‘Sing, Belgians, sing!’ – Elgar and Belgium

The recent WW1 centenary commemorations in Belgium brought the English composer Edward Elgar to mind, together with three largely unknown works he composed in support of that beleaguered country.

The invasion of Belgium, at the start of the war in 1914, generated a substantial wave of sympathy in the UK. A range of artistic individuals contributed to an homage called King Albert’s Book which was published by The Daily Telegraph at Christmas 1914. Elgar’s contribution was Carillon, a work for narrator and orchestra. This was the first of three works using the same scoring.

Carillon, op.75 (version for piano and optional narrator)

In it, Elgar sets a highly patriotic text by the Belgian author and poet Emile Cammaerts . The carillon of the title refers to the Belgian bell towers (as depicted on the cover), and I can imagine them, still standing, amongst the ruins and devastation of the German offensive. It’s noticeable that none of the impact of the invasion is shown in the cover design. The work was hugely popular in the UK, playing in London and on tour.

Le Drapeau Belge, op.79 (version for piano and optional narrator)

Again setting a text by Cammaerts, Elgar composed Le Drapeau Belge in 1917. The last of three works, it is also the slightest – a meditation on the colours of the Belgian flag. It is interesting that the cover art by Frank Dicksee is dated 1914. To me, the stirring, heroic image is so redolent of the opening months of the war. Of course, the intervening two and a half years had seen much fighting, horror, loss, and a distinct change in the public’s mindset. The reception given to Carillon wasn’t repeated when the new work was premiered in April 1917.

Une Voix dans le Désert, op.77 (version for piano, soprano, and optional narrator)

This stark, dramatic cover for the second of Elgar’s compositions is in such contrast to the other two. Here is no patriotic or sentimental fervour, but instead, a hint of the awful, bleak reality of Flanders’ fields. A desert indeed, but a man-made one. An artillery piece in the centre of the page reminds us how it was created. As do the crosses marking makeshift graves. The reddish pink is what? Reflected light from the sun, burning fires, or a reminder of blood?

The text by Cammaerts is the same. The opening stanza of Carillon is proud and patriotic in defeat:

Sing, Belgians, sing!
Although our wounds may bleed,
Although our voices break,
Louder than the storm, louder than the guns,
Sing of the pride of our defeats
‘Neath this bright Autumn sun,
And sing of the joy of honour
When cowardice might be so sweet.

Contrast this with the opening text from Une Voix (both in translation):

A hundred yards from the trenches,
Close to the battle-front,
There stands a little house,
Lonely and desolate.

Not a man, not a bird, not a dog, not a cat,
Only a flight of crows along the railway line,
The sound of our boots on the muddy road
And, along the Yser, the twinkling fires.

John Pickard in his notes for a Hyperion recording, calls it ‘a haunting, miniature masterpiece of great restraint and delicacy’. He also quotes a contemporary review of a staging:

It is night … [a] cloaked figure of a man, who soliloquises on the spectacle to Elgar’s music. …  the voice of a peasant girl is heard …  singing a song of hope and trust in anticipation of the day the war shall be ended. … he comments again on her splendid courage and unconquerable soul.

Other works that Elgar composed during the war included Starlight Express, which was performed at Christmas 1915, and The Spirit of England, first complete performance of which took place in Birmingham in 1917.

 

 

Sun, moon, and stars

Browsing through our songsheets, I quickly became aware of how many songs refer to heavenly bodies in one way or another. So many, in fact, that I had to narrow down my selection for this post. I settled for classical composers, and it helped if the cover was attractive. I’m a sucker for a colourful, well-designed cover.

Johannes Brahms  Mondnacht, WoO 21 (publ. late C19)

This setting of an Eichendorff poem talks about the sky kissing the earth, and the illustrations show this with its ethereal light and those strange blue / silver shadows you get from moonlight. The illustrator shows the bleached look very well. What they don’t capture well is the sense of movement that the poem talks about: a breeze wafted, rustling … Everything seems frozen, somehow. The figure sitting centre-stage is the poet, presumably. Brahms wrote his version a number of years after one by his friend and mentor, Robert Schumann. Looking at the music, it is very Schumannesque and deliberately so, as a tribute to his friend.

