of the Empire in the west. There was, I think, only one after it: a desperate visit by John VIII Palaiologos in 1423, which led to the Union of Florence.

The Empire of Nicea was founded by the Laskaris family and was the largest of three states founded by aristocrats fleeing the Fourth Crusade. The recapture of Constantinople in 1261 was launched from here. The modern city is İznik.

The Empire of Trabzon or Trebizond was founded by the Komnenos family with support of Queen Tamar of Georgia. It ruled part of the Black Sea coast until 1461, when its ruler, David, surrendered to the Ottoman Mehmed II. (I collect historical Davids, so there’s another: David of Trebizond.) Wikipedia: “Its demographic legacy endured for several centuries after the Ottoman conquest in 1461, and a substantial number of Greek Orthodox inhabitants (called Pontic Greeks) remained in the area until the early 20th century. At that time, the remainder of Orthodox Christian inhabitants in the area were deported to Greece (starting in 1923), as determined by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This agreement did not include local Muslims who spoke Greek dialects, who live in the Trebizond area to the present day.”

The Despotate of Epirus was founded on the Greek mainland by the Komnenos Doukas family and survived, under different dynasties, until the Ottomans took it 1479. Its capital was at Arta, with an interlude in Ioannina.

First sentence of Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

On June 1 1997 in Trabzon I met two unforgettable brothers: Ali Kemal Yılmaz and Yusuf Ziya Yılmaz.

Cities on the Move, OUP, 1970

Montpellier

Montpellier [where Adamantios Korais studied] was the university that served the hinterland of the port of Marseilles, to which it stood more or less in the relation of Padua to Venice.

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

President Truman and Brother Juniper

The Missourian politician-philanthropist’s eagerness to combine expediency with charity by assisting the wronged and suffering Jews would appear to have been untempered by any sensitive awareness that he was thereby abetting the infliction of wrongs and sufferings on the Arabs; and his excursions into the stricken field in Palestine reminded a reader of the Fioretti di San Francesco of the tragi-comic exploit there attributed to the impetuously tender-hearted Brother Juniper, who, according to the revealing tale, was so effectively moved by a report of the alimentary needs of an invalid that he rushed, knife in hand, into a wood full of unoffending pigs, and straightway cut off a live pig’s trotter to provide his ailing fellow human being with the dish that his soul desired, without noticing that he was leaving the mutilated animal writhing in agony and without pausing to reflect that his innocent victim was not either the invalid’s property or his own. [Footnote: Fioretti di San Francesco d’Assisi: “Vita di Frate Ginepro”, cap. 1: “Come Frate Ginepro tagliò il Piede ad uno Porco solo per darlo a uno Infermo”.] It must be added that the American repetition of this story included a sequel that was not to be found in the Italian original. In the Fioretti there is no indication that the sufferings of a victim of a holy man’s impulsive charity excited any human pity – for, when the owner of the unfortunate animal did eventually slaughter it, he was concerned, not to put a suffering creature out of its misery, but to atone, by making a feast for Brother Juniper and his brethren, for his own ungodly indignation at the damage done to his property – whereas, in the annals of the United Nations Organization, it is recorded that the United States Government took the initiative in relieving the plight of some 684,000 Palestinian Arab “displaced persons” by providing half the total sum that was estimated to be necessary for the purposes of first aid to these human victims of “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” [Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass].

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954

Quasthoff and Brahms

From an interview released by EMI to support Simon Rattle’s 2007 Deutsches Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic, Thomas Quasthoff, Dorothea Röschmann and the Rundfunkchor Berlin.

On January 11 Quasthoff announced his retirement from all singing (though not teaching and other commitments). “But I am totally happy with it!!!!” he says, characteristically, according to Norman Lebrecht.

Lebrecht’s BBC Radio 3 interview with him from last August is a marvellous 44 minutes. Quasthoff mentions his special relationship with Brahms. I only know his Requiem, but I hope to listen to all Quasthoff’s Brahms, especially Four Serious Songs.

If you want to hear more Quasthoff in English, there is his BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs interview from February 2009. Two Chick Corea numbers there: he’s especially loved in Germany.

Rattle further:

Rattle’s German in front of the orchestra continues to be a shade embarrassing. He could do better than this.

The recording’s website has the longest version of the interview, less soundbitey. I can’t get the video to work, but the mp3 podcast is well worth hearing. Rattle says some extremely perspicacious things. He draws attention to the influence of Schütz and other “early” composers even here in the Requiem. Brahms had been introduced or reintroduced to them through Schumann’s library.

The other Simon in Berlin is Simon Halsey, who has directed the Rundfunkchor Berlin since 2001. The choir goes back to 1925. After the war it was in East Berlin. It has, as Rattle and Halsey tell us, a German sound, perfectly suited to this music. The entire requiem is German. A German hearing the opening notes of Selig sind, die da Leid tragen (Matthew) after an ordeal must surely feel that he is coming home.

Not all Rattle’s Berlin Phil recordings have been successes. It’s hard to say why their Heldenleben is so completely unexciting. Somehow it was just not the moment to be recording it. But their German Requiem must be one of the finest recordings of the work ever made and one of the few great modern recordings of any Brahms. (Don’t get me started on John Eliot Gardiner. Of course he is wonderful in Bach, but his rhythms even there sometimes remind me of a very fit middle-aged jogger.)

Extreme beauty of Quasthoff’s voice at

“Herr, lehre doch mich,
daß ein Ende mit mir haben muß.
und mein Leben ein Ziel hat,
und ich davon muß”

(Psalm 39, verse 4). After 3:15 in the second clip.

Similarly of Röschmann’s in Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit (John). From 4:30 in the second clip.

This is an unconventional requiem, using various dogma- and fire-and-brimstone-free biblical passages, not the usual liturgical texts.

