Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1824)

February 3, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Beethoven’s Ninth (Symphony No. 9 in D minor) was his last complete symphony but it also happens to be regarded by many musicologists as his greatest work and one of the supreme achievements in the history of music. Not bad for a last major work, considering how many artists generally peak at some point earlier in their careers and tail off somewhat towards the end. It was composed between 1822 and 1824 and was the first example of a major composer using voices in a symphony. The final movement features four vocal soloists and a chorus, with words adapted from the poem by Friedrich Schiller, Ode to Joy (lending the tune its famous common name).

There are a number of anecdotes about the premiere of the Ninth, at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna on the 7^th May 1824, based on the testimony of some of the participants. There are suggestions that it was under-rehearsed and a bit scrappy, but regardless it was an enormous success. In any case, Beethoven was not to blame, since he was by now deaf and although he was ostensibly conducting so as to be present for the audience, it was actually co-conductor Louis Duport whose baton was followed by the musicians. Violinist Joseph Böhm recalled:

“[Beethoven] stood in front of a conductor’s stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor, he flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.”

When the audience applauded Beethoven was several bars off and still conducting, so contralto Caroline Unger walked over and turned Beethoven around to accept the audience’s applause. According to the critic for the Theater-Zeitung, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause.” The audience gave him five standing ovations; there were handkerchiefs and hats in the air, and raised hands, so that Beethoven, who they knew could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovations.

Here’s an excerpt from the Ode to Joy played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Film, TV, and Theatre

Oliver Postgate’s Noggin The Nog (1959)

January 20, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Persons of a certain age (and perhaps persons of any age, given the enduring popularity of his creations) will remember with affection the voice of animator and puppeteer Oliver Postgate (1925–2008). He was the creator, writer and narrator of such popular and charming children’s TV programmes as Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Pogles’ Wood. All these shows were made by Smallfilms, the company he set up in 1959 with collaborator, artist and puppet maker Peter Firmin, in a disused cowshed near Peter’s home in Blean near Canterbury.

They were a great team: Postgate came up with the concepts, wrote the scripts and did the stop motion filming whilst Firmin did the artwork and built the models. As Postgate voiced so many of the productions, his distinctive voice became familiar to generations of children. Smallfilms was able to produce two minutes of TV-ready film per day, which was many times more than a conventional stop motion animation studio of the time, with Postgate moving the (originally cardboard) characters himself, and working his 16mm camera frame-by-frame with a home-made clicker.

They began in 1959 with Ivor the Engine, a series for ITV about a Welsh steam locomotive who wanted to sing in a choir, and followed it up, also in 1959, with Noggin the Nog, their first production for the BBC. These two programmes established Smallfilms as a safe pair of hands to produce children’s entertainment and they went on to produce material for the BBC right up to the 1980s. Everyone will have their favourite (in a 1999 BBC poll Bagpuss was voted the most popular children’s TV programme of all time) and for me it was Noggin the Nog.

The stories were based around the central character of Noggin, the good-natured son of Knut, King of the Nogs, and his queen Grunhilda. When King Knut dies, Noggin meets and marries Princess Nooka of the Nooks, and becomes the new king, at the expense of arch-villain Nogbad the Bad, who is forever trying to claim Noggin’s throne for himself. Other characters included lazy Captain of the Royal Guard Thornogson, eccentric inventor Olaf the Lofty, and Graculus, a big green bird. The names and themes are very Scandinavian and saga-tinged and Postgate must have been very familiar with the Nordic folkloric tales of old such as the Icelandic Eddas, but of course it’s children’s TV so it’s all just wonderfully made-up fun.

The pair brought in composer Vernon Elliott to create atmospheric musical sketches for the programmes and he did so with great effect using the bassoon, harp, glockenspiel and, in the case of the Clangers’ distinctive voices, the swanee whistle. Speaking of Clangers, Firmin once said that the show’s surrealism had led to accusations that Postgate was taking hallucinogenic drugs: “People used to say, ‘Ooh, what’s Oliver on, with all of these weird ideas?’ And we used to say, ‘He’s on cups of tea and biscuits’ ”. So very British!