Richard Strauss  An die Nacht, op. 68 no. 1 (publ. 1919)

This design is so different from the one for the Brahms, but the moon still dominates. Everything possible is silvered and it’s amazing that the colour of the border particularly, still gleams so brightly after almost a century. The poem by Clemens Brentano is one of a set of six set by Strauss – a major achievement in lieder writing not surpassed until his much later Vier Letzte Lieder. Some years earlier, Gustav Mahler had set a number of Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection of folk poetry. Here, Strauss avoids that collection and sets some of Brentano’s original poetry. The publisher issued each song of the set separately, each with a different flower on the cover. These lilies (I’m not quite sure if they are lilies) would be appropriate, both for their colour and their association with bridal bouquets – the poem has references to the image of a bride.

Camille Saint-Saëns  Vénus (publ. 1896)

This little-known duet for male voices is a setting of one of Saint-Saëns’ own poems. Composed for two singers from the Paris Opera (see the dedication at the top of the image), it is an impassioned plea to Venus, both as goddess of love, and as the evening star. Both singers ask the goddess not to be late, so that they might visit their girlfriends with her shining down upon them. The minimalist backdrop of the illustration beautifully suggests the light of the star shining on the sea. And again, the colours are those of starlight or moonlight.

Frédéric Chopin  So deep is the night (Tristesse) (publ. 1939)

This songsheet is rather different. It’s not a song by Chopin at all. Instead, it’s new words set to the theme of one of his most famous piano etudes, op.10 no.3, nicknamed ‘Tristesse’. In looking through it, I’m amused at how different the English lyrics are from the original French. The opening line, for example: Reviens, mon amour. J’attends ce jour de tout mon coeur, plein d’infinie douceur. The English rendering is, So deep is the night, no moon tonight, no friendly star to guide me with its light. I have the impression of two different songs going on here. Still, for a high volume, popular song, the cover art is very effective and is obviously inspired by the opening line of the English lyrics. I wonder what the French publication looked like?

No room for the sun in this post, unfortunately. Next time, perhaps.

Birmingham Triennial Festivals 1

Most of us are very familiar with summer music festivals, and benefit concerts. This is the tale of a benefit festival which lasted for over a century and involved some of the major British and European composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the town of Birmingham was expanding rapidly. The free thinkers and scientific explorations of the Lunar Society , the canal expansion, and the explosion of manufacturing drew in large numbers of people. One important facility in the town was the General Hospital. This wasn’t funded in any way by the government of the day, but instead, relied largely on charitable donations. This was where the Triennial Festivals came in.

The Festivals in the 1820s

Started in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, by the 1820s, the Festivals were established as a popular, important source of funds for the hospital. A festival took place every third year, lasting for three or four days of concentrated music-making.

Engraving showing income and donations from the various Festivals

A closer look at a section of these basic accounts reveals that the Festival was dealing in serious amounts of money (in pounds sterling):

It is noticeable, though, that the Festivals’ expenses were almost as large as the amounts given to the General Hospital. This remained an issue throughout the entire run of the Festivals – sometimes, I get the impression that the social, musical occasion was more important than the original charitable purpose. In 1823, the gross receipts were nearly £10,560. The final Festival in 1912 generated only slightly more on paper – of course, allowing for inflation over the intervening ninety years, the amount was presumably substantially less. The expenses of the 1912 programme only left about £1550 nett and this was used to cover an operating deficit from the two previous Festivals. Nothing went to the General Hospital.

Organising any large-scale event requires a lot of effort and sometimes, a lot of bureaucracy. The bound Festival programme books that we have, contain fascinating glimpses of the structure behind the Festivals’ smooth operation. Here’s one such document.

The two main venues for the Festival at this period were St Philip’s Church (now Birmingham’s Anglican Cathedral ) and the Theatre Royal on New Street. You can definitely get a sense of how busy the concerts and services could get. This aspect of traffic control continues to feature, with one of the programme books in the mid C19 having a large, coloured map of the permissible routes.

