In the end she gets her wish, and, inevitably, dies in the arms of her lover as they sink silently into the lake from which she sprung.

It is sung by Lucia Popp.

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.

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.

Charlie Chaplin was eight years older than my grandmother. He was born in Peckham. His early life there, the poverty and distress, was terrifying. I’m glad my grandmother escaped it - into something relatively more comfortable, though I’m not sure we’d think of it so now. Her life, a Lancashire miner’s wife, was hard enough.

There’s a sculpture of Charlie there now. It’s not up to much, but it marks a remembrance.

This is Charlie’s composition ‘Limelight’ - into which he, by his genius, was able to escape to live, and my grandmother and great- great grandfather weren’t.

It is played by Eric Parkin.

It is sung by the Don Cossack Choir conducted by Serge Jaroff, recorded almost fifty years ago.

This song ‘Sonny’ is about the other side of this - of the one who didn’t leave. It tells of the fear of the mother that her son will, like those of so many other mothers, leave her alone. And when at last it is he who is left alone, it’s as if his life had had its meaning taken from him. It is sung here in a famous recording from 1991 by Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Black and Dolores Keane. The wailing uillean pipes, Ireland’s equivalent of country music’s steel guitar, seem to speak achingly of Sonny yearning for something he could never have and which he has no words for.

Anyway it gives me an excuse to play this heartfelt song, written and sung by Eddi Reader. She is waiting for news of friends who, like me, were caught up in it.

We play in a vacant room at the back of the club, out of harm’s way. But a few Legion regulars come in and bring their drinks with them. Not so much, I think, for the music, but to witness the amusing real life spectacle of us getting on each other’s nerves.

Anyway, here’s the best version, by Bunny Berigan. He was a beautiful trumpet player. His heyday was in the 1930s - but his day didn’t last long. He was dead at 34. He was almost the equal of Armstrong in tone and invention - more tender too. He also could sing, which he does here, in an engaging offhand manner. When he plays the melody again at the end, in the higher register, it is spine tingling. Recorded in April 1936.

Schumann’s Meine Rose is one of the most popular encores for sopranos, and Alice Coote sang it at the end of her recital. The recital was broadcast by the BBC and this is from my recording of it then. I’ve left in the applause and the announcer’s voice over at the end.

‘At your feet, I would like, to you as to a flower, silently pour out my soul, though I do not see your blossoming joy.’

Pavarotti, for me, was simply the greatest tenor voice of the twentieth century. Others may have had greater dramatic talent - Jon Vickers, Placido Domingo to name two. But few, I think, had Pavarotti’s delicacy, and none his voice.

I’m not sure that it was in the big arias of Verdi or Puccini - ‘Nessun Dorma’ the most widely associated with him - suited him naturally - though his ‘Che gelida manina’ would rightly bring the house down. He was at his best, in my view, in the gentler, more reflective and wistful music of Bellini and Donizetti - the bel canto repertoire in vogue before Verdi’s dramatic revolution.

Here he is singing ‘A te, O cara’ - ‘You, beloved’ - from Bellini’s ‘I Puritani’. Nicolai Ghiaurov and Giancario Luccardi join in, with La Stupenda - Joan Sutherland - mooning about up top.

At his best.

‘If I were the man you wanted, I would not be man that I am.’

His collection of short stories ‘Dubliners’, though, is of real quality, culminating in the most moving story of all, ‘The Dead’. It deals with the events at a twelfth night dinner, 1904, in suburban Dublin. Little happens -  some singing, playing, dancing, a festive dinner, an absurd but appropriate speech by Gabriel, the somewhat smug, superior but interesting protagonist. At the end of a good evening, as he and his wife, Gretta, leave, she is transfixed by the sound of a voice singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. For a few moments she is a stranger to Gabriel. Then they leave. Gabriel is by turns, touched, baffled and piqued - and he can’t let the matter drop. Later at their hotel, he presses for an explanation. She tells of a young man who loved her, twenty years ago, who used to sing the song to her. He was sickly and died. She had never been loved as she was by him. Overwrought by her memories, she falls asleep, leaving Gabriel to his melancholy. The final pages are an immensely moving rumination on love, passion and death.

