Barenboim’s band

Barenboim conducting the West-East Divan  at the Proms 

With the Olympics finally getting under way tomorrow night, it’s Barenboim conducting his West-Eastern Divan orchestra in Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony at the Proms I’m interested in, more than the hype and razzmatazz in the Olympic stadium.

I first heard of this orchestra ten years ago, when I picked up a newly published book called Parallels and Paradoxes,* which had caught my eye in a bookshop in Perth, W. Australia. I read it almost at a sitting, on the banks of the Swan River, and have never forgotten the impact it made. The book is a series of conversations between the Israeli-born musician Daniel Barenboim and the Palestine-born critic and cultural commentator, Edward Said. Out of their friendship and the dialogue that flowed from it, Barenboim’s band was born.

When Said died, in September 2003, a radical Palestinian website published an obituary written by Barenboim:

Perhaps the first thing one remembers about Edward Said was his breadth of interest. He was not only at home in music, literature, philosophy, or the understanding of politics, but also he was one of those rare people who saw the connections and the parallels between different disciplines, because he had an unusual understanding of the human spirit, and of the human being, and he recognized that parallels and paradoxes are not contradictions.

Edward Said 1935-2003

Here Barenboim points at once to the central theme of their recently published book: that opposites can be reconciled, that people with different histories can be brought to understand and recognize each other:

Edward Said [EWS]: I don’t think it necessary that everyone should agree, as long as there’s a mutual acknowledgement that a different view exists. That’s the important thing. We must have respect for each other’s views and tolerate each other’s histories.

It was in this spirit that in 1999 Barenboim and Said together had founded the West-Eastern Divan Workshop, a forum for young Israeli and Arab musicians to learn about music and about each other. The name comes from Goethe’s celebrated collection of translations from Arabic poetry, Westöstlicher Diwan. Seeing the other side of an argument, indeed understanding the idea of the Other, is central to Said’s legacy, and in Parallels and Paradoxes, he and Barenboim argue about the apparent contradictions that surround their lives. By the end, they have resolved many of these through a shared world view (which Said describes as ‘secular humanism’) and a passionate commitment to the importance of human creativity, specifically in music and literature.

Parallels and Paradoxes is an important and rewarding book about the relationship between the arts and history, education and politics. It is also a record of a remarkable friendship. Because the conversations are transcribed with a minimum of editing or tidying the reader gets caught up to an unusual degree in the debates between two unlikely friends – the intuitive artist and the intellectual critic - throughout the six chapters of this book. These chapters discuss topics as broad as the Middle-East Peace Process and as specific as how an orchestral conductor interprets Beethoven’s one-word instruction ‘Crescendo’.

Barenboim asks, what is the difference between a politician and an artist? He argues that ‘a politician can only work and do good if he masters the art of compromise … whereas the artist’s expression is only determined by his total refusal to compromise in anything – the element of courage.’ Said agrees with him when he concludes that the Middle-East conflict will ‘not be solved only through political means, through economical means, or through arrangements. It requires the courage of everybody to use, as it were, artistic solutions.’ With the founding of the West-Eastern Divan Workshop conductor and critic practised what they preached.

The Divan began as an artistic, political and educational experiment, and it is revealing to compare Barenboim and Said defining education: 

DB: Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kind of individuals they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way.

EWS: The purpose of education is not to accumulate facts or memorize the ‘correct’ answer, but rather to learn to think critically for oneself …. As a teacher, the thing I feel I can do the best is to have my students …declare their independence from me and go off on their own way.

However, it is their discussions about artistic creation and the parallels and paradoxes surrounding music and literature that really animate this book. For Said, ‘There’s no real equivalent of the performer in literature. Authors can read in public, but the logical aim of what we do is to produce silence – silent readings.’ Barenboim, by contrast, sees music as a way of defying silence and prolonging sound:

I see music, in many ways, as a defiance of physical laws – one of them is the relation to silence. The main difference between a Beethoven symphony and the sonnets of Shakespeare is that, although the words, as written in the book, are a notation of Shakespeare’s thoughts – in the same way that the score is nothing but a notation of what Beethoven imagined – the difference is that the thoughts existed in Shakespeare’s mind and in the reader’s mind. But in the Beethoven symphonies, there is the added element of actually bringing these sounds into the world: in other words, the sounds of the Fifth Symphony do not exist in the score.

