—
For Perspective

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, March 14 1907
.

Ellis Paz has become the first man in history to be awarded a doctorate by the University of Oxford while wearing just his pants.

Matthew Perry once entered a Vanilla Ice lookalike competition and came fourth.

There is no single recognised word for ‘gay’ in Pashto.

Trypophobia is an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps.

Air India have bespoke a special plane in order to transport the sacred Parsee flame.

There are few bears in Edinburgh.

There is an emoji oversight board.

Emma Bunton “wouldn’t know where to start” in trying to come up with a vaccine for Covid-19.

BMX has been breaking ground in Nigeria.

‘Eelam’ is the Tamil name for spurge, for toddy and also for gold.

Readers of books on nature are expected to be interested in poetry in a way that readers of literary biography are not necessarily expected to be interested in willow warbler migration.

Mussolini didn’t diet.

Even an Oxford man cannot summon knowledge out of the ether.
.

An avowed and much-loved masterpiece from its earliest performances – Vienna, 1798 – ‘whose appeal [I read from A Peter Brown’s DECCA sleeve-notes] was irresistible to the noble and leisured classes, amateurs and connoisseurs of different nationalities’, Die Schöpfung tells the story of (duh) the first week or so of the creation myth, in three parts.

It opens simply, in the humming potential of the void, moves to the first, dramatic, sunrise, and then gradually builds in complexity, as the forces of darkness are cast out and the cosmological items, flora and fauna, are created, one by one, until finally Adam and Eve walk hand-in-hand in the Garden of Eden (which is Kent, right?), Man- and indeed Womankind enjoying a somewhat brief respite before the Fall.

The whole thing runs to 1h45 – which given the amount of ground it has to cover (no pun), is quite efficient, really.

It is said that, inspired by (the success of?) Handel’s oratorios, Haydn asked a friend for ideas for something he could set to music. The friend picked up a Bible and suggested that he “Take that, and begin at the beginning.”

Less romantically, its genesis was in a Handel hand-me-down, an English poem called The Creation of the World (author unknown), which the crowd-pleasing Georgian didn’t care for on the grounds that setting it would have meant a piece that lasted four hours.

The eventual libretto, abridged and translated by the Esterházy’s Imperial librarian/diplomat/musician/Everything Else, Gottfried van Swieten, comprises bits of Genesis, the Psalms, and Milton’s Paradise Lost (the angels, mostly). It was officially published, in simultaneous translation, as twere, in 1800; but with Handel-worshipping English audiences in mind, both texts incline peculiarly towards the Anglican, especially where Biblical quotations are concerned. Metrical considerations have left us with some more-or-less irremediable ‘English’, and surely nothing has ever been so translated-from-ze-German as the line ‘In long dimension / Creeps with sinuous trace the worm.’

Musically, the word-painting is less than subtle, but perfectly in keeping with the standards of an oratorio (un-acted operas for Lent, essentially). And it achieved a trick of ‘universal’ synthesis: French-style overtures, Italian dramatic structure, English verses/religious formulae from the KJV, and psalm-based choral numbers with which the Germans would have been conceptually familiar.

Certainly it captured the zeitgeist (or whatever they call that in Germany). With 45 performances in Vienna alone in the ten years following its composition, and in capital cities throughout Europe, by ensembles routinely measuring in the hundreds, The Creation was the stadium-seller of its day.

My own introduction to it was, predictably, as a chorister in the Church of England (Maidstone, actually), singing the only stand-alone anthem to have emerged from the complete work, ‘The Heavens are Telling (the Glory of God)’. As a classically-inclined young fellow (read: ‘squit’), I would have been one of the younger kids to be aware that Gabriel was not the only archangel; but I also acutely recall one Sunday morning, autopiloting my way through its uncomplicated joy, and brassily attempting to ‘Display the firmament’ one time more than everybody else in the rehearsal room.

By secondary school I’d twigged that there was more to The Creation than just one anthem – i.e. solos, for would-be soloists – and I proposed it for our Choral Union concert. Seeing through this, no doubt, the choir director said he couldn’t be doing with all those Adam-and-Eve arias (‘This world so great, so wonderful’) which, it is widely held, are some of the best music Haydn ever wrote. He was a wise man, that director, and a first-class teacher: but he was wrong on that occasion. Wrong and a spoilsport.

