Visitors to the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle in County Durham are regularly blown away by the treasures housed in this provincial town, miles away from the major cities where art collections of this quality may be expected. The building alone is worth the visit; it is elaborately modelled in the style of the French Second Empire, purpose-built to house the art collection of John Bowes, and opened to the public in 1892.
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle
The collection contains paintings by El Greco, Goya, Canaletto, Fragonard and Boucher, as well as items of decorative art, ceramics, textiles, tapestries, clocks and costumes. The pièce de résistance, however, is today’s subject, the Silver Swan automaton, created by London jeweller James Cox and the inventor John Joseph Merlin.
The Silver Swan was first recorded in 1774 as a crowd puller at the famous Cox’s Museum of James Cox, an entrepreneur as well as a talented jeweller. The exquisitely crafted swan has an internal clockwork-driven mechanism with 2000 moving parts (designed by Merlin), and at an appointed time each day at Bowes Museum, the automaton is cranked up and goes through its 32-second performance.
The swan sits in a stream made of glass rods and surrounded by silver leaves, and small silver fish can be seen “swimming” in the stream. When the clockwork is wound, the music box plays and the glass rods rotate giving the illusion of flowing water. The swan turns its head from side to side, preens itself, and after a few moments bends down to catch and eat a fish. The swan’s head then returns to the upright position and the performance is over.
The Silver Swan was exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, and it was here that John Bowes and his wife saw it, fell in love with it, and in 1872 had the opportunity to purchase it (for £200, or about £20,000 in today’s money, still an absolute steal). The American novelist Mark Twain also saw the Silver Swan at the Paris exhibition in 1867 and described it in his book The Innocents Abroad:
I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes – watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop – watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it…
If this inspires you to see the swan for yourself, leave it a few months: it is currently being restored but is expected to return to its public next year.
Well, Halloween is coming round again so I thought it timely to write about a compilation of creepy tales that I have recently finished reading by the 19th century American short-story writer Washington Irving (1783–1859). If you are unfamiliar with the author, you may be more familiar with the titles of two of his more famous stories: Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). He was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he was admired by the likes of Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley and Walter Scott.
Irving had more strings to his bow than just short story writing: he was a diplomat, serving as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s, and a historian, responsible for several histories of 15th-century Spain. This no doubt explains why several of Irving’s stories are set in and around Granada and involve ghostly encounters in places like the Alhambra Palace with long-gone Moors from before the Reconquista. Many other stories, on the other hand, are set deep inside another area close to Irving’s heart, rural New York State including the Catskill Mountains (where Rip Van Winkle is set) and the bucolic environs of modern-day Tarrytown on the Hudson river (where The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set and where, in fact, Irving would end his days).
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow story revolves around local schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and his competition with town alpha-male “Brom Bones” for the hand of beautiful heiress Katrina van Tassel. The supernatural element to the story, however, is provided by local legend which has it that a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle still roams the area as a Headless Horseman. Irving was by no means the first to invoke the motif of the headless horseman – they have appeared in numerous stories from Gaelic, Scandinavian and German folklore, for example – but Irving’s is the one that has resonated down the ages, right down to Tim Burton’s (somewhat liberty-taking) movie of 1999, Sleepy Hollow.
Ichabod’s encounter with the headless horseman happens after his rejection by Katrina at the van Tassel household and he is returning home, crestfallen, on a borrowed horse, Gunpowder. Passing though a menacing swamp, he sees a cloaked rider and is horrified to see that the rider’s head was not on his shoulders but in his saddle. A frenzied race ensues as Ichabod rides for his life, desperately goading Gunpowder down the Hollow; as they cross a bridge, Ichabod turns back in terror to see the headless rider rear his horse and hurl his severed head directly at him: the missile strikes Ichabod and sends him tumbling headlong into the dust. The following morning, Gunpowder is found chomping at the grass, with the only sign of Ichabod, who is never seen again, being his discarded hat alongside a mysterious shattered pumpkin…
If you happen to be in Manchester with a spare hour or two, do call into its art gallery on Mosley Street where you’ll find a host of interesting paintings, not least of which is Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians by George Stubbs. Stubbs was an English artist, born in Liverpool in 1724 and who moved to York in 1744 to pursue his passion for human anatomy, studying under the surgeon Charles Atkinson at York County Hospital. He was also a natural and entirely self-taught artist, and worked as a portrait painter in York for ten more years, but he would become famous later not for painting human sitters but animal ones, particularly horses (of which his best-known, Whistlejacket, is at the National Gallery in London).
