Old Fogey’s Favourites

This was the other 78rpm record I used to play under the stairs. From Gluck’s opera ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’.

On the other side was ‘Art Thou Troubled?’, Handel’s aria from his opera ‘Rodelinda’.

Sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

I’m not sure Kathleen’s way is the only way. She sings it like a religious anthem, as if from ‘St Mathew’s Passion’. Yet I can understand why she did it like that. She knew it was meant for us, the English; she sung it how we would understand it, and how, in its sombre melody, our sentiment of farewell and regret should be portrayed.

It may not quite do justice to Gluck, but that’s not the point. It’s ours and it’s English. That’s what matters.

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When I was small we had one of those wind up gramophones, that played ’78s’, those old, thick, brittle discs whose sounds were scoured out by steel needles. Like a fish fat fryer heard through a rainstorm. We played it in the alcove under the stairs. Kathleen Ferrier figured strongly in our listening - she died age 42 in 1953 - and John McCormack. Here’s one of his most famous, recorded during the First World War, and much loved at the time. I suppose it was the equivalent of Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ of twenty years later.

The sound, of course, is terrible - recorded in a linen cupboard, with the orchestra thirty yards away. But it doesn’t dim the emotion, or the lingering heartache of what it must have meant to those girls who waved their sweethearts off to war in France, and to the men who marched away.

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In my last post I talked of my grandfather’s experiences in the First World War - or Great War as it was known to his generation - on the occasion of, what would have been, his 110th birthday. Two days later, Harry Patch, the last of all the Tommies, died at the age of 111.

Among the songs my grandfather used to whistle and sing, were the old soldier songs from that war. ‘Pack Up Your Toubles’ used to puzzle me with its line ‘while you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag’. Till he told me a Lucifer was a match. And this most famous of all the songs the Tommies sang - ‘Tipperary’.

These songs are hard wired into the English psyche. I used to sing them to my children when they were small, to send them to sleep. It’s now hard wired into them too.

So in memory of Harry Patch, my grandfather and all the Tommies here is John McCormack singing ‘Tipperary’.

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My grandfather, Will, would have been 110 years old today. He fought in the First World War, lying about his age, was captured by the Germans in 1917, and spent the rest of the war working on a farm in Germany. He told me that though he was hungry all the time, this was one of the happiest times of his life - working with animals in the open air - and even though they were the enemy, he, like so many Tommies, never really hated the Germans.

When he got back to England, his open air days were over. He went down the pit. Later, when he was thirty three, married with two young daughters, the roof of the tunnel where he was working fell in on him, breaking his spine. He was crippled for the rest of his life.

As a child I remember him, sitting in the corner of the front room, hands clasped behind his head, one withered leg crossed over the other, rocking himself backwards and forwards, whistling and singing this song.

‘We’re three little lambs who have lost their way. Baa, baa, baa. We’re little black sheep who have gone astray. Baa, baa, baa. Gentlemen songsters off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity. Lord, have mercy on such as we. Baa, baa, baa.’

Here, in memory of my grandfather, is this most melancholy of songs, of lost youth and mortality. It is sung, in this, its most famous recording, by Bing Crosby, with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians.

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From Catalani’s famous opera is one of the most hypnotic and haunting arias in all opera. Wally (absurdly named young woman) has been banished by her cruel father for refusing to marry the wealthy, but old, man he had arranged for her. She is a strange, rather wild woman, a child of nature who longs to live in the mountains. She determines to leave - ’I will go far away, alone, as far away as the sound of a distant tolling bell.’ Her voice mimics the insistent tolling of the bell, each word sounded on the same note, as if in a trance, before her anguish at leaving her mother’s home forever. 

The aria is famous too as part of the soundtrack of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s cult 1981 film ‘Diva’.

It is sung be the magnificent Italian soprano, Maria Chiara.

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When I first heard this song, written and sung by the incomparable French chanteuse, Barbara, I thought it was about a woman, who after years of separation, is returning to see her long lost lover in the last moments of his life. Till almost the end, there is nothing in the song to make us us think otherwise. Then, just before the close,  Barbara stops and, in a light high voice filled with anguish pronounces the words “Mon père. Mon père.” It is not a lost lover she has come to find again but someone deeper-buried in her heart – her father. What has been touching and sad to this point now becomes tragic. The song could only have this tragic quality carried on the voice of a woman, invoking the special quality of a daughter’s relationship with her father, that no other can share.  Here’s the final verse.

‘He came back one evening. It was his last journey, it was his last resting place. Before dying he wanted to warm himself again in my smile but he died the same night without saying farewell or “I love you”. By the road that runs by the sea, sleeping in the garden of stones I saw him to his rest. I laid him to rest under the roses.

My father. My father.

It is raining over Nantes. And I remember. The sky over Nantes pains my heart.’

There is something in the flat way Barbara delivers the words, as if struggling to show no emotion, that makes it so compelling.

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Guglielmo and Ferrando have been summoned to war, leaving their sweethearts, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, at home and prey to the machinations of the world weary cynic, Don Alfonso. Mayhem ensues. But here, at this moment of innocence, the three of them stand and watch them sail away, across the Bay of Naples.

‘May the winds be gentle, and the waves be calm, and every element respond sweetly to our desires.’

The most sublime trio in all opera.

Lisa della Casa, Christa Ludwig and Paul Schoeffler.

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Dido’s great lament, her farewell to life at the end of Purcell’s opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’. If you’re English, the melody is in the blood. Heard among the dead silent crowd at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, it is heartstopping.

‘When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast. Remember me! But ah! Forget my fate.’

‘Remember me!’ - the same note repeated, the voice forlorn, almost pleading, unsure she will be remembered at all. Cupids come to cover her.

This is Janet Baker, recorded in 1961 - never equalled.

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