Life must be filled up

I haven't heard Zadok the Priest performed quite like this before and I think it's great. 'Les Arts Florissants et les élèves du département Historical Performance de la Juilliard School 415 de New York interprètent Zadok the Priest HWV 258 de Haendel sous la direction de William Christie. En direct de la Grande Salle Pierre Boulez de la Philharmonie de Paris.'

This book was recommended by cornflower and as it deals with the writing of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, I was keen to read it. I consider the Passion to be the greatest musical work ever written (hardly an original view, I know), so I got stuck in. The story is told from the point of view of a boy, Stefan Silbermann, who comes from a famous family of organ makers. When his mother dies, he is sent away to school in Leipzig, to study music. The school is awful and he's bullied so unmercifully that he runs away. He has to go back but by a stroke of luck his voice and musicality have been noticed by the Cantor, as he always calls J S Bach. He becomes the principal soprano at the church, a cause of jealousy and more bullying. For a while, he moves into the Bach household: crowded and a place of constant music making. The Cantor helps him with his singing and organ playing and he learns the great man’s theories: work, work, work; get the fingering right and all else follows; breathe in the right places; praise God always in all that you play and sing. Bach’s work ethic was extraordinary and the descriptions of the menage, of the stern Lutheran faith of the people of Leipzig and daily life in the city are totally empathetic.

I was slightly disappointed that we didn’t get to the Passion until about two thirds of the way through the book but without what went before, we wouldn’t understand the writing of it so well. For instance, there’s a description of a botched public execution which seems gratuitous at first, until you see the parallels with the suffering of Christ and the theme of ‘blut’ which infuses the Passion. The music is difficult but the Cantor says it has to be, that all the musicians must be stretched by it. Nothing should be easy. In those days, women were allowed to sing opera but not church music, so the lead women’s roles were performed by boy sopranos like Stefan. It is first performed on Good Friday. When it ends, there is silence in the church; no one has ever heard anything like it. Imagine hearing it for the first time! Soon afterwards, Stefan’s year at the school is over and he returns home, leaving Bach’s daughter Catharina, with whom he’s in love. That’s all we know about Stefan until twenty-three years later, when he returns to Leipzig for the Cantor’s funeral and meets Anna Magdalena and Catharina again.

This is a brilliant book, which can be enjoyed by people who are neither musical nor religious, although it helps to be both.
( digression and some music )

Weekends are a TV desert for me. I’m watching Magpie Murders because I’d read the book and wondered how Anthony Horowitz would translate such a complicated plot to the screen. I read it again and now watch it playing ‘spot the differences’. I also like to watch Antiques Roadshow but yesterday it was cancelled at short notice. The only reason I can think of for it is that the BBC really hates older viewers and cares nothing for their disappointment. All was not lost, as I found two absolute gems on BBC 4.

The Queen’s Realm: England is a little film first shown for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. We take a tour of England from the air: the green countryside, the coast, industry, holiday camps, cars on new (then) roads, canals and steam trains. It must have looked nostalgic then; even more so now. There’s music but no commentary, just a lot of poetry, chosen by John Betjeman. This turned into a great quiz for me: spot the poet! I actually started making a list, which I won’t bore you with except to say that it was a masterstroke to have the Flying Scotsman whizzing along to Faster than fairies, faster than witches …. I Think Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is underrated and all children should read it because they will never forget the poems. RLS, Auden and T S Eliot in the same programme and all perfectly appropriate? Brilliant. Research afterwards failed to find a list of the poems used but I did discover that the film is on YouTube, fast becoming my favourite channel.

Later, I watched an absolute cracker: Norwegian violinist Bjarte Elke and his band Barroksoliniste playing seventeenth century British music in various candlelit venues. Traditional folk songs, drinking songs, sad laments, sea shanties and some lovely Purcell sung by a guest soprano. Brilliant musicians (several nationalities), subtle choreography and a lot of fun, including duelling fiddles. Do you ever wonder how you know The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies-O, Haul Away Joe and Leave Her Johnny, Leave Her?
I think I learned some at junior school, and slightly different versions; only to be expected with songs which have lasted centuries. They ended with Leave Her Johnny, singing it softly as they left the stage then, later, with their instruments all packed up and apparently bidding each other fond farewells, they played it again. This scene was intercut with atmospheric shots of a foggy old Thames, reminding you that it must have looked much the same in the past. I found I went to bed still singing, ‘what care I for a goose-feather bed’ to myself. Highly recommended, especially if you like folk music.

Channel 4’s The Piano is exactly the sort of programme I would expect to hate but because I love the piano, I watched the first episode and was pleasantly surprised. Yesterday, though, I thought, ‘Oh no, same old format every week; this is going to get very dull.’ Did I cry when the blind girl played Chopin? Of course I did.

There’s one thing about this programme which they really should change. Claudia Winkleman constantly describes Lang Lang as ‘the greatest pianist in the world.’ He is not.

Liberal England is always coming up with little gems and today he reminded me how much I love this song.

Everything is horrid but music endures and comforts. Here’s a Christmas favourite of mine, from L’enfance du Christ by Berlioz.



Edit. I've just seen that I posted this same video in 2017!

Yesterday evening, I listened to ‘Moira Stuart talks to …’ Monty Don. I thought it would be pleasantly relaxing and it was. Desert Island Discs it ain’t; much longer pieces of music are played. Near the beginning of the show came one of my very favourite things: Dido’s Lament (When I am Laid in Earth) from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. Annoyingly, they didn’t say whether this was Monty’s choice or just happened to be on the evening’s playlist. I didn’t much care for the recording they used and much prefer this, which makes me cry, even at half past eight in the morning. Golly, I love Purcell.

The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached by Mark Doyle.

Here’s a book I’m thinking of buying, after reading this review in The Spectator. (I got the link from Liberal England.) I’ve always been a fan of The Kinks. As I’ve got older and the sixties have become history, I’ve been amazed that someone as young as Ray Davies was then could have such an acute sense of a working-class world that was vanishing and write so nostalgically about it. Autumn Almanac and Shangri-La are still favourite songs of mine.

The other evening I watched Janet Baker - In Her Own Words on BBC 4 and cried my way through most of it. What an inspirational woman.

Here she is singing in the St Matthew Passion, which is an utterly wonderful work and very appropriate listening today.



The quality here isn't that great but it does give you an idea.