Whistlejacket
By 1764, Stubbs had established a reputation for his anatomically accurate animal paintings, and attracted the attention of the royal court, who had commissioned him, the year before, to paint Queen Charlotte’s South African zebra. He was, then, the obvious choice when a certain outgoing Governor General of Madras, Sir George Pigot, arrived back in London with a menagerie of “wild beasts and curiosities” as gifts for King George III, and was looking for an artist to paint a portrait of the most exotic of those gifts, a magnificent cheetah.
Easily tamed and trained, cheetahs had been used as hunting animals by the Mogul Emperors for hundreds of years. In that spirit, the King’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, was eager to put the King’s cheetah through its paces and so arranged a demonstration in Windsor Great Park, where George Stubbs was present to capture the occasion on canvas.
A stag was duly placed in an enclosure of the royal paddock while the cheetah was prepared by Pigot’s Indian servants. First, they ‘hoodwinked’ the animal by tying a red blindfold over its face, whilst one of the servants held it by a restraining sash around the hindquarters. A servant then pulled back the hood back to allow the cheetah a first sight of its quarry, whilst the other one gestured towards the stag, and the predator was unleashed. What happened next was not quite what was intended: according to the St James’s Chronicle the stag staunchly defended itself and ended up chasing the cheetah off!
The painting has been praised for its sincere rendering and lack of European condescension: in an age when foreign visitors were pictured at best as colourful exotics, at worst as sinister or ridiculous caricatures, Stubbs endowed the servants with a grace and authenticity equal to the magnificent creature they were caring for.
Postscript Cheetahs are no longer to be found wild in the Indian sub-continent: the last three individuals were reportedly shot in 1947 by the Maharajah of Surguja.
Cheetah and Stag with Two IndiansGeorge Stubbs, self-portrait
Like Morecambe and Wise before them, the comedy partnership of Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as the Two Ronnies was one made in heaven. Two strikingly affable guys with naturally funny bones, remarkable chemistry, and an obvious mutual deep friendship, the Two Ronnies’ legacy has happily been besmirched by neither time nor scandal. Their TV show was a hugely popular feature of Saturday night entertainment from 1971 to 1987 and everyone growing up during this period will remember their shows with great fondness, and perhaps conjure a mental picture of the Ronnies as newsreaders, reading spoof news items and ending each show with:
Corbett: That’s all we’ve got time for, so it’s “Goodnight” from me.
Barker: And it’s “Goodnight” from him.
Both: Goodnight!
The Ronnies had met each other back in 1963 and first appeared on television together in 1966 in The Frost Report with David Frost and John Cleese. However, their big break occurred as a result of an eleven-minute technical hitch at a BAFTA awards ceremony at the London Palladium in 1970, in which they filled in, unprepared and unscripted, with such aplomb that two audience members, Bill Cotton and Sir Paul Fox (the Head of Light Entertainment and the Controller of BBC1 respectively), offered them a show on the BBC!
The Two Ronnies show was filled with sketches, either standalone or featuring recurring characters, and often involving clever word-play (their Four Candles sketch being a case in point). Many of the jokes revolved around Corbett’s lack of height, with the self-deprecatory Ronnie C delivering many of them himself:
Barker: This next part does suit Ronnie C. right down to the ground.
Corbett: Mind you, that’s not far is it?”