It’s a wonderful story that, in 1987, was made into a wonderful film by John Huston. It was his last film. It stars his daughter Angelica as Gretta, Donal McCann as Gabriel. They, and the rest of the cast, are well nigh faultless. Huston conceives the action differently from Joyce. For Joyce the events were contemporary, now. For Huston, and us, they are long passed,  witnessed from a distance, the distance of more than 80 years, where all the actors in the drama are long dead. Like ghosts they are repeating the actions of that night, as we might do ours when we too, like they, are long dead.

The moving moment where Angelica stops to listen to ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ can be see here - it is the crux and turning point of the film, made all the more poignant by Huston having the camera hold on his daughter’s face for so long. The melody does return at the very end of the film, over the final credits. This time it is on the harp, a slight and fragile sound that might so easily be snuffed out. It is followed by a little waltz, as if referring back to the little joys of that  evening long ago, a faded memory, almost gone.

It is played by Ann Stockton.

‘As the sun rises on Mary, it sets on him’.

She’s the shoulder he cries on, and young love being strong and fickle, it’s not long before his affections are transferred wholesale to her.

‘As the sun sets on Mary, it rises on him.’

At the end there’s an unmistakeable smile of triumph in Dido’s voice.

‘I’m taking care of Danny, and he’s taking care of me.’

I don’t think Geography could have been Dido’s best subject at school. Her time difference isn’t right. If Mary’s in India and Danny’s in England, she’s five hours ahead of him. So when the sun sets on Mary, there would still be three or four hours to go (depending on the season) before it rises on him.

Pedantic, of course, but it’s the details that always trip you up.

This is Christina Ortiz. She doesn’t sentimentalise the lovely melody, and it’s all the more touching for that.

You can see why the English are so stoical - what with our weather and the public service amateurs that watch over us.

Here for Muriel is Judy Garland, chasing rainbows. And a little test.

Who wrote the original melody?

I’ll give the answer in my next post.

This is from 1957, and the incomparable Peggy Lee. Originally from her LP ‘The Man I Love’ it is ‘Happiness is a thing called Joe’. I like it, apart from the melody, for the seductive way she seems to be seducing me into thinking that if my name was Joe I might be the man she adores.  I’m not sure what feminists think about her. I suppose they would admire her success as a woman but I’m not sure they’d approve the little girl vulnerability, inside that velvet voice, that makes men like me melt.

Her command was masterly.  They would approve of that.

And whichever way you look at it, Peggy Lee had class - in the true American sense.

It was 1 December 1983. My career was on the slide. I didn’t fit in; I didn’t talk the same language. I was too intense. Things mattered to me that seemed of no consequence to those around me. They looked at me oddly, and, when at last I noticed, it was clear I was going nowhere.  So it was Friday and I escaped to the church of St John’s, Smith Square, which the BBC broadcasted a weekly recital. I didn’t know what the programme was, but I didn’t care, and stumped up the fiver to get in - for an hour’s relief from incomprehension.

The recital was given by the Austrian pianist, Edith Vogel. Three Beethoven piano sonatas, ending with the ‘Appassionata’. She was then in her early sixties, the same age as I am now. She didn’t cut an impressive figure. She seemed dowdy, grey steaked hair, no concern for her appearance. And when she played she wasn’t without faults. Like Schnabel there were fluffed notes. But the moment she sat down and touched the keyboard it was like icicles forming in air.  I could only listen with my mouth open.

This is from Beethoven’s Sonata No.21, the ‘Waldstein’, the first sonata she played on that programme. It starts with a slow Adagio which leads haltingly towards the final movement. Vogel plays the Adagio as tragedy, like a Shakespearean soliloquy, all internal self questioning and rage, unquenchable passion - then, at last, calmed, by that cascade of cooling harmony that is the heavenly melody of the final movement. Rage returns at intervals, but love and harmony win out in the end.

When I returned to work afterwards, I didn’t care. There were more important things.

This is my recording from that concert. For some reason, at the time, I edited out the applause, which is a shame, for it was tumultuous.