I auditioned for a university choral scholarship with the Raphael ‘rage’ aria about the waters ‘Rolling in foaming billows’, but I don’t recollect our ever performing it while I was there. No doubt such things were thought crass. See also: ‘enjoyable to sing or listen to’.

So I think the first time I ever sang the whole Creation was with the Oxford Spezzati, a group of a few dozen of us who go back, at a music festival in West Kensington – my good friend Al playing the flatulent bass notes of the ‘immense leviathan’ with ill-disguised bassoonist’s gusto.

And the last time I sang ‘The Heavens are Telling’ was in the Chapel Royal, at Hampton Court. I had the bass ‘verse’ part, which I now suspect means, over time, that I’ve sung all the parts of that particular movement. (Aled Jones, eat yer heart out.)

The German is the lesser-trodden path these days (what even is a ‘Finsternis‘?). There’s something a bit uncomfortable about the opening tenor aria’s repetitive insistence on ‘Ordnung‘… But for all its sober origins, the English text is pretty silly. ‘Finny tribes’; ‘flexible tigers’; and I’ve heard at least one soloist word-paint the hell out of the ‘fleecy, meek and ble-e-eee-eating flock’. A note to nature writers: if I find ‘purling’ and/or ‘limpid brooks’ in your work, we will not be going home together.

I assume it sounds quite foolish to the Germans, also. But for all that, it is usually quite fun. (Or it had better be. I’m about to miss the first match of the cricket season.)

Per Prof. Brown, though, the romping tunes and memorable – or, perhaps more accurately, ‘easily- learned’ – choruses make this also a fairly sensible choice for choral societies, whose concerts are, in the majority of cases, a pragmatic combination of the amateur and the professional. The choruses are repetitive (both internally and externally), often interrupted by long solos, duets, trios, etc. (there’s only one that isn’t, in fact), and relatively few and far between. I’m not suggesting that the idea of a choral society is to keep the dues-paying members as quiet as possible… but it helps to know one’s limitations.

In 1808, amid the blast of the Napoleonic Wars, an ageing Haydn made his last public appearance at a gala do of The Creation, attended by royalty and, allegedly, Beethoven. At the creation of light, the audience broke into spontaneous applause, causing Haydn to deflect the adulation heavenwards – but by the time they reached ‘The Heavens are Telling’ his ill-health and emotions had got the better of him, and he was carried out. Fifteen months later, the French entered Vienna, and the last rendition of his music Haydn heard came from the mouth of a French officer:

In native worth and honour clad,
With beauty, courage, strength adorn’d,
To heav’n erect and tall he stands
A man, the Lord and King of nature all.

—
For The Oldie, in a different edit

My relationship with G&S had started early, specifically the argument in Three Men in a Boat over which song Harris is trying to sing (I remain confused to this day). Block-booked family cheap-seats at the ENO fed this enthusiasm through my adolescence, until at secondary school I played the part of Nanki Poo in a local girls’ concert performance of The Mikado (fitting punishment for any teenager who think he’s an heroic tenor). During my A Levels, I sang ‘He who shies’ from Iolanthe with two fellow 6th-formers – at which point I realised I was not a tenor and made us all swap roles before we went on stage.

At Oxford, I found the collegiate choral life a little stultifying, and a turn as Florian in Princess Ida provided one way out.

They were a weird and wonderful bunch, the G&S Society – from the otherworldly to the decidedly worldly. A dapper junior law lecturer rubbed shoulders with a chap who worked behind the counter at the local Barclays. Young ladies with evident social prospects duetted with slightly-less-young ladies on 10-year PhD courses. The Fellow of All Souls who’d performed with the Kazakh National Opera (or somesuch) could routinely be found wolfing down a fry-up in St Giles beside the first-year undergrad who’d turned up once for Cox & Box to turn the pages, in a yellow tracksuit.

Sometimes there was even the odd (‘Tzing! Boom!’) musician.