The Ronnies also had their own solo section: Ronnie B usually appearing as the head of some ridiculously-named organisation, and Ronnie C delivering a discursive monologue to camera from his famous armchair. Each series also had an ongoing comic serial featuring private detectives Charley Farley and Piggy Malone (remember The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town?), giving ample scope to guests such as Diana Dors and Kate O’Mara to ham it up.
My favourite sketch though is this classic from 1980, the hilarious Mastermind sketch, which you can enjoy below and then perhaps go on to read the transcript of the revised, expanded (and in some places even corrected) version which was performed as part of their 1983 London Palladium residency.
Transcript:
MAGNUS: And so to our final contender. Your name, please?
SMITHERS: Good evening.
MAGNUS: Thank you. In the first heat your chosen subject was Answering Questions Before They Were Asked. This time you have chosen to Answer the Question Before Last each time. Is that correct?
SMITHERS: Charlie Smithers.
MAGNUS: And your time starts now. What is palaeontology?
SMITHERS: Yes, absolutely correct.
MAGNUS: Correct. What is the name of the directory that lists members of the peerage?
SMITHERS: A study of old fossils.
MAGNUS: Correct. Who are David Owen and Sir Geoffrey Howe?
SMITHERS: Burke’s.
MAGNUS: Correct. What’s the difference between a donkey and an ass?
SMITHERS: One’s a Social Democrat, the other’s a member of the Cabinet.
MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the quotation, “To be or not to be…”
SMITHERS: They’re both the same.
MAGNUS: Correct. What is Bernard Manning famous for?
SMITHERS: That is the question.
MAGNUS: Correct. Who is the present Archbishop of Canterbury?
SMITHERS: He’s a fat man who tells blue jokes.
MAGNUS: Correct. What do people kneel on in church?
SMITHERS: The Most Reverend Robert Runcie.
MAGNUS: Correct. What do tarantulas prey on?
SMITHERS: Hassocks.
MAGNUS: Correct. What would you use a ripcord to pull open?
SMITHERS: Large flies.
MAGNUS: Correct. What did Marilyn Monroe always claim to wear in bed?
SMITHERS: A parachute.
MAGNUS: Correct. What was the next new TV station to go on the air after Channel Four?
SMITHERS: Chanel Number Five.
MAGNUS: Correct. What do we normally associate with Bedlam?
SMITHERS: Breakfast television.
MAGNUS: Correct. What are jockstraps?
SMITHERS: Nutcases.
MAGNUS: Correct. What would a jockey use a stirrup for?
SMITHERS: An athletic support.
MAGNUS: Correct. Arthur Scargill is well known for what?
SMITHERS: He puts his foot in it.
MAGNUS: Correct. Who was the famous clown who made millions laugh with his funny hair?
SMITHERS: The leader of the mineworkers’ union.
MAGNUS: Correct. What would a decorator use methylene chlorides to make?
SMITHERS: Coco.
MAGNUS: Correct. What did Henri Toulouse-Lautrec do?
SMITHERS: Paint strippers.
MAGNUS: Correct. What is Dean Martin famous for?
SMITHERS: Is he an artist?
MAGNUS: Yes — what kind of artist?
SMITHERS: Erm… pass.
MAGNUS: Yes, that’s near enough. What make of vehicle is the standard London bus?
SMITHERS: A Singer.
MAGNUS: Correct. In 1892, Brandon Thomas wrote a famous long-running English farce — what is it?
SMITHERS: British Leyland.
MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the following quotation about Shirley Williams: “Her heart may be in the right place but her…”
SMITHERS: “Charley’s Aunt”.
MAGNUS: Correct, and you have scored 22 and no passes!
When it comes to literary “wits”, two names are often bandied about, namely Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde, but honourable mention should be reserved for a veritable club of wits that thrived in early 18th century London. Founded in 1714, The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of writers comprising prominent figures of the English literary scene such as the satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. One of the club’s purposes was to ridicule pretentious writing of the era which they did through the persona of a fictitious literary hack, Martinus Scriblerus. They were the Private Eye of their time.
