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Ravel

1913

In an art deco theatre on the Avenue Montaigne

off the Champs Élysées – newly built, its exterior

(for style and mechanics in concrete) the interior

(gilt, lead paint and plush) still smelling fresh – there is a riot

on the evening of May 29th at the premiere

of the ballet, ‘The Rite of Spring’, by Igor Stravinsky,

Vaslav Nijinsky and Nicholas Roerich.

 

This is the year the House of Romanov celebrates

its three hundredth anniversary, the year there are two

Balkan Wars, Ford introduces an assembly line,

Pablo Picasso paints his Cubist ‘Guitar, Glass and Bottle’

and the first volume – ‘Swann’s Way’ – is published

of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’

 

Proust and Picasso were in the first night audience – as were

Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Gertrude Stein: luminaries

of a luminous city. The riot began, it is said,

with derisive laughter as the first notes were played.

Vegetables were thrown. The dancers could not hear the orchestra.

Nijinsky, dancer as well as choreographer,

called out the steps. Forty people were ejected – or maybe

no one was. The impresario, Sergei Diaghilev,

was a master of PR, hence, perhaps, the greengrocery.

Modernism in music was so successfully launched

on an eventually calm sea that Walt Disney used

the opening bars in ‘Fantasia’, conveyor belt art

in the year of the Blitzkreig. Yet art’s truth transcends as always.

How such fierce music and brutal dance overtured, by accident,

the sacrificial Eurasian violence of the rest of the century!

 

 

 

GEORGE GERSHWIN AT CHIRK CASTLE

Chirk Castle from the North, Peter Tillemans, 1725
Chirk Castle from the North, Peter Tillemans, 1725


As we walk up the steep driveway, stopping

for breath at the curve where the castle

comes into sight – raised to block the routes

through the Dee Valley and Glyn Ceiriog

to starve the Welsh – a beribboned Rolls

descends, bride waving, followed, on foot,

by the wedding party in straggles –

black suits and brown shoes, wispy wedding hats –

treading the incline with tipsy effort.


‘The radio and the telephone

And the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies,

And in time may go!’


George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershovitz,

the second son of Russian immigrants,

ex song plugger in Tin Pan Alley

at Remick’s on West 28th Street,

in his thirtieth year visits Europe,

renews acquaintance with Alban Berg,

Ravel, Poulenc,  Milhaud, Prokokiev

and William Walton, hears Rhapsody in Blue

and Concerto in F performed in Paris.


From the grassed walk above the Ha-ha,

we can see the main gates, unused now,

the lane to the station, the Cadbury

and MDF factories, the market town

of Chirk itself and, beyond, the panorama –

from Bickerton Hills to The Long Mynd –

as we follow the trail of illicit confetti

to the Doric Temple aka summerhouse.


‘But, oh my dear,

Our love is here to stay.

Together we’re

Going a long, long way.’


The 8th Lord Howard De Walden – Tommy

to friends and family, Eton and Sandhurst,

Boer War and Great War, race horse owner,

playwright, theatre impresario –

turned its 14th century chapel

into a concert hall and invited George.

The westering sun shines upon us, dreaming

in the Temple, your head upon my shoulder.

A flock of starlings swarms suddenly

above the town – waltzing, deceiving like

a net, substantial, delicate – and is gone.


‘In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble,

There’re only made of clay,

But our love is here to stay.’


There is no public record of what he played

or when or how he got here. I like to think

he chose the stopping train from Paddington,

to work on An American in Paris,

and that Tommy met him personally

at Chirk Station, drove him up the hill,

in his Hispano-Suiza, through the baroque

wrought iron gates replete with wolves’ and eagles’ heads –

and as they, genius and renaissance man,

chatted about the history of the place,

along the chestnut lined drive among

the grazing sheep, George thought of Brooklyn’s

geometric streets and of Manhattan’s roar.


Remick's Music Store, 1914
Remick's Music Store, 1914

 

 

Note: an edited version of this piece has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer