We drove to the Forest of Dean on a wet Tuesday. I am getting to know the green car better. Sometimes it is breathtakingly brainy, at other times exasperating; in fact just like Bertie.
Rather than inputting the address or postcode on a fiddly sat nav keyboard, I now say the address and it usually finds it. However, when I select an album of Chopin études, it plays the first track and then starts playing Guys and Dolls. Don’t get me wrong; I like G&D almost as much as G&T but in both cases one can have too much of a good thing.
We broke the journey west at Windsor Great Park and went for a walk around Obelisk Pond.
The inscription, somewhat worn, reads:
This Obelisk raised by command of King George the Second commemorates the services of his son William Duke of Cumberland the success of his arms and the gratitude of his father
This tablet was inscribed by His Majesty King William the Fourth.
The Duke of Cumberland is the third and youngest son of George II, famous for putting an end to a Jacobite rebellion at the Battle of Culloden. He was pretty heavy-handed in his treatment of the rebels and those he thought were sympathetic to them earning himself the sobriquet “Butcher” from his Tory opponents; the Whigs called him “Sweet William”. A thanksgiving service was held at St Paul’s Cathedral, that included the first performance of Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, composed especially for Cumberland, which contains the anthem See the Conquering Hero Comes.
On Monday evening we heard another oratorio at the Proms, Haydn’s The Creation. It was performed by the BBC Philharmonic and some excellent singers with backing from the BBC Proms Youth Choir. The conductor, Omer Meir Wellber, multi-tasked. In the first half he played a harpsichord, turning his music while conducting. After the interval he played a pianoforte. It was a very good realisation of Haydn’s oratorio. At the end the General commented: “a British orchestra conducted by a Jew and sung in German – that’s what we fought the war for”.
I think I am correct in saying the the Sweet William flower is known in Scotland as “Stinking Billie”, reflecting the rather different views of the Duke of Cumberland.
Christopher,
The General is evidently a very perspicacious gentleman, and his comments reminded me of the history of another Haydn composition and its changing fortunes as result of war.
Haydn visited England in the 1790’s and was much impressed by the singing of the National Anthem ‘God save the King’ and how it stirred the emotions of the British people. As a result, the Imperial High Chancellor, Count von Saarau, commissioned him to compose a similar national song for Austria. Symphonic composers generally don’t do national songs very well, but Haydn nailed it. It was first performed in 1797.
In the late 19th century this same piece of music was paired to the hymn ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, the tune being appropriately named ‘Austria’ . The problem was that Germany had adopted Haydn’s tune in the 1840’s for their own anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles’, and in the years preceding & during the Second World War it was (understandably) deemed improper to be belting out the music to the German National Anthem in Church on Sunday morn.
Enter Canon Cyril Vincent Taylor, who in 1941 composed the wonderfully majestic alternative tune ‘Abbots Leigh’ for ‘Glorious things’. It was so successful it now seems to be invariably the music of choice for this hymn in England (I have no experience of it in Scotland or Wales). In Ireland, however, (both North & South) Haydn’s music is still front-runner, and appears in all Irish hymn books as the first preference for ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’.
Let’s not forget the plucky CH…until fairly recently Hadyn’s hymn was the national song of the Swiss(don’t believe it had superstructure of GSTQ). Lyrics in German,French, Italian and Romansch.
First line was “Ruf’st du mein Vaterland…” and 1 August (to many hoch helvetias) was time where it was sung the most…and indeed the fatherland was calling just in time for the annual mobilization of a considerable force of volunteer soldiers and their beloved and glistening rifles . Places like Zug and Zurich were amazingly noisy thanks to musketry drills…when you reached the soft south of Ticino only a few half hearted whiffs of elderly sidearms could be heard as the lakes approached.