Enjoy this nostalgic selection of opening segments from Noggin the Nog, Clangers, and that “saggy, old cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams”, Bagpuss…

Literature

P G Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

January 6, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

PG (Sir Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse (1881–1975) was an English author who was one of the most widely read humourists of the 20^th century. A prolific writer throughout his life, Wodehouse published more than ninety books and would often have two or more books on the go at any one time. His prose style and subject matter was light and breezy and, in his own words, he wanted to spread “sweetness and light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every gently innocent character, and every farcical tussle, all set in an idealised world of the 1920s and 30s, Wodehouse whisks us far away from our worries.

He had many fans among the great and the good, including former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh; I seem to remember reading that Lemmy of Motorhead used to read him on his tour bus, post-gig! Although Wodehouse wrote several series of books about various characters such as the Blandings Castle set, the unrufflable monocle-wearing Old Etonian Psmith (with a silent P), and the tall-tale-telling Mr Mulliner, most people will know him for the comic creations, Jeeves and Wooster.

Bertie Wooster is the moneyed young toff who cares little about anything other than fashionable socks, frippery, and tophole societal high jinks, whilst Jeeves is the sagacious valet who clearly has the brains that Bertie lacks and who steers his master through many a social storm. The Jeeves canon consists of 35 short stories and 11 novels, and a wonderful starting point is 1925’s collection of ten short stories, Carry On, Jeeves.

My own introduction to Wodehouse, like many people, was the 1990s TV series Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. Jeeves and Wooster was a weekly escape into a jazz-age wonderland of art-deco apartments, panelled gentlemen’s clubs, “tissue-restoring” cocktails and buffet breakfasts, all serving as a backdrop to a series of predicaments for Bertie from which he would invariably be extricated by Jeeves. The drama was always held together by fizzing dialogue, peppered with bons mots and not a few neologisms from Wodehouse’s pen.

As befitting a man whose characters and situations had such lightness of being, Wodehouse didn’t take himself too seriously either, as this rejoinder to a critic below shows:

“A certain critic — for such men, I regret to say, do exist — made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’…he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

Here’s a typical scene from the TV series wherein Bertie finds himself embroiled in a secret love triangle in high danger of imminent exposure and it’s down to Jeeves to pull off a suitably clever rescue.

Film, TV, and Theatre

Will Ferrell in Elf (2003)

December 23, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Anyone seen Elf again recently? I have, and although I came late to the party, some years after its 2003 release, it’s a Christmas staple in our house. It’s just a joy to watch, with great performances from Will Ferrell as Buddy the human-who-thinks-he’s‑an-elf, and a strong supporting cast including James Caan and Zooey Deschanel (great comedic actress later to star in American sitcom New Girl). It’s just a charming, silly family film but a sublimely-made charming, silly family film. The director was Jon Favreau, who is known for films as diverse as romcom, musical drama, adventure and sci-fi, and including several of the Marvel Studios movies.

The first script for Elf was written way back in 1993 by American screenwriter David Berenbaum, with Jim Carrey in mind to play Buddy. However, as the project took years to get off the ground, Carrey went on instead to produce that other festive favourite in 2000’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and Will Farrell joined the project instead. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a human baby, inadvertently brought back to the North Pole in Santa’s sack, who is brought up as an elf, and who later tracks down his biological father in New York. As an “innocent abroad”, there is none so innocent as this.

While you might assume that a lot of computer trickery was employed to make Will Ferrell look bigger than his fellow actors in the North Pole, Jon Favreau favoured camera techniques and trickery to create the illusion. He used the concept of “forced perspective”, along with the building of two sets, one smaller than the other, with one raised closer and smaller and one bigger and further away. With the two sets measured and lined up, the director could have one person on one set appear to be much larger than a person on the other set. The only CGI in the film was some snowing.

The scene with Peter Dinklage is riotously funny, and is best viewed without food or drink in your mouth. The scene is set in the boardroom of the children’s book publishing house that Buddy’s father works for, under pressure to come up with the next best-seller. Dinklage plays a paid external children’s book wunderkind come to bail out the company with his great ideas. Dinklage’s character, like Dinklage himself, has dwarfism and the juxtaposition of innocence and offence that ensues, when Buddy enters the room and thinks he is seeing an actual elf, is brilliant. For the viewing audience it is a case of seeing both sides…and it’s very, very funny, so Merry Christmas!