The second section, Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (Peter), from 0:55, must have knocked Elgar flat when he first heard it.

Quasthoff’s experience of life must have, in part, given his voice its colouring. Thalidomide was prescribed between 1957 and 1961. Quasthoff was born in 1959.

Brahms is basically a composer for the voice.

Of course, that sounds like nonsense to most people, but it is true if you measure his output. I did that with the complete DG Brahms edition in 1997. I think I concluded that 69% of his music was for voice.

His study of early music bore its ultimate fruit in his fourth symphony, which seems to belong to both romantic art and higher mathematics. The best recording is not Carlos Kleiber’s, but that is for another post.

Thomas Quasthoff

Norman Lebrecht’s BBC Radio 3 interview with Quasthoff from last August is a marvellous 44 minutes and tells us everything we need to know about him.

Conrad’s stories and novellas

Tales of Unrest 1898
Karain: A Memory
The Idiots
An Outpost of Progress
The Return
The Lagoon

Youth, and Two Other Stories 1902
Youth
Heart of Darkness
The End of the Tether

Typhoon, and Other Stories 1903
Typhoon
Amy Foster
Falk
Tomorrow

A Set of Six 1908
Gaspar Ruiz
The Informer: An Ironic Tale
The Brute
An Anarchist: A Desperate Tale
The Duel
Il Conde

’Twixt Land and Sea 1912
A Smile of Fortune
The Secret Sharer
Freya of the Seven Isles

Within the Tides 1915
The Planter of Malata
The Partner
The Inn of the Two Witches

Tales of Hearsay 1925
The Warrior’s Soul
Prince Roman
The Tale
The Black Mate

romancehaslivedtoolonguponthisriver.com

Babylonic militarism

When a Judah that had just escaped falling into Assyrian hands in 700 B.C. was carried away captive in 597 and 586 B.C. by the Assyrians’ Babylonian heirs, the only provinces of the Syriac World that still remained unscathed by Babylonic militarism were the Phoenicians’ colonial domain in the Western basin of the Mediterranean, which was insulated by the Sea, and Arabia Felix (the Yaman [sic]), which was insulated by Arabian deserts (the Najd and the Hijāz).

The Assyrians had controlled Egypt, but the neo-Babylonians did not. The post-Assyrian Neo-Babylonian Empire used to be called Chaldean. Chaldea is in southern Mesopotamia, Assyria was the north. Thus “Ur of the Chaldees” (Genesis 11:28, 11:31, 15:7) in the period of Sumer.

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Ottoman widows

The wife of an Ottoman sultan came into power if and when her son succeeded her husband on the imperial throne; and an Herodotus would have noted with amusement that the accident of becoming a widow, for which a woman was penalized in the Hindu World by being sent to the funeral pyre to be burnt alive, and in the Western World by being sent to the dower house to die of ennui there, was rewarded in the Islamic World by the enjoyment, as a widowed mother, of a status and a license never accorded to a wife during her husband’s lifetime.

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Manzikert 1071

Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed. Turkish nomads from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the Moslem world [including Iran] as the vigour of the Arabs waned. First they came as slaves, then as mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam. As champions of the [Abbasid] caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the infidels’ encroachment on the Moslem border. They challenged the Romaic Empire’s progress in Armenia, and in A. D. 1071 – five years after the Norman founded at Hastings the strong government which has been the making of England – the Seljuk Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd [Manzikert] that heritage of strong government which had promised so much to Greece.

Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia. The Arab could make no lodgement there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk found a miniature reproduction of his original environment. Tribe after tribe crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new marches which their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities were isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses [caravanserais] built by the Seljuk sultans themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced. The vitality of the Turk was indeed unquestionable. He imposed his language and religion upon the native Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek had imposed his before him, and in time adopted their sedentary life, though too late to repair the mischief his own nomadism had wrought. Turk and Anatolian coalesced into one people; every mountain, river, lake, bridge, and village in the country took on a Turkish name, and a new nation was established for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which nourished itself on the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the supreme enemy of the race.

This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire’s doom. Robbed of its Anatolian governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal regime of the Turks in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more. It was heralded by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government as mercenaries in southern Italy and then expelled their employers, about the time of Melasgerd, from their last foothold in the peninsula. Raids across the straits of Otranto carried the Normans up to the walls of Salonika, their fleets equipped in Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before the eleventh century was out, they had followed up these reconnoitring expeditions by conducting Latin Christendom on its first crusade.

Manzikert is the traditional English spelling. The modern Turkish is Malazgirt. The victor was the third Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan. His Byzantine opponent was Romanos IV Diogenes.

Greece, in The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915

Paul Lewis

Interviewed by Melchior Huurdeman in Amsterdam. What a civilised interaction. Lewis’s new Schubert is out.

His website. Guardian article about his Schubert. Wikipedia.

Talking to Tom Service about Beethoven.

He could be cast as the young Beethoven, down to the chin.

1803 portrait by Christian Horneman.

TH Huxley

Huxley arguing, in 1893 and ’94, against Social Darwinism.

“Cosmic Nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of Ethical Nature. … Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process, the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best. … The ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle. … What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place? … The practice of that which is ethically best what we call goodness or virtue involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint. … It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. … Man, as a ‘political animal’, … is compelled to be perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and within himself. … The ethical progress of Society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. … The history of Civilisation details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an artificial world within the Cosmos. … In virtue of his intelligence, the dwarf bends the titan to his will. … That which lies before the Human Race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organised polity, in which, and by which, Man may develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.”

[Footnote: Huxley, T. H.: Evolution and Ethics, the Romanes Lecture, 1893, and Prolegomena, 1894, reprinted in Huxley, T. H. and J.: Evolution and Ethics, 1893-1943 (London, 1947, Pilot Press), pp. 78, 81, 51, 52, 81-82, 59, 82, 83, 83, 60.]