The tickets for each event were miniature works of art – look at this ticket for a concert in St. Philip’s. Notice also, the small embossed image of the General Hospital in the RH corner. Was this to stop fakes being produced, I wonder? Also, if the ticket numbering was running sequentially, then this was ticket number 587 – that’s a pretty good audience size.

Ticket from 1823

The Festival organisers didn’t miss a trick. The popularity of the ticket images were noted and concert goers were offered the opportunity (at a price, of course) of owning the image they liked.

I’ll take a look at the composers, performers and their music in the 1820s Festivals next time.

The not-so-silent movies 2

Looking through our collection of silent movie music, it’s fascinating to see which titles got used many times, and then coming across sets which still look pristine. The two main owners of the material, Harry T. Saunders, and Louis Benson, both bought widely. Whereas the main collections in the US have mostly American publications, our collection has a greater proportion of scores from continental Europe than either the UK or the US. The differing ways that the publishers produced their wares is also interesting, although I have to say, it does sometimes feed into perceptions of national stereotypes as well.

 Ludwig Siede Der erste Kuss

To me, in fact, to anyone, it should be entirely unsurprising that this set looks rather the worse for wear. How many hundreds, thousands of films across the years have featured a first kiss? It’s probably a set that hardly left the musicians’ stands. This impression is confirmed by looking at the part for the first violin.

The cue written on it is only the most recent of many. Louis Benson’s sets are frequently marked with cues – apparently from the intertitles of whichever film the music was being used for. The boss is away – that, to me, suggests some kind of office setting where his (at this period, it almost has to be a man) employees are free to ignore their work in favour of a more tempting and delicious occupation.  The flirtatious, teasing nature of the possible scene is evoked beautifully by the music. The skittish trills and fast staccato scales fit exactly.

Ludwig Siede was a German composer with a very long list of compositions similar to this one – characteristic intermezzos which could be used for films, or simply for background music to all sorts of events. Other titles in our collection include Glückliche liebe  (Happy love) and Padischah – Turkisches charakterstück. Somebody equally prolific in this area was the American composer J.M. Zamecnik .

J.M. Zamecnik Samarkand

Samarkand – series front cover

This sort of branding gives the impression that photoplay music was big business – as it was for a few short years. The whole cover sheet here has listings of four different series available from Sam Fox. The listing for the Paramount series makes an interesting claim: A musical interpretation for every motion picture situation … Really? Every available space has an advertisement, wanting to sell the cinema musician more and more music.

Zamecnik wrote a vast amount but it’s interesting that the collection here only has a small quantity (30 sets out of 850). This particular series was obviously written for news reels, so the music had to set the atmosphere almost immediately. No room for an introduction or building up themes. It was more for reinforcing the images were on the screen rather than suggesting or highlighting the drama – other titles include Oriental scene, Head of the parade, In the stirrups.

Compared with the Siede set, this looks unused. It was part of Harry Saunder’s collection and it’s easy to tell those sets which he used regularly. Maybe he didn’t have much call for Turkish scenes, or, more likely, he had something else which he preferred to use. The music does suggest what might be loosely termed Middle Eastern music by the use of the key in particular. The actual music might be termed a parody by our standards but it was quite common to write like this in the early C20.

I’ll look at French and English publications next time.

Fire survivor

When the first Birmingham library burnt down in 1879, only a thousand items were saved. Today, I’m going to look at one of the possible survivors.

When exploring the historical printed music collections here, I was always curious as to why we stocked nothing prior to the 1880s. By this, I mean items which came into the collection at the same time as they were published. We have a large number of items published before the 1880s, but they all came into the collection through donations or later purchase. Then I learnt something of the history of public libraries in Birmingham.

Following the Free Libraries Act of 1850, the people of the town (as it was then) decided they wanted a library, together with an art gallery. By 1866, both lending and reference libraries existed. They were popular, and grew until, by the time of the fire, the building housed 50, 000 items. The fire was catastrophic, destroying the building and the vast majority of the stock.

The volume I’m going to look at has some smoke damaged pages at the start, and it wouldn’t be a great stretch of the imagination to think that it was one of the rescued items.