Swift would become famous for his 1726 prose satire Gulliver’s Travels; John Gay for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728; and Alexander Pope for a series of erudite mock-heroic narrative poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism. Despite its dry title, the latter was indeed poetry, one of Pope’s first major poems, in fact, and one which had already been published prior to the coming together of the Scriblerati. It is the source of the famous quotations “To err is human; to forgive, divine”, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing”, and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, which is a pretty impressive set of additions to the lexicon for just one poem.
An Essay on Criticism was composed in heroic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the manner of the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE), known for his playful criticism of the many and varied social vices of Roman society through his light-hearted odes. Essentially, Pope’s poem is a Horatian-style verse essay offering advice about the chief literary ideals of his age and critiquing writers and critics who failed to attain his (evidently pretty high) standards.
Pope’s opening couplets contend that bad criticism is even worse than bad writing, thus signalling that even critics should be on their guard, not just pure writers. Dare I say, it has an element of contemporary “rap battles” or “roasts” with its gentle ribbing of inferior writers; it’s not too hard to imagine a modern-day rendering of these lines, perhaps with a mike-dropping flourish at the end:
‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill Appear in Writing or in Judging ill; But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence, To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; A Fool might once himself alone expose, Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
Pope points out common faults in poetry such as settling for easy and clichéd rhymes:
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes, With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes. Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees; If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep, The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.
The couplets are impeccably and relentlessly delivered, 372 in all, each rapped out in that steady da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum iambic pentameter. Pope only breaks out of iambic pentameter once, and that’s deliberate:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along
The second line of this couplet is itself an Alexandrine, which is iambic hexameter, a form that Pope evidently regarded as laboured and inelegant with that extra da-dum and which this line demonstrates (geddit?). The whole piece is a masterclass in poetry, and all written when Pope was just twenty-two, so take that, pretentious and turgid writers of the 1700s!
In the sixties, just as Berry Gordy up in Detroit was driving the Motown sound, down in Memphis the most influential creator and promoter of that crossover of blues/soul/pop music known as the Memphis sound was Stax Records, founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (Stewart/Axton = Stax). Unprecedented in that time of racial tension and strife in the South, Stax’s staff and artists were ethnically integrated, including their legendary house band Booker T & the MGs, who played on hundreds of recordings by artists including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Bill Withers.
Booker T & the MGs c. 1967 (L–R): Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T. Jones (seated), Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.
Another successful Stax act was Sam & Dave, made up of harmoniously-compatible soul singers Samuel Moore and David Prater, and today let’s enjoy their 1967 recording, Soul Man, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Hayes had found the inspiration for the song in the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement. In July 1967 he had watched a television newscast about the aftermath of the 12th Street riot in Detroit, Michigan, and noted that black residents had daubed the word “soul” onto their buildings in the hope that the rioters would pass them by – analogous to the biblical story of the Passover, it was their way of saying “Please don’t wreck my building, I’m one of you” (so to speak). The idea morphed in Hayes’ mind into an expression of pride and defiance: “I’m a soul man!”.
The MGs were drafted in to record the song, with the help of horns from that other reliable Stax house band, the Mar-Keys, and the result was an instant smash that would enter the Grammy Hall of Fame. Sam and Dave take it in turns to sing the verses, joining in together for the choruses, and complementing each other seamlessly. One of Steve Cropper’s guitar licks is introduced by the exclamation “Play it, Steve”, a nuance that was repeated some years later when Soul Man was included as one of the soul classics paid tribute to by the makers of 1980’s The Blues Brothers movie (in which Cropper makes an appearance).
Here’s a TV appearance by the duo singing Soul Man (sans Cropper and thus sans the “Play it Steve” snippet but hey…) to an audience that doesn’t quite yet know how to move to the rhythm!