Surely, aside from the now-obvious evils of Social Darwinism, this is the right idea to have of civilisation. We know the physical universe is a howling emptiness, and most of it a tedious place to be. We know part of it is red in tooth and claw. We’re doing our own thing.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

Gentlemen of the French guard, fire first!

The eighteenth-century punctiliousness over fine points of the military game may be illustrated by the famous legend of the encounter between the English Guards and the French Guards at the Battle of Fontenoy in the War of the Austrian Succession. When the Red Line and the White Line had approached one another to within point-blank range, an English officer is said to have stepped forward from the ranks, made his bow to the enemy, and cried: “Gentlemen of the French Guards, fire first!” Obviously the Guards could not have afforded to indulge in these courtesies if a precocious Industrial Revolution had enabled King George and King Louis to equip their toy-soldiers with Bren guns instead of muzzle-loading smooth-bore muskets; but it is equally obvious that, even if the French and English troops had been armed, in A.D. 1745, with weapons that were no more formidable than those of Cortez’s Aztec adversaries, and could thus have exchanged their courtesies with almost complete material impunity, they would not have exchanged them, even so, if they had not been acting as “living chessmen” but had been fighting in deadly earnest for causes which they personally had at heart.

Wikipedia, edited: “On obtaining the summit of the ridge the Allied column found itself facing the first line of French infantry. The French and Swiss guards, together with the regiments of Aubeterre and Courten, rose and advanced towards the crest, whereupon the two forces confronted each other at a distance of 30 paces. The moment was immortalised by Lord Charles Hay of the 1st Regiment of Guards who, stepping forward, took out a hip flask and drank with a flourish, shouting out to his opponent, ‘We are the English Guards, and we hope you will stand till we come up to you, and not swim the Scheldt as you did the Main at Dettingen!’ He then led his men in three cheers. Voltaire’s version of this famous episode has become proverbial. He wrote: ‘The English officers saluted the French by doffing their hats … the French returned the greeting. My Lord Charles Hai, captain in the English Guards, cried, “Gentlemen of the French Guards, fire!” The Comte d’Auteroche, then lieutenant of the French Grenadiers, shouted, “Gentlemen, we never fire first; fire yourselves.”’ In the event, the French were the first to fire. The volley was somewhat ineffective but threw the 3rd Guards into some confusion and wounded George Churchill. Captain Lord Panmure led the unbroken companies of the 3rd Guards to the flank of the 1st Guards. Up to this point the British column had not fired a single musket shot, but now the Allied infantry poured a devastating discharge into the French. The volley of musketry, with the battalion guns delivering numerous rounds of grape-shot, swept away the enemy’s front rank, killing and wounding between 700 and 800 men and reducing the rest to a shambles.”

I haven’t checked the sources of that, not even the Voltaire. Another site has: “Selon Voltaire (Le siècle de Louis XV), lors de l’avancée de l’infanterie anglaise, les officiers anglais saluèrent leurs homologues français et le capitaine Charles Hay cria: ‘Messieurs des Gardes françaises, tirez!’ Ce à quoi le Comte d’Auteroche, lieutenant, aurait répondu: ‘Messieurs, nous ne tirons jamais les premiers, tirez vous-mêmes!’”

Exchanging courtesies; painting by Édouard Detaille

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Carthage and Venice

In [...] managing to retain her rank as a Great Power in an Hellenic or Hellenizing World in spite of the sudden vast increase in the scale of Hellenic life at the transition from a pre-Alexandnne to a post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history, Carthage achieved something that Venice failed to achieve at the transition from a Late Medieval to an Early Modern Age of Western history. Circa 281 B.C. Carthage was a Great Power still, whereas Venice, circa A.D. 1559, was lucky to find herself still independent and in possession of an empire in the Levant and on the Italian mainland that was now dwarfed by the gigantic stature of Great Powers of a higher calibre that had loomed up all around her. [...] By A.D. 1559 Venice had long since met her Ottoman fate, whereas Carthage was not to meet her Roman fate till 264 B.C.; and by A.D. 1559 Venice had also felt the adverse economic effects of the Portuguese conquest of the Indies and the Spanish conquest of the Americas, whereas the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenian Empire had no similar adverse economic effects on Carthage’s monopoly of the African and Iberian hinterlands of her “wooden curtain”.

Carthage belonged to the “Syriac society” which Greece was overwhelming in the Levant.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Giacinto Scelsi

Since I mentioned him in the last post, here is Hinterhäuser playing Scelsi’s eighth piano suite. They both come from the same corner of Liguria. The suite is called Bot-Ba, which I think means Tibet. This is the first of three clips. The famously unphotographed Scelsi turns out to have had quite a few photographs taken of him. His music is something like Scriabin meets Nono or Feldman, but there is no point in trying to classify it.

That figure is all too reminiscent of a cripple on an Indian pavement, but is obviously a dancer, presumably Tibetan. A kind of Tibetan breakdancer, judging from a still, but I suspect rather slower.

Scelsi’s music surely is not the total break with European traditions that it is sometimes made out to be. Some works may be, but I can hear Liszt and Ravel here. So strong is that pull that some modernist or other purists must have been tempted to call it edelkitsch. Or am I carrying too much aural baggage? Scelsi’s intention was to create a bridge to a transcendent reality and to help us to lose baggage. This is from the beginning of what is called his second period.

The Austrian character

An attractive but decidedly unheroic combination of fecklessness with amiability and softness with elegance.

True, and one could have added an old-fashioned unpleasantness which was certainly in evidence when I spent time there in the ’70s. Unabashed antisemitism. A vigorous or sour cantankerousness. A spineless or sweet sycophancy.