Literature

HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds (1898)

December 9, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

HG (Herbert George) Wells (1866–1946) was a prolific writer with more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories to his name. His output was an eclectic mix, including works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and futurism (he foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something akin to the World Wide Web) – but of course what he is best remembered for is his science fiction, following the remarkable rapid-fire publication over a four-year period of instant classics The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an extra-terrestrial race. It presents itself as a factual account of a Martian invasion as witnessed by the narrator. You know the plot: apparent meteors have rained down around the narrator’s home town of Woking (through which I travelled by train recently, prompting me to make a mental note to write this very blog), but which of course turn out to be far from inorganic space rock, but instead very much not-friendly space aliens bent on destroying humanity.

The first edition was illustrated by British artist Warwick Goble: inky, black-and-white depictions that were eerie, imaginative, exciting, and thoroughly of their late Victorian time. Later, in 1906, the French editions were illustrated by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa, which turned out to be something of an upgrade, adding to the evocation of Wells’ imagined creatures and their vessels, and of which Wells himself mightily approved.

The War of the Worlds has spawned half a dozen feature films and television series, a record album and musical show (Jeff Wayne, of course), but perhaps the most impactful dramatisation came in the 1938 radio programme directed by and starring Orson Welles. It was very much played for real and if you happened to miss the introductory monologue – which thousands of listeners did – you could be forgiven for thinking the drama was a live newscast of developing events. The programme famously created widespread panic with hordes of people believing that a real-life Martian invasion was underway right then in North America (Welles had swapped out Woking for Grover’s Mill, New Jersey). It’s easy to scoff at the mass credulousness of the public, but you decide: here’s a clip of the broadcast. Might you have believed it, too?

Art

Jacques-Louis David’s Oath Of The Horatii (1784)

November 25, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

A generation or two before the Impressionists, French artists didn’t have the luxury of lolling about fields painting haystacks and generally having a wheeze of a time. At a time of seismic social and political change, an artist had to box clever to stay on the right side of dangerous political forces. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was one such painter who managed to successfully navigate his way — and his art — from the final years of the Ancien Régime through the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon.

David was considered to be the preeminent painter of the Neoclassical era, that return to the high-minded severity of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome in contrast to the frivolity of the late Baroque. David’s history painting matched the moral climate of the final years of Louis XVI and he was favoured by the Court. However, David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Robespierre, and his Death of Marat (1793) became one of the most famous images of the era.

Imprisoned briefly after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, the First Consul of France. As well as his suitably heroic rendering of Napoleon in his Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), he also created the monumental The Coronation of Napoleon (1806). Finally, after Napoleon’s fall from power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, where he remained until his death.

However, let’s return to David’s origins with a painting considered a Neoclassical masterpiece, Oath of the Horatii (1784). It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a seventh-century BC dispute between two warring cities, Rome and Alba Longa. Instead of the two cities sending their armies to war, they agree to choose three men from each city; the victor in that fight will be the victorious city. From Rome, three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to fight three brothers from a family of Alba Longa, the Curiatii.

The three Horatii brothers, willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of Rome, are shown saluting their father who holds their swords out for them. There could be no more evocative a scene of patriotic duty and, although painted four years before the Revolution, it nonetheless became a symbol of loyalty to State and a defining image of the time.

Of the three Horatii brothers, only one will survive the confrontation and he will kill each Curiatii brother in turn, seizing victory for Rome. Aside from the three brothers depicted, David also represents, in the bottom right corner, a woman crying. She is Camilla, a sister of the Horatii, who happens to be also betrothed to one of the Curiatii fighters, and thus she weeps in the realisation that, whatever happens, she will lose someone she loves.

Music

Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 (1888)

November 11, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 2 Comments

Pretty much all of the classical composers I have written about in this blog so far (let’s see: Brahms, Mozart, Chopin, Mendelssohn, to name but a few) were prolific and complex and noted for being child prodigies for whom an upward musical trajectory was clearly in the offing. Not so this week’s enigmatic composer, Eric Satie (1866–1925). The son of a French father and a Scottish mother, Satie studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and left without even obtaining a diploma (one tutor described his piano technique as “insignificant and worthless”; they didn’t hold back in those days), working throughout the 1880s as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. At this time, however, he would begin composing works, mostly for solo piano such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, that would propel him to an unanticipated renown.

