March 2017 - Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

In 490 BC, the Athenian army defeated the invading Persian army in a battle on the plain of Marathon, roughly 26 miles north of Athens. According to legend, and brought down to us via the writings of Herodotus, Lucian and Plutarch, the Athenians then ordered the messenger Pheidippides to run ahead to Athens and announce the victory to the city. Pheidippides raced back to the city in the intense late summer heat. Upon reaching the Athenian agora, he exclaimed “Rejoice! We conquer” and then collapsed dead from exhaustion.

This trope, of the long distance chase to deliver vital news, we see again in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride (1860). This told the (highly embroidered) tale of Paul Revere’s valiant ride to Concord to warn the militia that the British were coming, thus promoting him in American culture to the status of hero and patriot of the American Revolution.

In the same spirit – though this time wholly imaginary – is Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. The poem is a first-person narrative told, in breathless galloping meter, by one of three riders, only one of whose horses, the narrator’s brave Roland, survives to fulfil the epic quest. The midnight errand is urgent — “the news which alone could save Aix from her fate” — but what that good news actually is, is never revealed. The sequence of towns flashing by between Ghent and Aix-la-Chapelle is true to life, though they are characterised only by the associated times of night, dawn, and day (also a feature of Paul Revere’s Ride) as the narrator charges through them.

This poem is one of my earliest memories of poetry, from schooldays, and its rollicking movement and sense of adventure resonates with me now as it did then. There is a recording of Browning himself reciting the poem on an 1889 Edison cylinder, but it’s far too crackly for our purposes, and besides, he forgets the lines and gives up after the first verse (“I’m terribly sorry but I cannot remember me own verses”) so instead I offer this more modern and professional version!

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835 and raised by his widowed mother and his great-aunt, who introduced the young Camille to the piano and gave him his first lessons. The boy was a real prodigy, demonstrating perfect pitch at the age of two and giving his first public concert at five. Over the course of his long life Saint-Saëns was incredibly prolific: after writing his first symphony at 16 he went on to write four more, along with five piano concertos, three violin concertos, two cello concertos and some 20 concertante works.

Nor were his talents limited to music. He was profoundly knowledgeable about geology, botany, lepidopterology, and maths, and his celebrity allowed him to enjoy discussions with Europe’s finest scientists.

Of all Saint-Saëns’ astonishing output, though, the most famous is undoubtedly The Carnival of the Animals, composed in 1886. He hadn’t considered it a serious piece at all and in fact worried that it might damage his reputation. He needn’t have worried. The 13^th and penultimate movement of The Carnival of the Animals, The Swan (Le Cygne), became acclaimed worldwide as The Dying Swan after 1905 when it was choreographed for legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova, who performed it about 4,000 times.

The legend of the “swan song” grew from the popular belief among the ancient Greeks that the mute swan is silent until its final moments of life, at which point it sings the most beautiful of all birdsongs. Saint-Saëns captures this idea in the music…and here we see ballerina Uliana Lopatkina effortlessly evoking in dance the gracefulness of the animal (almost entirely en pointe) and the heartbreak of its demise. Beautiful.

Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

Monthly Archives: March 2017

Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix (1845)

Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Swan (1886)

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