All true sometimes.

Extreme sensitivity and fastidiousness when it came to culture, but at the same time a concern with quite a small universe of high art in music and theatre. That sentence, but not the others here, applies to my friend, not that I have seen him for years, Markus Hinterhäuser (half-Italian), interviewed here as he leaves the concert directorship of the Salzburger Festspiele for the Wiener Festwochen.

Limited interest in the great untidy ragbag of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Not the global outlook either that is part of being English. On the other hand, we still don’t know anything about Germany or Austria.

Jascha Horenstein on the provinciality of Arnold Schoenberg (post here).

Can one imagine Karajan in a scruffy pub with the Philharmonia players? There is a big cultural difference between standing randomly together and sitting at a table (a table is an afterthought in a pub). The Café Winkler would have been more his thing.

The Telegraph has a nice piece on Herr Hawelka, who died a few days ago, and the smokey glories of his café in Vienna. I did a post on him for his 100th birthday last year.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934

Nabucco

Which is an excuse for an unearned digression into Verdi. Lamberto Gardelli, Wiener Staatsoperorchester.

Numbers in the Babylonian captivity

According to the Bible, there were three deportations of Jews of Judah to Babylon: in 597 BC, involving King Jeconiah and his court and others; in 587-6 BC, of his successor King Zedekiah and others, when Jerusalem was burned; and a possible deportation after the assassination of Gedaliah, the Babylonian-appointed governor of what had become Yehud Province, possibly in 582 BC. The forced exile ended in 538-7 BC after the fall of Babylon to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who gave the Jews permission to return and to rebuild the Temple. The second deportation is the one we usually remember.

Eduard Meyer [post here] estimates the numbers deported in 586 B.C. at something between 30,000 and 50,000 (Geschichte des Altertums, vol. iii (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta), p. 175). This estimate appears to be based on the record, preserved in the Book of Nehemiah, chap, vii, of the numbers that returned from Babylonia to Judaea in 538 B.C. after Nebuchadnezzar’s sentence of deportation had been rescinded by Cyrus. The total given in this document amounts to no less than 42,360 free persons and 7,337 slaves, and the figures are convincing, since they are the sum total of thirty-nine precise items, while there is also a note of one group that was of doubtful legitimacy and of another that was definitely rejected. All the same, Eduard Meyer’s estimate for the deportation of 586 B.C. seems hazardously high in the light of the information (fragmentary and ambiguous though it is) in the second Book of Kings and in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. Even in 586 B.C. Nebuzar-adan, Nebuchadnezzar’s captain of the guard, “left [...] the poor of the people, which had nothing, in the land of Judah, and gave them vineyards and fields at the same time” (Jer. xxxix. 10; cf. 2 Kings xxv. 12); and this statement means, on the face of it, that the agricultural population of Judah was not only left undisturbed, even in 586 B.C., but was given possession of the former property of the executed or deported notables. Even the deportation of 586 B.C. may have been confined to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and we cannot be certain that the urban population was deported en masse even on this second occasion. “Now the rest of the people that were left in the city, and the fugitives that fell away to the King of Babylon, with the remnant of the multitude, did Nebuzar-adan … carry away” (2 Kings xxv. 11; cf. Jer. xxxix. 9) has to be taken with a grain of salt considering that the same authority declares that Nebuchadnezzar had “carried away all Jerusalem” in 597 B.C. (2 Kings xxiv. 14). Moreover, a quite incompatible set of figures, on a far smaller scale, is given from some different source in Jer. lii. 28-30: 3,023 persons deported by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C.; 832 deported by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.; 745 deported by Nebuzar-adan in 581 B.C.; making only 4,600 souls in all.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

2012

Superficial but entertaining predictions by BBC correspondents chaired by Owen Bennett Jones on Radio 4.

Isolation

For the [...] assumption that the livelihood of the [English] people at large was dependent upon foreign trade it might be difficult to find chapter and verse that was older than the nineteenth century. An early instance is cited by J. L. and Barbara Hammond in The Rise of Modern Industry, 5th edition (London 1937, Methuen), p 203: “When Fox destroyed the [slave] [bracket in original] trade in 1806 even Sir Robert Peel complained that we were philosophizing when our looms were idle, and George Rose, that Americans would take up the trade, and that Manchester, Stockport, and Paisley would starve.”

At large meaning beyond a merchant oligarchy and its immediate dependents.

The slave trade relied on a large support network of ports, shipping services and finance and insurance companies, but there is doubtless hysteria in those remarks.

Industries were created to process the raw materials harvested or extracted by slaves in the Americas.

The writings of the Hammonds were as far as most people of Toynbee’s education and background got into English economic history. Didn’t the English feel dependent on wool exports in the Middle Ages?

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Hoping for the best

People ask, more anxiously than in ’08, “Will there be a depression?” in the same way that they asked in the ’30s “Will there be a war?”

This links to twenty-plus minutes of predictions by a Swiss hedge fund manager, Felix Zulauf.

“The periphery goes into depression. When you look at a country like Greece, it’s now been in recession for three years. GDP is probably down 15% from the top. The stock market is down 90%, which is the equivalent of 1929 to 1932 in the US. This is depression-like. Then I expect next year one country, probably three, will exit the euro. That will make 2012 very interesting because there are no rules on how to exit the euro. A country exiting the euro means the next day, when they exit, their banking system is bust. That means the banking system has to be immediately nationalized in a new currency. They introduce a new currency, they nationalize the banking system, and then, of course, the government is also bust. Then the government will default. That’s what you have to expect next year. I think Greece will do so and Portugal and Ireland are candidates also.”

The interview takes a while to load and you have to listen at the beginning to the appalling voice of Eric King.

Drawing by Thomas Derrick probably in Time and Tide, and in that case probably December 30 1933.