As a teacher Barenboim believes the ‘most important thing is to explain to people what sound does. Why is it that there is an emotive quality to sound?’  He argues that ‘You have to understand, first of all, the physicality of how the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth really operates.’  Said draws a parallel with poetry: ‘If one considers poetry as requiring a particular kind of language, then it’s figured language, not ordinary prose.’ It will surprise some readers to discover that Said starts with a thoroughly formalist attitude: he describes ‘the poetic object’ as ‘a whole series of relationships, internal to the poem, which you need to understand before you can, if you will, “read it”’. He argues that the best kind of interpretation is ‘ to regard the text as the result of a series of decisions made by the composer, writer, or the poet, the result of which we get. And therefore, to read it, one must try to understand the process by which these notes or these words have gained a presence on the paper.’ The context of writing, for Said, is all-important:

When I am writing and lecturing about the works of the past, my main interest is to try to explain them and present them, as much as possible, as creations of their time … you read the texts in a historical context and understand the discipline of the language and its forms and its discourses.

This is the philological method underpinning all Said’s criticism, but his view of critical interpretation is neither purely formalist nor historicist:

What I think is also extremely important is to understand the interpreter’s role not just in the context of the original composer or poet but also of the performer and interpreter in the present …

The interpretive process, Said concludes, is ‘a dynamic one, which always requires a great deal of rational examination and isn’t a matter to be determined simply by feeling.’  Barenboim agrees, but only up to a point: ‘It’s not ethical’, he reminds his friend, ‘to make a crescendo only with your brain; your whole body has to be involved’.

So, listen to Barenboim conducting Beethoven’s 9^th at the Proms; better still, watch him. You’ll see what he means.

Adrian Barlow

*Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said.  (Bloomsbury, 2002)

                                                                                                                                               

Anglo-French

In St. Germain-en-Laye there’s a cheerful approximation of an English pub. It’s called The Bitter End, and serves Adnam’s Ale along with those other staples of any English bar: Leffe, Hoegaarden, Nastro Azzuro etc. BBC 1 is streamed to the TV, so that you can watch Wimbledon with an English commentary – or you could, if the sound weren’t turned right down. Somehow, though, it doesn’t quite feel like an English pub, not least because when I visit it I’m often the only Brit there. Perhaps it’s best summed up in Philip Larkin’s line: ‘A joyous shot at how things ought to be’.

I sit now at one end of The Bitter End, reading this weekend’s Le Figaro magazine, entitled ‘All you need is Londres’. I turn the pages with increasing amazement: is this really how the French see the English?

The cover is predictable enough: a clownish figure bedecked in the Union Jack and posing in front of a red telephone kiosk. He is about to tip his souvenir-stand bowler at the reader but remains slightly inscrutable behind his dark glasses – the sort Timmy Mallet used to wear on Wacaday. The headline itself is an affectionate nod towards that other great British icon, John Lennon.

The articles within open up for Le Figaro’s readers an England I scarcely recognize, but one presumably meant to demonstrate that the best things across the Channel are, well, French. There’s an article about Arsène Wenger, ‘le plus anglais des entraineurs français’ and a special feature on one of England’s finest National Trust houses, the ever-so-not-English Waddesdon Manor:

En faisant construire Waddesdon Manor, Ferdinand de Rothschild voulait un édifice qui resemble au chateaux de la Loire. Le résultat est un savoureux mélange des XV^e, XVI^e et XVII^e siècles dressé dans la campagne anglaise.

At the other end of the scale, readers wanting to find the best pub in Soho are recommended to drink at

The French House qui a connu les riches heures de la Résistance française expatriée, plus tard lieu de boisson de Francis Bacon, toujours frequenté par des artistes d’aujourd’hui.

It is, Le Figaro reassures its readers, Sans doute le seul pub londinien qui ne sert pas de pintes. So that’s all right, then.

This special England edition has an oblique angle on the Olympics, about which Paris is perhaps still a bit sore. With a deft ironic nod in the direction of the approaching chaos of the Games, the leading article is headed ‘God save London!’ The author of this piece, Olivier Frébourg, asks pointedly:

Qu’est ce que la couronne royale si ce n’est l’alliance de clans, de clubs, de communautés? L’Angleterre ressemble à un vaste club avec ses règles, ses droits, ses devoirs: il permet d’échapper à la folie du monde. Le club est un cercle  olympique … L’esprit de club a sculpté la civilization britannique. C’est un garde-fou qui permet aux passions de ne pas déborder.

M. Frébourg sees a distinction between the Greek ideal of the athlete and the English notion of the sportif, the amateur - a good French word possibly going out of fashion in France. The Englishman, he asserts, loves sport because ‘il y voit les valeurs de la chevalerie, d’une noblesse accessible à tous.’ He forbears to mention that concepts of chivalry and noblesse arrived in England via the French codes of courtly love. Then follows a remarkable summing-up both of Englishness and of the English character:

Cette civilisation urbaine et industrielle qui a la culte de la maison, du cottage, du home sweet home, de la méchanique, vénère l’éspace vert, la pelouse, celle des squares et des jardins mais aussi celle des terrains de sport. Ce peuple de  l’intériorisation - never complain, never explain – a le culte des activités extérieures. C’est lui qui a inventé le week-end et le loisir sportif par tous les temps.

The writer expands on his theme in a second article, ‘Au royaume des sports les plus excentriques’. Here he introduces to astonished Figaro readers sports such as Cheese Rolling (‘La palme de l’absurde’), Chess Boxing (‘6 rounds d’échecs et 5 de boxe’ -  really?), Duck Racing (Course de Canards), the Eton Wall Game and ‘la Maldon mud race’. The origins and aims of this ancient sport were news to me:

500 participants plongent à marée basse dans ce port envasée de l’Essex … Sur un distance de 1 kilomètre, ils doivent traverser ces sables mouvants, visqueux et noirâtres qui ne tardent pas à les emprisoner. Engloutis, pétrifiés, les participants, histoire oblige, recherchent la tête de Byrthnoth, vaillant chef saxon décapité dans la rivière par les hordes de Vikings victorieux de la bataille de Maldon, que la vase ne parvint jamais a recouvrir.

I wish I’d know about this when struggling to read The Battle of Maldon in Anglo-Saxon at university. Surely the Maldon mudlarks, sinking beneath the shifting sands,  still call out words I memorized for my Finals:

Hige sceal þe heardra,          hearte þe cenre,

Mod sceal þe mare,           þe ure maegen lytað.

Our determination shall be stronger, our heart the keener,

Courage shall be greater, as our strength ebbs away.

But the people who, for M. Frébourg (and now for me), best embody the Anglo-Saxon obsession with history, sport and snobbery are the Archers of Arden. It’s not surprising I’ve never heard of this exclusive band of merry men because ‘les archers d’Arden sont des hommes des bois mais ils composent l’un des clubs les plus fermés du royaume.’ With due deference to historical fact, the author acknowledges that ‘L’arc a été l’arme decisive qui a permis aux Anglais de batter les arbalètes [crossbowmen] françaises a la bataille d’Azincourt en 1415.’ He notes that members of this über-exclusive club begin their day’s sport with a copious breakfast of Cheddar cheese and beer and he finds some consolation for past national humiliation in the fact that, while the archers are at the butts,

Dans la cave sommeillent, tels des gisants,* de grands crus français: une forme de revanche sur la défaite d’Azincourt.

Well, Le Figaro has made my weekend. It’s clear the English remain au fond a source of amused, and bemused, admiration to their neighbours across the Channel. Finishing my pint and my annual 10-day immersion in Anglo-French bi-cultural education, ‘comme tous les autres jeux excentriques’, at the Bitter End, I am happy to leave the last word to Olivier Frébourg:

On trinque a l’identité saxone et à l’esprit de corps. Plonger dans la fange demeure une façon pour les Britanniques de rire de la condition humaine, de conforter leur simplicité, la valeur la plus difficile à conquérir pour les français.

Adrian Barlow

* Gisants, a word new to me, are the stone effigies of sleeping lords and knights found on top of old tombs. They are a good simile for bottles of fine wine laid down in a vault (la cave sommeillent), waiting to be brought back to the light and then drunk.

Strasbourg: stained glass and storks

Flying, the other day, over the strange landscape of the Gobi desert, I must have dozed off. I remember waking with a start to see Strasbourg Cathedral being blown up. I thought at first it must have been ‘breaking news’: some terrorist outrage streamed by CNN to the little screen on the back of the aircraft seat in front of me. It took a while to realize I had not been watching the News at all, but the latest Sherlock Holmes film, proudly presented as in-flight entertainment by China Air. Even so it was a shock: Strasbourg’s west front is one of the architectural masterpieces of the western world – and of the Eastern, come to that.

Working in Strasbourg this weekend, I’ve been glad to reassure myself that the Cathedral is still intact; better still, to see that the stained glass of the South aisle has just been conserved and re-leaded. I had forgotten how stunning it is. In particular, I’d forgotten (I first came to Strasbourg in 1986, and this has been my fourth visit in twenty-five years) the marvellous colours and the sheer imagination of the artist. Look at this image of the red-eyed Devil, early 14^th century but almost  as though appearing last year in a Dr. Who Christmas Show.

What I had really hoped to see on my flying visit to the capital of Alsace was not stained glass, however, but storks. Thomas Hardy wrote about them when he set a scene from his novel The Laodicean in Strasbourg and I wanted to see them for myself. Every souvenir shop in the city sells toy storks – plastic, inflatable, or plaster-of-Paris -  but I have never seen them. ‘Get up early and see them flying over the Cathedral,’ I was told at my hotel. ‘Get the tram out to the European Court of Human Rights; they nest over there,’ I was assured by a friend.

I tried both, but no luck. At six on a Sunday morning only the swifts were up, practising close formation flying around the extraordinary North Spire of Notre Dame. I love swifts, and can watch them for hours in summer but, in almost every way you can imagine, swifts are the opposite of storks. I took a tram and headed out past the Place de la République in the direction of what my map called the Institutions Européennes, but again no luck.

However, on the tram itself I did encounter a different prize specimen. Sitting opposite me was an American who wasn’t happy, not at all. 'I’m not staying in this town,’ he announced as if into thin air, but actually into his phone, ‘Strasbourg sucks. It’s got no water,’ (we were crossing the river as he spoke), you can’t get a decent burger, and its just a heap of ugly buildings.’  I suppose ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, but Strasbourg is a World Heritage site, and the kind of city where you just want to wander, and enjoy the narrow streets, the encircling river, the squares and the half-timbered jettied houses – colombage, since we’re in France, but fachwerk in Germany, as Strasbourg was when these houses were built.

You confront Strasbourg’s contested past at every turn. The street names are given in both French and in local German. Sometimes the results are surprising: the narrow rue du Tonnelet Rouge, linking the rue des Juifs and the rue des Frères, becomes the Rotfässelgässel. Nearby, a plaque on a wall identifies the site of the ancient Synagogue until the Massacre of the Jews in 1349. In the Place St. Etienne there is another plaque, on the wall of the Cathedral Choir School, which tells its own appalling story:

Every bookshop in the city (and there are many) displays books about the German occupation of Strasbourg and the brutalizing of the population under the Gauleiter Robert Wagner. I find a photograph of a huge Nazi rally in the Place Kléber, the same square where Hardy’s heroine in The Laodicean, Paula Power, was reunited with her architect suitor, Somerset, while staying at the Maison Rouge Hotel. She saw storks. Tired after her long journey to Strassburg (Hardy’s spelling reflects the city’s 19th century German identity), she is gazing out of her hotel window and looking at the birds through a binocular (sic): ‘ "What strange and philosophical creatures storks are," she said. "They give a taciturn, ghostly character to the whole town." The birds were crossing and recrossing the field of the glass in their flight hither and thither between the Strassburg chimneys, their sad, grey forms sharply outlined against the sky, and their skinny legs showing beneath like the limbs of dead martyrs in Crivelli’s emaciated imaginings. The indifference of these birds to all that was going on beneath them impressed her: to harmonize with their solemn and silent movements the houses beneath should have been deserted, and grass growing in streets. '

Smaller, more welcoming than Kleber Platz (as Hardy called it), is Broglie. Not so much a square as a long oblong, it has an avenue of regimented plane trees through the middle, leading to a memorial to General Leclerq, the ‘Liberator’ of Strasbourg in November 1944. Leclerq, who was to die only three years later in Algeria, stands at the foot of an obelisk looking slightly self-conscious – as well he might for he is flanked on either side by angels in flight. It’s a curiously old-fashioned monument, almost medieval in its symbolism – practically the apotheosis of the Maréchal de France.

But French memorials of World War II often have difficult stories to tell, and the language for these stories is not always easy to speak. Strasbourg endured horrors between 1942 and the end of the War – and even for long afterwards, for many of its men were sent either to be forced labour or to fight on the Russian front. Those who survived took a long time to come home.