The OUGSS get through about three shows a year, and so it was with many of these fine folks I found myself performing Iolanthe at the Holywell Music Room, in Michaelmas (that’s autumn) term, 2002.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s fourth consecutive smash hit, premiered simultaneously in the UK and the US in 1882 (the first new show to do this, in an effort to prevent piracy), was also the first production to open at D’Oyly Carte’s purpose-built Savoy Theatre, and the first therefore to be lit entirely by electric lighting.

In every other respect, though, it was a formulaic G&S gig. Iolanthe is a fairy banished from Fairyland for marrying a mortal. She has a son, Strephon – ‘an Arcadian shepherd’ – who is in love with Phyllis, which would be fine except that a) he’s a bit of a fairy himself, and b) Phyllis is a Ward of Chancery, and not only the Lord Chancellor but also every other member of the House of Lords had been rather hoping to marry her himself. Still, everything is going swimmingly until young Strephon is caught embracing his suspiciously attractive mother who, for reasons too theologically complicated to go into here, is eight years younger than him (‘Oh, fie! Our Strephon is a rogue!’). The fairies go to war against the upper house, returning Strephon to Parliament ‘carrying every bill he may wish’ and opening the peerage to – gasp! – ‘competitive examination.’

I was cast as George, Earl of Mountararat (Wikipedia: ‘See also: “Mount Ararat” and “Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907”’), a peer who barely has a line before the second act. (Wikipedia also has the Lord Chancellor down as ‘comic baritone’, where Mountararat is staunchly ‘baritone’. Hear, hear.)

I remember learning my lines in a single late-night bus trip back from London – almost successfully. But that’s about the only thing I do remember. This was a ‘busy’ time for me (‘Faint heart never won fair lady,’ and all that). The flyer in my copy says we did a night in Bletchingdon Church. Well, I suppose it must have happened.

But I do know G&S is not as easy to pull off as one might think. Gilbert’s trademark (and bestselling) socio-political satire – ‘If you ask us distinctly to say / What Party we claim to belong to, / We reply, without doubt or delay, / The Party we’re singing this song to!’ – and panto ribaldry – ‘I heard the minx remark / she’d meet him after dark / inside St James’s Park / and give him one!’ – are often finely balanced. Sullivan’s music, meanwhile, treads a thin line between pastiche (of Wagner, e.g.) and a desperate desire to be taken seriously. (He was going to break it off with Gilbert after Iolanthe, until his finances went down the drain.)

The sorry-not-sorry paeans to duty (as was pointed out in an early West Wing episode, “they’re all about dooty”) and the mock-ponderous ‘Blue blood’ and guardsman’s songs are tricky to get right when you’re a callow 20-something. We laughed too easily at ‘vulgar plebs’ and roared ‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!’ more than was entirely genteel. And while the call-and-response ‘One Latin word, one Greek remark, / And one that’s French!’ is audaciously witty and self-deprecating, I always thought ‘as the ancient Romans said, festina lente’ was just plain bad – at least until I heard of Jacob Rees-Mogg. A lot of Iolanthe now seems glumly prescient for our bull-headed times. ‘When Britain really ruled the waves’ is the perfect piss-take Brexit anthem.

I came back hard in my (positively) finals term, as a snarling Lord High Executioner. And then, of course, we went our ways. The law, academia, journalism, post-modernist French clown school. Phyllis is now a high-flying mathematical analyst. Lord Tolloller experiments with ketamine, while working on a novel about rescue donkeys. Private Willis, the embodiment of stolid manly virtue, is now called Sally.

Another alumna spent the Saturday before last assuring teenagers at a schools’ workshop that ENO had not concocted most of the entendres in their new production. True, director Cal McCrystal has missed no opportunity for smut; but nothing could (or need!) be dirtier than these two lines from the original: ‘Why did five-and-twenty Liberal peers come down to shoot over your grass-plot last autumn? … Why did five-and-twenty Conservative peers come down to fish in your pond?’ As undergraduates, we gave these full attention.

G&S is not admitted as the peak of anybody’s musical ambition, and my G. Schirmer scores have lain untouched for 15 years. Flipping through them now, though, I find with pleased relief that I still chuckle at the cheek of the librettos, and my feet tap ingenuously through the finales.

—
For The Oldie, in a different version

—
For The Oldie

—
For The Oldie