Satie famously employed a minimalist, pared back style of music in contrast to the grand and epic compositions of a Wagner, for example. In fact, he would influence a whole new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism and towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel (see his Boléro, for example) and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and Arvo Pärt.

Satie was an enigma, for sure, and something of a quirky character. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) (“True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)”, 1912), and Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois (“Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man”, 1913). He never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and later in Arcueil. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly garb, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and another, perhaps his most enduring persona, in which he wore a neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.

If you think you don’t know Eric Satie’s music, think again, as you’re sure to recognise his Gymnopédie No. 1 that you can hear here against some footage of old Paris (I love these old videos, don’t you, during the advent of moving pictures when passers-by would stare or glance at this strange new-fangled gizmo pointing at them, and seeming to connect, albeit briefly, with we the viewer well over a century later).

Music

Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman (1970)

October 31, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

One of the advantages of having older sisters in the early seventies when I was just starting to discover music was the inheritance from them of certain classic albums. In retrospect, I admire their generosity, because it’s not everyone who relinquishes large parts of their music collection to younger siblings (I’m not sure I would have, had I had any). Nonetheless, I came to own and appreciate at a young age such seminal records as David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars, the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, and Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin II. Oh, and also three classic albums by the subject of today’s blog, Cat Stevens, namely Mona Bone Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman, and Teaser and the Firecat.

These three albums sprung out of what was an impressively rich period of output from Cat: in order, they had been released in April 1970, November 1970 and October 1971. Not that I knew the order of release back then – I wasn’t yet a geek – they were simply records, but records chock-full of warm, catchy folk-pop, occasionally with a Greek tinge in homage to his part-Hellenic heritage (his father was Cypriot, his mother Swedish, and Cat himself – Steven Georgiou — was born in Marylebone, London).

Songs that resonated: Katmandu from Mona Bone Jakon, a lilting, mystical acoustic song awash with flute from a 19-year-old Peter Gabriel, and a paean to all things simple and peaceful, a metaphoric Eden away from Western civilisation. Years later I would be riding a bus into the real Kathmandu in Nepal with this track playing meaningfully on my Sony Walkman.

From Teaser and the Firecat: Peace Train, and its hopeful, anti-war lyrics (Out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train, Oh peace train take this country, Come take me home again). Idealistic, sure, but it certainly struck a chord with me at the time, and if you can’t be idealistic as a young teenager, when can you be (the gimlet eye of experience hadn’t yet been acquired)?

And from Tea for the Tillerman, the beautifully crafted Father and Son, a poignant exchange between a father failing to understand his son’s desire to break away, and the son struggling to articulate the drive he feels to seek his own destiny. I always had travel in my soul, and dreamt of taking off into the wider world, so this spoke to me in volumes, even though I didn’t actually have to deal with any such cultural misalignments with my own dad.

After famously converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam in 1978, and dropping out of the spotlight for many years, Cat returned to pop music in 2006 and released an album of new pop songs (for the first time in 28 years), under the name Yusuf. In September 2020, and now under the combinatorial name Yusuf/Cat Stevens, he released Tea for the Tillerman 2, a reboot of the original to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Another great song from that album was Where Do The Children Play? and here is Cat playing a simple acoustic version of it and proving that he’s still got a voice like warm molasses. A shout out to my mate Graham for sending me this and inspiring this week’s blog!

Film, TV, and Theatre

Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner (1967)

October 14, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Although I was too young at the time to watch the original 1967 airing of this British TV series, I guess it must have been re-run in the eighties or perhaps my friend Alec had it on video and shared it with me? Whatever, at some point in the eighties I discovered The Prisoner and, hooked from episode one, I became, with Alec, a big fan. Here was a TV series that was not only entertaining but actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it seemed, no-one had a real name, you never knew who the good guys were and who the bad; it had a unique, surreal vibe, and it incorporated elements of science fiction, allegory, spy fiction and psychological drama.