And I know of no memorial in Britain, from either world war, which has to tell a story anything like that of the Strasbourg City memorial in the gardens of the Place de la République. Much larger than life-size, an Alsacienne mother cradles in her arms not one but two dying sons. It is a kind of double Pietà, and indeed the mother looks part Mary, mother of Jesus, and part Marianne, heroine of France. But even this is to oversimplify, for the son under one arm represents the youth of Alsace killed in the Great War fighting for Germany against France, while the youth under the other represents the young men of Alsace-Lorraine (which Germany ceded to France under the Treaty of Versailles) killed fighting for France against Germany. The bodies of the two men twist away, unable to look each other in the eye, but - almost unnoticed at the bottom of the sculpture - their hands are clasped together.

Adrian Barlow 

[Strasbourg illustrations: (i) the North spire of the Cathedral, (ii) stained glass, early 14th century, (iii) ‘La Main Noire’ memorial, Place St. Etienne; (iv) memorial to General Leclerq, Broglie; (v) War Memorial ‘A Nos Morts’; Place de La République. Photographs by the author.

I shall be giving a lecture on war memorials, ‘Memory, Remembrance and Memorialising’ as part of the programme of War memorials: Remembrance and Community at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education on 27 October.

Mongolia: Chaucer and Chinggis Khaan

On Saturday 2^nd June, I attended a concert in Gloucester Cathedral to mark the beginning of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. On Sunday 10^th June I enjoyed a concert of music in Sudbury, Suffolk, performed by children from the town. In between I went to Mongolia and back.

The drive from Chinggis Khaan airport into Ulaanbaatar is not encouraging: roads in a dreadful state, traffic uncontrolled, pollution ditto; on either side gers, shanties, gas pipes, industrial wasteland and giant advertising hoardings; people picking their way between puddles and rubbish – a Jake and Dinos Chapman nightmare landscape writ large. But the city itself, sprawling across a plain surrounded by mountains, is mercifully different, full of quirks and contrasts.

I’ve never been anywhere quite like Mongolia. It is a huge country sandwiched between China and Siberia, between the Gobi Desert and the Steppe, but nearly  half its population lives in one place - Ulaanbaatar, known by everyone there as UB. The Mongolian language, to my untutored ear, sounds like Mandarin with a Russian inflection, or vice versa. The script is Cyrillic – a legacy of the Soviet era too complicated to dismantle. And there’s still some nostalgia for that past. In the State Department Store (the name itself redolent of Communist control) I search for and find somewhere to get a new battery for my watch. In a far corner behind a small counter a woman sits mending watches, and on the wall behind her are large photographs of Soviet women heroes be-ribboned with as many medals as Borat in his new film, The Dictator. On a plinth outside the Ulaanbaatar Hotel Lenin himself still stands, larger than life, looking out over the city. Outfacing him on a giant cinema hoarding is a huge poster - advertising The Dictator. Ivan Illych  does not look amused.

Someone else who looks out over the city is Marco Polo. His meeting with Kublai Khan is the starting point for Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities.  This is a book about fantasy and realism, and about the permeability of perception. It seems to chime eerily with modern-day UB. Marco Polo himself reflects at one point in the novel, “Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging gardens of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.’ To this day, the rubbish heaps and the gardens exist side by side. In the late evening, someone has dossed down on the steps beneath the statue of Lenin; by the morning he’s gone, leaving behind his cardboard mattress, the detritus from his evening meal (cans, and then more cans; a pizza carton from the nearby Grab n’ Go fast food kiosk) and – carefully posed on the top step, as if an offering to the deity on the plinth – a teddy bear.

Offerings to rather different deities can be seen in the temples and Datsans (institutes) of the Gandantegchenling Monastery. Downtown UB this isn’t: the town planners seem to have abandoned a half-finished attempt to landscape the uphill approach to this imposing campus from which, beyond the tiled and tilting rooftops of the temples, one has a plain view of the hills. Campus is the right word for there is a university here too, the Buddhist University of Mongolia. I learn from a leaflet that ‘the University combines modern education with traditional teaching methods. Four year Bachelor’s degree programs are offered and currently there are two departments. The Department of Internal Sciences which includes majors in Buddhist Philosophy and Chanting; the Department of Common Knowledge which includes Tibetan, Sanskrit and English majors as well as a Traditional Medicine and Astrology major.’