My appreciation of art spans many centuries. I’ve marvelled at the Greco-Romano art of the classical world; contemplated frescoes adorning Byzantine monasteries and churches in Turkey, Armenia and Cyprus; spent hours in galleries musing over paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, through the eras of Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism to late nineteenth-century Impressionism and on to…well to be honest, when we hit the twentieth century, my enthusiasm starts to wane. Sure, Art Deco was a bona fide, aesthetically pleasing and innovative art movement, and Cubism had its place, but when I start to consider Surrealism, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, I’m less impressed.
Sure, sure: it’s eminently possible to sit and enjoy a monumental and vibrant Jackson Pollock canvas in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — and I have done — and there will always be exceptional and intriguing art to be found throughout the twentieth century. But my contention is that overall these tend to be outliers, and that in amongst the gems there is a broad seam of distinctly uncaptivating art. You can enjoy a Mark Rothko but can you really be captivated by it? I can’t. And don’t get me started on the truly modern “art” of the last four decades, the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Martin Creed et al…please!
Having said that, I’m going to give a free pass to one of the head honchos of Abstract Expressionism, the Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). With Kandinsky I can embrace the new century vibe and be inspired by all that art theory behind colour and form. Kandinsky wrote voluminously about art theory: his writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the 1910 treatise On the Spiritual in Art were bold affirmations that all forms of art can reach a level of spirituality. He founded the short-lived but influential Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, and Albert Bloch, who experimented boldly with colour, lines and form, and gave priority to spontaneity and improvisation.
Kandinsky’s paintings are expressive explosions of colours, lines and shapes that have an extraordinary force and musical quality about them. Kandinsky recognised that there were important connections between music and abstract art: music is abstract by nature and does not try to represent the exterior world but instead expresses the immediate inner feelings of the soul. That is why Kandinsky referred to his works as “compositions”. I get it. I seem to remember having this composition — 1925’s Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau) — on my kitchen wall in the nineties, and, to extend the musical metaphor, I find it rather jazzy!
December 1976 saw the release of the Eagles’ Hotel California album, with its eponymous single released in the following February. This was right in the middle of a seminal time for me in terms of musical flowering (the release of the records straddled my 14th birthday) and it hit the spot just as surely as songs by the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens and David Bowie had in the year or two previously. I loved the way the song told a story (a slightly discomfiting, odd story at that) and how it audaciously included an exquisite and lengthy guitar solo (2 minutes and 12 seconds) that would become the bane of radio producers bred to keep musical offerings short and sweet (the whole song is six and a half minutes long).
Hotel California was the Eagles’ fifth album and they were already the biggest band in America when they embarked on its recording. Sadly, personal relationships in the band had already broken down (a repeating theme in the life of the band, despite which, amazingly, the band endured); nonetheless, personal enmities never stood in the way of the band creating ground-breaking music. Guitarist Don Felder came up with the Hotel California riff, which was then developed by Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Frey’s lyrics were inspired by an attempt to “expand our lyrical horizons and try to take on something in the realm of the bizarre, like Steely Dan had done”.
He certainly nailed it: the brooding imagery around this faded hotel in the middle of nowhere (the hotel in The Shining about sums it up in my head) is magnificently evocative and the lyrics are peppered with killer lines. I cannot conceive of a better line, given the preceding lyrics and leading into the iconic guitar solo, than “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. Then again, have there ever been two opening lines – “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair” – so evocative of a place and milieu? I could go on (“some dance to remember, some dance to forget” et al), but let’s instead just enjoy the whole piece and its wonderful duelling guitars at this live performance at Largo, Maryland, in 1977.
At my school we were encouraged to join one or more of the many extracurricular clubs and societies, and I recall a bewildering array of choices from archery to playing the zither (not really, but it begins with Z and illustrates the point). I chose Film Club because it didn’t involve any more effort than sitting in the lecture theatre and watching a movie, and this seemed like a fair extracurricular activity to me. Some students must have been in control of the actual film selection because I can’t imagine any of our teachers suggesting 1975’s violently dystopian sci-fi flick Rollerball (set in the then-distant future of 2018) or 1972’s gritty and nudity-containing mob movie, Prime Cut, yet both these movies figure prominently in my Film Club memories. Another movie that somehow made the cut was Deliverance.