Songs and Etchings by T. Anderton and R.S. Chattock (publ. 1871)

Thomas Anderton (1836-1903) was quite a prolific composer of choral works – cantatas and operettas mostly. He wasn’t that well known on the musical scene during his lifetime. and has since virtually disappeared from view. He lived and worked in Birmingham which explains in part, why the library bought this volume. Richard Chattock (1825-1906), an artist and etcher, was also local, being based in Solihull. Their project was evidently to take a selection of poems from different poets, illustrate one of the lines from each with an etching and then Anderton set the whole poem to music as one of a set of songs.

A contemporary news cutting pasted into the opening pages, puts it like this:

It is the joint production of Mr Anderton and Mr Chattock, and the bond of union between them has evidently been both perfect and complete. The etchings go so perfectly with the songs … that it is plain that the musician and artist were each inspired by the same thoughts … and each was similarly moved, by love of beauty, admiration of harmony, and faith in art.

Interesting that there’s no acknowledgement of the poets concerned …

Ben Jonson: To Cynthia

Thou that mak’st a day of night, Goddess excellently bright

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to a Skylark

The pale purple even Melts around thy flight.

Here is a flavour of how Anderton set both to music. I can’t help feeling that the etchings are rather more inspired than the music. A quick look at both of these excerpts suggest Victorian parlour song to me.

To Cynthia (opening)

Ode to a skylark (opening)

Sebastian Evans: Shadows

Lonely o’er the dying ember I the past recal.

Sebastian Evans wasn’t particularly known as a poet, but he was local, and prominent in a number of different arenas. This is my favourite etching in the collection – the dense cross-hatching strongly suggests the gloom, both of the room and of the old man, himself. It’s a pity that again, Anderton’s music doesn’t live up to the illustration.

Altogether, a fascinating volume.

Souvenirs?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow famously said that Music is the universal language of mankind. It’s no surprise then, that we stock music from many countries of the world and in many different languages. However, for some of the scores we have, I do wonder how we came to have them here. My first example led me on a short journey of exploration round the internet, and does deserve the description of being a musical souvenir.

National Musik – The Hals album (publ. 1890s)

What caught my eye was the stamp beneath the decorative front cover. It says: Bennett’s Tourist Office with the names of several Norwegian cities and towns surrounding it, including Christiania (now Oslo ) and Trondheim . What, I wondered, was someone called Bennett doing running a tourist service in nineteenth-century Norway?

Thomas Bennett (1814-1898) was secretary to the British consul in Oslo. One of his duties was looking after any British travellers who came to Norway. In the 1850s, the country was new as a tourist destination. Bennett had travelled around Norway so he was in a good position to advise any travellers and answer questions. He could also organise transport for them, sell them maps, food, and anything else they might need. This soon turned into a full-time occupation and signalled the start of the Norwegian tourist industry. Bennett’s Tourist Offices grew rapidly and assumed a dominant position in Norwegian tourism. The company remained in business until the 1990s when it was taken over and the name lost.

The main attraction for tourists then as now, was the country’s natural beauty but as the century progressed, I wonder how much the fame of the composer Edvard Grieg might have contributed to this?  This music volume contains no original works by Grieg but rather a couple of arrangements of folk music. The standard of difficulty is such that it would have been well within the capacity of anyone with a reasonable musical education.

My next example is much less obviously a souvenir but it came to the library as a donation, so I wonder whether its previous owner had bought it on a trip to Canada.

Chansons populaires du Canada (publ. 1880)

This cover is stunning with so much fine detail and depth. Whether it is an idealised or genuine scene of somewhere in Canada, I don’t know. However, this music score is very much more than just a decorative item. When the Canadian folklorist and composer Ernest Gagnon first compiled this collection in 1860s, it was done as a serious, scholarly study of French Canadian folk songs. It was also a way of capturing and promoting the French Canadian way of life and its heritage. He was way ahead of his time in presenting the music just as it was, without any elaborations, or being seen through a western, classical music lens.

He introduced each of the one hundred melodies with a short essay before giving the music and words. His work was so good that it is today still a well-known and authoritative collection of Canadian folk music. Unfortunately, the fact that it is entirely in French, seems to have counted against it once it became part of our stock in 1919. Between then and 1951, it only had four issues.