Simenon lists

A sort of fugal exercise in its early stages: a site I’ve set up that will list his work. This is for bibliophiles and addicts.

More substantial references in this blog are here.

~~~

Back December 31.

Klaus and Mbeki

Václav Klaus stands in relation to Václav Havel as Thabo Mbeki stood in relation to Nelson Mandela: a science-denying smaller man.

Klaus only went into politics in 1989 and never spent time in jail. Nor did Mbeki, who chose exile and returned to South Africa only after the release of Mandela. Havel spent many years in jail.

Armenians and Algerians

The French National Assembly, probably with the Armenian vote in mind for the presidential elections next year, has voted in favour of a bill that would make it illegal to deny that the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, mainly in Anatolia, during the First World War was genocide. The bill goes to the Senate next year. There was an earlier attempt, starting in 2006, which failed.

Countries which officially recognise the killings as genocide already include France (1998), Italy (2000) and Germany (2005), but not the UK, US or Israel. In the US, there have been resolutions in the House of Representatives and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and many at state level, but nothing signed by a president. As far as I know, no country before France has attempted to make denial a crime, unless it is a crime in Armenia.

Turkey’s reactions to all this usually have a third-world ring to them, though I avoid using the word genocide too glibly myself. Erdoğan, meanwhile, has counter-accused France of genocide in Algeria. There may well be justification for that, in relation to the settlers’ behaviour there from 1830 onwards: see this recent FT review of books on Algeria.

Toynbee was one of the people responsible for documenting the Armenian massacres in 1915 and brought them to the attention of the UK Parliament. There is a category here on them. Here is a post from last year.

Balanchine again

And see last post. It links back to another. Apropos the more recent, we get a glimpse in this clip of his Mozartiana.

Born 1904.

Russia (mainly St Petersburg) to 1924.

Europe (mainly Ballets Russes) to 1932.

US (eventually New York City Ballet) to death in 1983.

Life. Ballets Russes and descendants.

Jeux des sons – and Christmas in St Petersburg

Balanchine, cited here the other day, and in the spirit of looking freshly at Tchaikovsky:

“What are Tchaikovsky’s orchestral suites about? [...] The first movement of the Second Suite is called Jeu des sons. What does that mean? [...]

“The first movement of the First Suite is sheer genius, it’s complete in itself. We used to dance the march from that suite in Russia in the ballet The Fairy Doll, conducted by old Drigo. The Third Suite is a masterpiece. Think of that waltz: gloomy, almost grim, but not in the least sentimental! And that waltz is orchestrated masterfully; it starts in the violas, then goes to the lower register of the flutes. You can’t stop listening closely. The last movement of the Third Suite, Theme and Variations, is now played rather frequently. The theme is so elegant and restrained – sheer Mozart!”

The suites stand in something like the same relation to his symphonies as Brahms’s serenades do to his, but they don’t predate the symphonies. They aren’t well-known. They have his brilliance and charm, but not every movement is equally successful. There is an experimental feel to some of them. The Third Suite strikes a deeper note.

They are the other side of the Tchaikovskyan moon. Jeu des sons: what a modern name! It looks sideways to Liszt and forward to Ravel. It’s a strange movement. Doesn’t it begin with a quotation from Beethoven’s Pastoral? The Tchaikovsky of Nutcracker influenced Ravel in a very direct way.

Even the variations at the end of the Third Suite are not known to most people now. Adrian Boult’s recording of that suite with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra is one of the great Tchaikovsky recordings. There is a recording of the Second and Third with the Moscow Philharmonic under Kondrashin.

The Fourth Suite is a set of Mozart arrangements called Mozartiana.

The march in the First Suite, the fourth movement of six, is a sort of Nutcracker number a dozen or so years before the Nutcracker. He composed it in Florence, where he would later write Pique-Dame. It looks forward to the children’s chorus at the beginning of that opera, where the children are like toy soldiers. There is a hint of the Waltz of the Flowers. It is less refined than what we have in the Nutcracker (sounds like a failed precursor), but according to Jurgenson, his publisher, the audience at the first performance in Moscow under Rubinstein, December 20 (Gregorian) 1878, was enchanted: the march “drew applause which would not stop until it was repeated”.

Performers not stated. Despite the picture, I don’t think the piece has anything to do with Christmas. Balanchine again:

“The Nutcracker is a ballet about Christmas. We used to have a fantastic Christmas in Petersburg. Ah, how fantastic it was! For me, Christmas was something extraordinary. Naturally, Christmas is no Easter. At Easter the church bells pealed joyously throughout the night! Nothing is like Easter. But for Christmas St Petersburg was all dark and somehow strange. It wasn’t the way it is now, with everyone shouting, running around as if it’s a fire instead of Christmas. Back in Petersburg there was a stillness, a waiting: Who’s being born? Christ is born!

“I’ve never seen a Christmas like we had in Petersburg anywhere else – not here in America nor in France. It’s hard for us old Petersburgers! I tried to get people in the Orthodox church in New York to take Christmas more seriously, more solemnly, with understanding. But nothing came of it. They get to church with their candles and it starts: ha-ha-ha, ho-ho-ho. Russian talk, gossip. It’s all wrong!

“In Petersburg they had the Christmas service at nearby St Vladimir’s. And naturally in all the big cathedrals: at the Kazan, at St Isaac’s. An unforgettable moment of mystery: when the candles were put out, the church was plunged into darkness, and the choir came in. They sang magnificently! In the Orthodox church, the service is a real theatrical production with processions and all that. The priests come out in pairs wearing velvet kamilavka on their heads, the deacons and altar boys in brocade vestments. And finally, chasuble glittering, the Metropolitan himself.