The show was created while Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein were working on spy drama Danger Man (fun fact: Ian Fleming worked in the development stage of Danger Man, and its protagonist, played by McGoohan, announces himself as “Drake…John Drake”). The exact details of who created which aspects of The Prisoner are disputed though majority opinion credits McGoohan as the sole creator of the series, and it’s certainly true that it was McGoohan who pitched the idea verbally to station boss Lew Grade. One can only imagine the inner workings of Grade’s mind as the concept and plot were laid down for him; however, he went with it and the project was born.

So, what was that plot? An unnamed British intelligence agent is abducted and wakes up in a mysterious coastal location known to its residents as the Village. His captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job, something he steadfastly refuses to divulge. His chief antagonist is styled Number Two (and no, we never satisfactorily learn who is Number One), the identity of whom changes with nearly every episode, allowing a roster of well-known sixties’ actors, like Leo McKern, Anton Rodgers and Peter Wyngarde, to play their part.

Most of the residents are prisoners themselves, while others are embedded as spies or guards. The Village is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other, and any would-be escapees who make it out to sea are tracked by CCTV and recaptured by Rover, a huge mobile translucent white balloon-thing. Everyone uses numbers for identification, and most of the villagers wear a standard outfit consisting of coloured blazers, multicoloured capes, striped sweaters, and a variety of headwear such as straw boaters. They are generally very polite, though that tends to make you very suspicious of them.

Catchphrases abound, and I remember Alec and I gleefully repeating them ad infinitum: “I’m not a number, I’m a free man!”, “Be seeing you” and the gloriously libertarian “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!”. The latter phrase I had emblazoned on a t‑shirt bought from the gift shop at Portmeirion in North Wales, where The Prisoner was filmed and which I visited on pilgrimage in 1987.

Let’s enjoy the opening credits, enhanced by the excellent soundtrack from Ron Grainer.

Art

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

October 1, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 1 Comment

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) was a London-born painter and sculptor whose artistic talents were recognised early on: at age thirteen he exhibited works at the Royal Academy as an “Honorary Exhibitor” and was elected as an Associate there at the minimum age of twenty four. He was able to paint extremely quickly and perhaps these days would have attracted a cool nickname like snooker players Hurricane Higgins and Whirlwind White (Lightning Landseer, perhaps); he was also reputed to be able to draw simultaneously with both hands. One biographer wrote:

…upon the occasion of a large party assembled one evening at the house of a gentleman in London, the conversation having turned upon the subject of feats of skill with the hand, one of the ladies present remarked that it would be impossible for anyone, however skilful, to draw two things at once.
“Oh, I can do that,” said Landseer quietly; “give me two pencils and I will show you.” The pencils were brought, and Landseer, taking one in each hand, drew simultaneously and unhesitatingly the profile of a stag’s antlered head with one hand, and with the other the perfect outline of the head of a horse.

Certainly, Landseer’s renown stemmed from his paintings of animals, particularly horses, dogs and stags, although his most famous work is undoubtedly the set of four bronze lion sculptures at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Today’s subject is probably his next most famous work, though, being, as it is, the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland: The Monarch of the Glen.

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a red deer stag, set against the steamy rugged hills of the Scottish Highlands. It was completed in 1851 as part of a series of three panels intended to hang in the Refreshment Rooms of the House of Lords, although that commission never came off due to some dispute or other and it was sold into private ownership. It also, however, sold widely in reproductions and became one of the most popular paintings of the 19th century. It probably helped that Queen Victoria was a big fan.

The painting was purchased in 1916 by the Pears soap company and this kicked off the Monarch’s career in advertising. It was sold on to John Dewar & Sons distillery and became their trademark before similarly being used by Glenfiddich on their whisky bottles. A derivative of the Monarch graced the shelves of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason via the cans of Baxter’s Royal Game Soup, and of course, as implied, it adorned many a tin of shortbread biscuits. In 2017, the painting was finally sold by its last owner Diageo to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it can now be viewed by the public in all its majesty.

The stag has twelve points on his antlers, which in deer terminology makes him a “royal stag” not a “monarch stag”, for which sixteen points are needed, but let’s not quibble; he’s a magnificent beast.

Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1824)

Oliver Postgate’s Noggin The Nog (1959)

P G Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

Will Ferrell in Elf (2003)

HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds (1898)

Jacques-Louis David’s Oath Of The Horatii (1784)

Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 (1888)

Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman (1970)

Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner (1967)

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

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