I’ll leave you with the lovely image of a beaver on the back cover.

Songs from across the centuries 2

There’s been a lot written and said about World War 1 recently because of the various centenary commemorations, but very little has focussed on the music. By this, I mean popular songs and piano music, not the well-known works by Elgar, Butterworth and others. From the examples we have in our collection, there was no room for doubt about the progress of the war at all in the minds of the composers and publishers. The outcome was certain – it was just a matter of time. Relentlessly upbeat would be a good description of a lot of them and the patriotism was applied by the bucket load.

I’m going to spend most of this blog looking at one sheet with particular Birmingham connections but, as I was looking for it, I came across this, a good example of a music hall song published in 1914.

God bless my soldier Daddy

Although it’s written as a girl talking to her mother, to me, it immediately suggests a male music hall performer. I can just hear him milking the pathos of the chorus:

God bless my soldier Daddy, To war he had to go, Protect him from all danger, Because I love him so, Take care of him when fighting, Don’t let me pray in vain, God bless my soldier Daddy … And bring him safe home again.

The next song sheet is a much more home-grown affair, and also very different in its tone and purpose.

Britannia’s Glorious Flag

Throughout the war, those who remained at home were encouraged to raise money either for the general war effort or for the soldiers at the front. This sheet was the project of two people called Brookes (presumably related)  from Birmingham – one composed the music and the other wrote the words. Their objective was to raise money for their named causes:

As The AUTHOR was also the publisher ie a private individual, it was presumably only meant for local distribution and sale. Certainly, there are no other obvious library copies held elsewhere. I’m curious to know how many copies were printed and sold – you’d have to sell a large number to make any significant contribution. Ten percent of the profits on the 6d selling price wasn’t so very much.

I suspect that the printer the Brookes used wasn’t a regular printer of sheet music – the music engraving is decidedly amateur at times:

but again, as private individuals, they wouldn’t have had access to the engravers used by the big London publishing houses. Nor would they have wanted to spend a large amount of money getting it printed if the principal object was to raise money.

The song text is very patriotic (as you’d expect) but interestingly, it isn’t particularly anti-German. In fact, apart from a couple of mentions of the Kaiser and some commentary in the first verse, it concentrates entirely on the people caught up in the war effort, both those fighting and those at home. Here’s a sample:

“England’s in danger” was the cry: a million men replied – “We’ll rally round the good old flag” in life, in death, in pride: Our watchdogs on the sea alert, their eyes turned to the foe, Our airmen in the skies above, our submariners below … 

I’ll close with their dedication  – it shows the Brookes’ serious intent compared with the first song I looked at.

 

The not-so-silent movies 1

Going to the movies in the first decades of the C20 was anything but a silent experience. The film itself may not have had sound, but each cinema had its resident musician or group of players to provide a live soundtrack including sound effects.

The Library of Birmingham has a large collection of music scores and instrumental parts which were used to accompany silent films. These are not compositions married to a specific film, instead, they are short pieces for use with any film that came along. They might be generic pieces which were specially written, popular dance music, snippets of classical music, anything, really, which an enterprising musician could recycle to create a soundtrack. This led to a mini publishing boom with many music publishers producing whole series of compositions billed as written specially for the silent movies.

Giuseppe Becce (1877-1973)

Giuseppe Becce was an Italian-born composer who was heavily involved in the German film industry in the 1920s. He continued to compose for films far into the sound era, as well. He wrote the scores for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Der Letzte Mann and many other films, but what I’m going to look at is a collection of his generic pieces. Issued by the German publisher, Robert Lienau, the Kinothek series was aimed at the busy cinema musician, offering a choice selection of dramatic musical snippets. Although they are only short, they are also quite complex for the genre – demanding wide instrumental ranges, and well developed techniques to cope with his German late-romantic style.

You don’t need to have a great knowledge of silent film to understand how evocative these titles are. Resignation, for example, the hero awaiting his fate, or Tragedy, the heroine slumped in despair … Notice that the publisher helpfully lists how long each piece lasts, although they could be cut or stretched to fit as required. Improvisation was an important skill for any cinema musician – even if you had sheet music, there were still bridging passages needed to get you from one piece to the next without an awkward break or a change of key. The goal was to achieve a seamless accompaniment which matched what was on the screen, though I wonder how often it actually happened.