“On Christmas night we had only the family at home: mother, auntie, and the children. And, of course, the Christmas tree. The tree had a wonderful scent, and the candles gave off their own aroma of wax. The tree was decorated with gold paper angels and stars, tangled up in silver ‘rain’ or tinsel. I liked the fat glass pears – they didn’t break if they fell.

“Of course, we all expected presents. We weren’t wealthy, so we children didn’t get big presents, just a few things. Once I received a watch that didn’t run. I was wildly ecstatic – both because the watch didn’t run and because it was mine!”

Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

It’s an interesting passage, but one wonders whether the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which killed him (it was only diagnosed after his death) was beginning to make itself felt.

Waltz of the Snowflakes, end of Act 1, The Nutcracker, London Festival Orchestra, conductor and chorus not stated. Better and more mysterious than a Dresdner Staatskapelle version also on YouTube.

The dark horse

The apparently paradoxical, and at the same time fundamentally right and natural, victory of “the dark horse” is the theme –  if this may be said without irreverence – of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, … blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth” (Matt v. 3 and 5). The same paradox is the Leitmotiv in the “folk-tale” of the Ugly Duckling which turns into a swan, in the fairy-story of the Cinderella who turns into a princess, and in the romance of the boor who turns into a mighty man of valour like Sir Kay in fiction and Muzio Attendolo “Sforza” in “real life”. And, if Sir Leonard Woolley’s theory is right, we can see the same principle at work in the first gleam of a revelation of the nature of the One True God which has eventually shone out in Christianity. According to Woolley in his Abraham (London 1936, Faber), God revealed himself to the Hebrew patriarch in the shape of the familiar humble tutelary genius of the household, whose worship Abraham carried with him out of Ur into the Wilderness, and not in any of the great deities of a Sumeric Pantheon whose temples the emigrant perforce left behind him in a city of destruction from which he was extricating himself just in time.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Václav Havel

BBC radio half hour here until December 25. Former Prague correspondent Chris Bowlby with Timothy Garton Ash and others. Reminds us how much Havel regretted the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Divorce, though he remained president of the new republic. And of his disapproval of his successor, the ascetic Eurosceptic economist Václav Klaus, who disdained the former dissidents and all their works.

Guardian.

Suite française 2

Poulenc (last post) did write some Christmas music, the Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël of 1952 for mixed chorus to Latin texts. But here is something else that is Christmassy, at least in parts, and deeply-felt, the Suite française of 1935 for woodwind (two oboes and two bassoons), brass (two trumpets and two trombones), percussion and harpsichord. This is a set of arrangements of tunes by a sixteenth-century French composer, Claude Gervais.

The movements are Bransle de Bourgogne, Pavane, Petite marche militaire, Complainte, Bransle de Champagne, Sicilienne and Carillon. One can imagine the lovely Pavane, Bransle de Champagne and Sicilienne played outdoors in a French or Swiss town in winter.

Milhaud’s marvellous and very different Suite française would use folk tunes. What was Gervais’s relationship with popular music? Why doesn’t one speak of French “folk music”, or does one? Is it because the word folk is too German?

I wrote about the Milhaud in an earlier post. No YouTube example there, though there are many indifferent performances. It has a life in high school and other bands which is far away from official recording studios, in so far as those still exist. I’d like to hear it done by the Trinity High School Band, Euless, Texas.

Some of the best of the neoclassical arrangements between the wars were made of the music of composers who were rather unknown, at least outside their countries. Pergolesi, I would bet, was not well-known when Stravinsky made Pulcinella. Poulenc uses Gervais. Milhaud in one work uses Anet. In another Campra. Respighi uses obscure sources for Ancient Airs and Dances. In England, Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite was based on based on tunes in Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie, a manual of Renaissance dances.

I have a theory (which I need to develop, I’m sure it’s not original) that there were two great ages of the tune. The first was in the sixteenth century. It produced the greatest and most elemental tunes. Think of the Old 100th (sixteenth-century French and still sung every year at Concord, Massachusetts), Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (German, circa 1600), Vom Himmel hoch (Luther), many others. And these tunes by Gervais which Poulenc is setting. The second age was after 1800, and especially after 1850, and it produced a kind of apotheosis of the tune, especially in Tchaikovsky and Puccini. In the great age of counterpoint and in the classical era that followed it the tune was, relatively speaking, in abeyance. (I am distinguishing “tune” from “melody”.)

Claude Rostand’s description of Poulenc as monk and delinquent, le moine et le voyou, is unforgettable. The Piano Society website writes of Suite française that it “displays Poulenc’s inimitable blend of the archaic and the anarchic”. The astringency of that blend is slightly reduced by the version I’m about to embed. It is described as an arrangement for brass (Empire Brass) and organ (Michael Murray). In other words, we have lost the woodwind. At least, I think we have. The harpsichord is there, though not mentioned by the uploader. So is some percussion. The result is something warmer. The effect of losing the woodwind is to give the harpsichord no foil. Did Poulenc make the arrangement?

What classic film used Poulenc’s music? Alfred Hitchock’s Rope of 1948. Hitchcock has always been big in France.

