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Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) makes her second appearance in this series having already given us ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the buring deck’). This poem of hers is now only famous because of Noel Coward’s superb parody but Hemans’s verse has the distinction of being the source of our use of the phrase ‘stately home’. The…
KHATIA BUNIATISHVILI at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, 4 June 2014 The Georgian pianist, now 26, is, let us say, very pleasing to the eye. Last night she gave us a shimmering, figure-hugging, full-length silver gown. With that mop of black hair and trademark carmine lips, Khatia Buniatishvili cuts a charismatic figure. You can’t teach stage…
Apparently there is another Football World Cup about to take place. Being a follower of the oval rather than round ball, I shall be getting in a few rental films over the next weeks to avoid the inevitable wall-to-wall coverage, and not see much of the action until England meet Germany in the quarter-finals for…
‘Willow, Titwillow’ from The Mikado W S Gilbert There have been many parodies of the ‘Tit Willow’ song, sung by Ko-Ko in Act 2 of Gilbert & Sullivan’s light opera. In fact Gilbert himself may have consciously (or unconsciously) been parodying the lines of the poet Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718): …
THE STORY OF HIAWATHA Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1855) Longfellow’s epic poem, written in trochaic tetrameter, has been much parodied. It begins thus: Should you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest With the dew and damp of meadows, With the curling smoke of wigwams, With the…
The Royal Festival Hall’s mighty Harrison & Harrison organ has not been heard at full throttle since 2005. It was taken out of action for two years when the Hall’s acoustics were refurbished since when only one-third of the instrument has been operational. First installed in 1954 (it took four years to build), it was…
COCKLES AND MUSSELS Irish trad. The origins of Cockles and Mussels are obscure and the legend of Molly Malone is disputed, though there is no doubting the song’s still-popular appeal in Dublin where it is almost the city anthem. Indeed, a statue of Molly hawking here wares was unveiled in Grafton Street in 1988. That…
This poem was written to memorialize a suicidal charge by light cavalry over open terrain by British forces in the Battle of Balaclava (Ukraine) in the Crimean War (1854-56). 247 men of the 637 in the charge were killed or wounded. The date of the Battle was October 25, 1854 and Tennyson wrote this famous poem in…
Sea Fever (from Salt Water Ballads) John Masefield (1902) Masefield’s evocative poem appeared in his first volume of poetry published in 1902 in London by Grant Richards. In his Collected Poems, the first line was changed to ‘I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky’. There have been many…
WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCHED THEIR FLOCKS BY NIGHT Nahum Tate Tate (1652-1715) was born in Dublin. Apart from this carol, his most famous creation, Tate is remembered for his libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and for the many ‘improved’ happy endings he provided for a number of Shakespeare’s tragedies. He also compiled a metrical version…