Here are a couple more listings from the same series:

Wild chase and Help! Help! are two which immediately bring pictures to my mind – Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, perhaps, being pursued by a mob, or pleading for help as a building is destroyed by fire. As for Supreme peril or Love’s yearning … they hardly need any introduction.

I shall return to this fascinating collection in future issues of this blog.

Pretty as a picture

Old-style library bindings were never meant to be anything other than functional. This is a pity because they can conceal some very colourful and pretty covers. I’ve chosen three to look at, which I discovered by chance. It also gives me an opportunity to talk briefly about a female composer, Liza Lehmann.

Liza Lehmann (1862 – 1918)

Liza Lehmann was an English opera singer and composer – so it’s no real surprise that the music I discovered are songs. They’re mostly for one solo voice but some are scored for a vocal quartet. She was obviously aware of her position as a female composer and so, an outsider with limited influence in the mainstream of the classical music world of the time. Late in her life, she became the first president of the Society of Women Musicians . This grouping first met with the aim of improving their mutual chances within a male-dominated profession and continued until the early 1970s.

Nonsense songs from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, 1908

A delightful cover, showing all the non-human characters (as well as Alice) depicted in the various songs. Quite why the white rabbit is clutching a musical brass instrument isn’t clear.

Hips and Haws, 1913

Here, the typography is both part of, and complementary to, the illustration. This song cycle is notable for setting five poems by the writer and poet, Radclyffe Hall from her collection, ‘Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems’.

The front cover also has a large, decorative advertising stamp of a Birmingham music retailer. Henry Scott must have been a successful businessman to have had three addresses in the city.

Songs of love and springtime, 1903

A particularly lovely cover. showing spring blossoms. It’s interesting that Graves’ name is prominent – he’s not the poet but rather the translator of verses by the German poet and playwright, Emanuel Geibel.

Hope you’ve enjoyed these. As for the musical content – Lehmann’s work is rarely performed today, although a few performances can be found on the web.

Songs from across the centuries 1

The Library of Birmingham has extensive music collections. One of them is our historical collection of song sheets. We have thousands and thousands of them – the main problem in featuring this collection is deciding which individual sheets to look at.

I’ve chosen a couple to look that which have local connections – they’re both from the nineteenth century and have pictorial covers which are wonderful and amusing to look at.

Here’s the first one:

Simon Squeers – the undertaker’s man (publ. 1878)

Music: Vincent Davies

Words: John Cooke Jnr

The words of the song can be found here: http://monologues.co.uk/musichall/Songs-S/Simon-Squeers.htm

The song is clearly one for the music hall. Sometimes, the covers of music hall songs sheets show the actual performers in costume – it’s not obvious from this cover whether that’s the case. Possibly not, as the performers enjoyed having their names in print as much as the composers and lyricists.

The most obvious local connection is the publisher – listed as H. Beresford of 99 New Street. Whether they had any particular reason for publishing this song, is not known. What is worth noting is the cost of the sheet – four shillings. This was a substantial proportion of the weekly wage for the working poor
( http://www.victorianlondon.org/finance/money.htm ) so it was likely that it was bought only by the middle class.

The second sheet is:

The Bombardment of Alexandria (publ. 1882)

Music: Harry Fitter Ball

Words: Tom Browne

 

It was quite common for songs or other music to be composed to commemorate British military campaigns abroad – the title of this is self-explanatory to a degree. For more information see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Alexandria . What is striking and funny about this, is the illustrator’s attempt to do Egyptian costume. The head wear looks relatively convincing, but, by the time you get to the footwear, the lace-up boots are entirely Victorian.

Again, the publisher is Birmingham-based but the address is missing because of the damage to the sheet. Loose music sheets like these are vulnerable to wear and tear, and were never meant to be long-term possessions. This is probably the main reason why there are apparently no other libraries or collections which hold this particular song.

I’ll be back soon with another selection of songs from the archives.