One of the protagonists obsessively plays the first of the Mouvements perpétuels for piano of 1918. In doing so he makes the film obsessively memorable. (He was played by Farley Granger, who died this year. As did the screenplay-writer, Arthur Laurents.) And Leo Forbstein and/or David Buttolph combined that mouvement perpétuel with a fragment from the Pastorale, the first of Trois pièces for piano, also of 1918, in a Hollywood, and somehow wholly Hitchcockian, take on the material for full orchestra for the opening credits. Here it is.

Here are Poulenc and Jacques Février in the first movement of the two-piano concerto, with the ORTF under Georges Prêtre. The rest of the work is clickable at the end. Poulenc is the one with the hairy hands.

Poulenc accompanying Jean-Pierre Rampal in the second movement of his flute sonata of 1957.

Both those sequences are on an essential EMI DVD called Francis Poulenc and Friends. You can watch him taking questions from a Parisian audience at the Salle Gaveau.

___

This ramble on Poulenc was supposed to be a prelude to something on Nutcracker, inspired by Gavin Plumley’s wonderful current series of posts on it at Entartete Musik and recent article in the Guardian. He is right to insist that one looks at Tchaikovsky freshly. A book that does that (I know there have been questions about Volkov’s academic integrity now and then) is Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky, conversations between Volkov and Balanchine about Tchaikovsky which took place in New York in the early ’80s, towards the end of Balanchine’s life. Some of it is disarmingly simple. There is a chapter on the Nutcracker.

“Sometimes people say to me [routinely], ‘I love the music of such-and-such composer.’ My feelings for Tchaikovsky were different, even as a child. [...]

“I was small and knew nothing about music theory. But I liked all of Tchaikovsky’s compositions. When I looked at his pictures, I liked his face. I liked everything about him, everything Tchaikovsky had ever done in his life.”

Another way to refresh one’s ideas about Tchaikovsky, equally far from analysis and theory, is through his letters. In addition to the letters, one should read David Brown’s anthology of personal reminiscences of Tchaikovsky, Tchaikovsky Remembered.

Gavin begins his Guardian piece: “Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote music for the soul.” He’s right, but Balanchine might not have liked that sentence or one about the Nutcracker’s “soulful message”.

“Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of gentle lyric music, but there are also stormy passages, almost Dostoyevskian. [...] But in Tchaikovsky it’s in harmony, it’s all proportional. [Mozartian.] You can study at length how he did it, what tricks of the trade he used. And people say – soul! I don’t understand what that is – soul in music. Tchaikovsky was right to laugh at it. When people like something, they say it’s dushevno, soulful. They confuse two completely different words – dushevnyi, ‘soulful’, and dukhovnyi, ‘spiritual’. Tchaikovsky’s music isn’t soulful, it’s spiritual.”

Figure humaine

Painting by Louay Kayali (1934-78) from the weblog of Imad Moustapha, who until a few days ago was the Syrian ambassador to the US. There is a lot of Syrian art on it. A Kayali site is here. Wikipedia.

Poulenc’s Figure humaine is a set of eight settings of poems by Paul Éluard. The notes to a new recording describe it as “a secret hymn to the French resistance”. The last poem is called Liberté.

The first is De tous les printemps du monde:

“Of all the spring times in the world
This is the most vile.
Of all my modes of being,
The trusting one is the best.

The grass lifts the snow
Like the stone from a tomb,
But I sleep through the storm
And wake with clear eyes.

The time draws slowly to a close,
The roads had to pass
Through my most secret hiding-places
Before I could greet anyone.

I do not hear the monsters speaking:
I know them, they have said it all.
I see only beautiful faces,
Good faces, sure of themselves.

Sure of soon destroying their masters.”

My translation.

“De tous les printemps du monde,
Celui-ci est le plus laid
Entre toutes mes façons d’être
La confiante est la meillure

L’herbe soulève la neige
Comme la pierre d’un tombeau
Moi je dors dans la tempête
Et je m’éveille les yeux clairs

Le lent le petit temps s’achève
Où toute rue devait passer
Par mes plus intimes retraites
Pour que je rencontre quelqu’un

Je n’entends pas parler les monstres
Je les connais ils ont tout dit
Je ne vois que les beaux visages
Les bons visages sûrs d’eux mêmes.

Sûrs de ruiner bientôt leurs maîtres.”

BBC Symphony Chorus, All Hallows, Gospel Oak, conducted by Stephen Jackson, June 2003.

Forster in 1959

BBC film made at the time of his eightieth birthday. The clip runs twice.

Old post: BBC tribute to Forster after his death in 1970.

Maugham and Muggeridge

Wonderful period piece. Malcolm Muggeridge interviewing Somerset Maugham for BBC television, almost certainly in 1954, the year of his eightieth birthday. His Ten Novels and Their Authors was a set of essays which had begun as introductions to some American reissues of classic novels. Maugham had chosen the novels. Were they abridgements? He refers at one point in the interview to a condensation of Of Human Bondage.

The novels which he identifies as the ten best, not necessarily in this order, are:

Tom Jones
Pride and Prejudice
Le rouge et le noir
Le père Goriot
David Copperfield
Madame Bovary
Moby Dick
Wuthering Heights
The Brothers Karamazov
War and Peace

These lists are always depressing. Life is about reading more and more, not less and less, Edmund White says somewhere. (I love work lists, but not best lists.)

Muggeridge was editor of Punch when this was recorded. He quotes Shakespeare’s phrase chronicle of wasted time. He says chronicles, and in that form it was the title of his own autobiography some twenty years later.

In a letter of the late ’40s or early ’50s, he writes that there is a “whiff of charlatanism” around Toynbee. (From memory.)

Old posts: another Maugham interview; Muggeridge in Christopher Hitchens’s film about Mother Teresa.

Etherialization

“A fiery soul which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay
And o’er-informed the tenement of clay.”

[Footnote: Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel.]

A Study of History, Vol III, OUP, 1934

Elliott Carter

Last Thursday evening, in a concert at the 92nd Street Y in New York, seven works by Elliott Carter written since his 100th birthday were given their world or US premieres. He celebrated his 103rd birthday on Sunday.

Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, 1952, recording from 1965. Samuel Baron, flute; Ronald Roseman, oboe; Alexander Kouguell, cello; Sylvia Marlowe, who commissioned it, harpsichord.

Durbar

100th anniversary of the Delhi Durbar of 1911.

In India, the Persian word durbar (from دربار , darbār) meant either a feudal state council for administering the affairs of a princely state or a purely ceremonial gathering. The Persian word diwan overlaps with it in meaning, but usually refers to an inner council.

The British durbars in Delhi were demonstrations of loyalty by Indian princes and dignitaries to the British Crown.

The Proclamation Durbar of 1877, less than twenty years after the Crown had replaced the East India Company, when the Viceroy was Lord Lytton, celebrated the proclamation in 1876 of Queen Victoria as Empress of India.

The Coronation Durbar of 1903, with Lord Curzon, celebrated the accession of Edward VII. It was filmed by RW Paul (watch in full screen and with the music off):

The culmination was the Delhi Durbar of December 1911, which George V and Queen Mary attended in person. They were the only British monarchs to visit India during the period of British rule. (Edward VIII had visited as Prince of Wales, as had George V himself, and Edward VII.) Practically every ruling prince attended to pay homage. The Gateway of India in Bombay commemorates the visit. The Viceroy was Lord Hardinge.

At the durbar, George V announced that the capital would be transferred forthwith from Calcutta to Delhi. The foundation of New Delhi was laid three days later. It was planned by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, christened New Delhi in 1927, and formally inaugurated on February 13 1931 by the Viceroy Lord Irwin, Viscount Halifax (who was Foreign Secretary when the war broke out).

Mughal processions, in the Victorian imagination, with their umbrellas and brown Kim-like boys on swaying elephants, were something romantic, fantastic, but the 1911 durbar was more elaborate than anything previously seen. It could hardly have been called charming. Was the 1877 durbar more authentically Mughal in feel? During the royal wedding in London this year, I found myself wondering whether the famous British skill at pageantry was not really something we had brought back from India.

With Our King and Queen through India – or The Durbar in Delhi – was filmed in Kinemacolor and released in February 1912. About two hours of film survive, but it was originally longer. List of Kinemacolor films. Why was the process not used more often and why not after 1914?

More:

Another film:

The king then went big game hunting in Nepal. See Hon John Fortescue, Narrative of the Visit to India of Their Majesties King George V and Queen Mary and of the Coronation Durbar Held at Delhi, Macmillan, 1912.

Elgar’s The Crown of India was staged at the Coliseum Theatre in London in March 1912. The king and queen had arrived home in February. The words, spoken and sung, were by Henry Hamilton. It was a masque consisting of two tableaux.

Tableau I: The Cities of Ind

1 – Introduction
Sacred Measure
2 – Dance of Nautch Girls
India Greets Her Cities [The cities of Ind were Agra, Delhi, Calcutta, Benares, Lucknow, Bombay, Madras, “Haiderabad”, Mysore, Gwalior, Allahabad, Lahore.]
3 – Song (Agra): “Hail, Immemorial Ind!” (The Homage of Ind)
Entrance of Calcutta. India: “Welcome Calcutta!”
Entrance of Delhi. Delhi: “Stop! That place is mine” [Delhi-Calcutta rivalry!]
4 – Introduction
March of the Mogul Emperors. India: “Illustrious Emperors!”
5 – Entrance of John Company. Calcutta: “Good John Company, reply” [John Company was a colloquialism referring to the East India Company.]
Entrance of St. George. India: “Calcutta, Delhi, give your quarrel pause”
6 – Song (St. George): ”The rule of England”
7 – Interlude

Tableau II: Ave Imperator!

8 – Introduction
Warriors’ Dance
9 – The Cities of Ind. India: “Hail festal hour from out the ages drawn”
10 – March: The Crown of India. India: “Incessu patuit Imperator”
The Homage of Ind
11 – The Crowning of Delhi
12 – Ave Imperator!

There’s nothing I like on YouTube and most of it is not great music.

On the accession of George VI in 1936, when the Viceroy was the 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, it was decided not to hold a durbar. The cost would have been a burden to the government of India, and Indian nationalism was rising.

2011 – 1911 – 1811. In 1811 the British East India Company, confronted with a reassertion of Mughal rights in Bihar and Bengal, had already declared that it was “unnecessary to derive from the King of Delhi any additional title to the allegiance of our Indian subjects”.

BBC news links:

Low-key celebrations

Audio slideshow. The narrator says that when he came to Delhi in 1945 it was like a village compared with Calcutta.

Indian maharajah’s daring act of anti-colonial dissent

Photographs of the 1911 durbar by Lilah Wingfield

Nineteenth-century photographs by Felice Beato

Old posts:

To Delhi, from Farghana and Calcutta

Persian in India

After Aurangzeb

Anglo-India

The Kingdom, and Gramophone

“Elgar conducting an inspired BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of his Prelude to the oratorio The Kingdom, recorded in London in 1933”: YouTube. Whether you regard this as top-drawer Elgar or not (I am not sure that I do), it is a fine recording. It was done on April 11 1933 at Studio no 1, Abbey Road under the direction of Fred Gaisberg.

I got that date from Michael Kennedy’s book: the Gramophone archive is riddled with typos and gets it wrong. Gramophone has managed its archive ineptly since it put it online as Gramofile in 2000 or earlier. That may sound like prehistory, but it was possible to do these things rigorously even then. I lost track of the number of times Gramofile was “relaunched”, and none of the relaunches seemed to fix any of its problems, which included missing reviews. They should have done the job properly once and for all and charged. Even now, though they show page images as thumbnails, we are forced to read unreliably OCR’d text. And that isn’t the only thing wrong with it.

In a Steve Jobs phrase, they don’t get it.

It’s a pity, since Gramophone, founded in 1923, contains or contained the best writing about recorded music anywhere.

The spirit of sectarianism

And I suppose the spirit of Sectarianism is a sour ferment of the new wine of Nationality in the old bottles of Religion.