Deliverance was a landmark 1972 movie produced and directed by British filmmaker John Boorman, and chronicles the story of a group of city slickers embarking on a canoeing adventure in the remote wilderness of northern Georgia. Burt Reynolds plays Lewis, the most seasoned outdoorsman and leader of the group, with Jon Voight playing his friend Ed, and newcomers Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox appropriately playing novices Bobby and Drew. Unfortunately for all concerned, things don’t turn out quite the way they were planned.
The film is noted for the music scene near the beginning, in which one of the visitors, Drew, plays Dueling Banjos on guitar with a gifted banjo-picking country boy, played by fifteen-year old local Billy Redden (whose large head and almond-shaped eyes ticked the boxes for Boorman looking for a character suggesting an “in-bred from the back woods”, with all due respect to Redden). Redden didn’t actually play the banjo and wore a special shirt that allowed a real banjo player to hide behind him!
Duelling Banjos
Deliverance is also notorious for the scene later on in the movie when the adventurers are now deep in woods country, and in which Bobby and Ed encounter two shotgun-wielding mountain men. These men turn out to be the last people you would want to meet in such a remote setting, and they tie Ed to a tree by his neck whilst one of them puts Bobby through a gruelling and humiliating ordeal: he is compelled to strip down and then to “squeal like a pig” as his attacker torments him, before finally being raped. It’s grim viewing, and only relieved when Reynolds’ capable character Lewis happens upon the scene and comes to the rescue (if a little late for Bobby) by killing the rapist with his bow and arrow and inducing the second hillbilly to scarper into the woods. The rest of the film involves the panicked reactions of all concerned and the drama of their attempts to escape back to civilisation (where you can safely imagine Bobby would be remaining ever after).
There is a scene in which the guys fall from their canoes whilst riding a particularly dangerous stretch of rapids. Dummies were used in the filming but having viewed the scene, Burt Reynolds requested to have the scene re-shot with himself in the canoe rather than a dummy, in the interests of authenticity. Boorman agreed and Reynolds proceeded to ride the rapids, but fell out, smashed his shoulder and head on rocks and floated unconscious downstream, before waking up with Boorman at his bedside. Reynolds asked “How’d it look?” and Boorman said, “It looked like a dummy falling over a waterfall”!
Get a flavour of the movie by watching this montage below.
Although Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) is right up there in the pantheon of composers, his music gained its true currency only well after his death. Sure, he was famous in his lifetime as a conductor but his compositions were largely neglected and indeed banned in Europe during the Nazi era (Mahler was an Ashkenazi Jew), and it was only after 1945 that a new generation of listeners rediscovered his music and turned him into one of the most frequently performed and recorded composers which has sustained to the present day.
Mahler composed his Symphony No. 5 between 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at his holiday cottage at Maiernigg in Austria (his “composing hut” is now a little museum). At nearly seventy minutes long, it’s a musical canvas with some serious scope, but today we’ll look at the fourth movement or Adagietto, a tender piece of music that was said to have represented his love for Alma Schindler whom he married in March 1902.
The Adagietto is undoubtedly the single most well-known piece of Mahler’s music. Leonard Bernstein conducted it during the funeral Mass for Robert Kennedy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1968, but it was its use in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice that skyrocketed it to fame.
Death In Venice was German author Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella about a famous and ennobled writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, who is sojourning in Venice for health reasons and becomes increasingly obsessed with a young handsome Polish boy, Tadzio, who is staying in the same hotel on the Venetian island of Lido.
In the movie, Visconti turns von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) from writer to composer, which allows the musical score (which also includes music by Beethoven and Mussorgsky) to represent Aschenbach’s work. The ending scene in which the dying composer watches Tadzio strolling and wading through the seawater to the enraptured tones of Mahler’s Adagietto (before von Aschenbach promptly keels over dead) is striking. You can go watch the movie (despite the spoiler!) but for now, listen to the music itself:
Gustav Mahler
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