I have to reprove myself for smiling at this description of common knowledge. Replace Tibetan and Sanskrit with Latin and Greek; English with, say, Rhetoric; add the elements of Internal Sciences, Theology and Philosophy, and you have something close to the curriculum of Cambridge in the 15^th century. Even chanting is akin to the medieval practice of singing the daily offices: in the Vajradhara Temple, a group of young monks - all teenagers, their scarlet robes only more exotic versions of student gowns in England – is being taught to chant part of a service. Their tutor keeps a beady eye on them, but even so one bored monk manages to check the messages on his mobile phone without being spotted. I remember the words of the disillusioned monk in the closing lines of Basil Bunting’s 1932 poem, ‘Chomei at Toyama’:

I do not enjoy being poor

I’ve a passionate nature.

My tongue

Clacked a few prayers.

In six days it is hard to do more than register as many different images as possible: the DESTROY HAIR AND BEAUTY SALON with, unusually, its sign in English; the courage and unconcern with which pedestrians walk out into the surging traffic because if they didn’t no-one would ever get across the road; the steam engine, still emblazoned with the head of Stalin, parked beside a main road; the extraordinary new Blue Skies Building, facing the acres of Parliament Square where children play in pedal cars in the afternoon sun and students pose for graduation photographs before the steps of Parliament House.

At the top of these steps sits the largest statue of all: Chinggis Khaan (do not call him Genghis Khan here), revered not as the bloodthirsty monster of modern western imagination, and not just as the man who forged the vast Mongolian Empire but as the leader who established the Mongolian language, promoted education, cared for his people and insisted on being buried in an unidentified grave. Perhaps his nearest European equivalent would have been Charlemagne.

On the grand staircase of the National Historical Museum there is, in pride of place, the following glowing tribute to Chinggis Khaan, ‘King of Tartary’:

This noble kyng was cleped Cambyuskan,

Which in his tyme was of so greet renoun

That there was nowher in no regioun

So excellent a lorde in alle thing,

Hym lakked noght that longeth to a kyng.

This tribute is Chaucer’s, from The Squire’s Tale.

Adrian Barlow

P.S. I was not on my own in Mongolia. My thanks to all my fellow education consultants who quickly became my friends; in particular to Tanya, Judith and Laurie - travelling companions with whom, improbably, I visited Beijing and Moscow airports in the same week.

[Mongolia images: (i) View of the hills beyond the city of Ulaanbaatar (ii) Statue of Lenin in front of Ulaanbaatar Hotel (iii) Statue of Marco Polo facing the Blue Skies Building (2012) (iv) monks at the Gandantegchenling Monastery (v) Parliament Building.  Photos by the author .

Short measures (ii): Time and Thomas Hardy

In June 1915, the War in France not yet a year old, Thomas Hardy visited Exeter with his second wife, Florence. They went to a concert and then, next morning, visited the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, where a particular exhibit caught Hardy’s attention and spurred him to write ‘In a Museum’. It’s a poem crying out for some context.

I



Here's the mould of a musical bird long passed from light, 


Which over the earth before man came was winging; 


There's a contralto voice I heard last night, 


That lodges with me still in its sweet singing.



II



Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird 


Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending 


Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard, 


In the full-fledged song of the universe unending.

The exhibit he writes about in this poem is a plaster cast (‘mould’) of a fossil of the earliest known bird, archaeopteryx. The original had been found in Germany only a few years after the publication of The Origin of Species, and was hailed as evidence to support Darwin’s theories because it was a transitional fossil, one that suggests birds may have evolved from dinosaurs.

Extinct birds aren’t unusual museum exhibits: there is a fine specimen of a stuffed dodo – fine at least if you don’t have (as I have) an aversion to taxidermy – at the Horniman Museum in South London. But this bird puts the dodo in the shade: it was flying ‘over the earth’ long before the late appearance of homo sapiens. ‘Winging’ may sound slightly precious. However, Hardy needs it to prepare for the feminine rhyme ‘singing’ at the end of the stanza; and the word also echoes the name of the bird itself: the Greek etymology of archaeopteryx is ‘ancient wing’.

The fossil, though millions of years old, is present to the poet ‘Here’ and now. Similarly, the beautiful voice he heard last night is simultaneously in the past – ‘There’ – and present because it ‘lodges with me still’. The poet is moved by song, whether it be the ‘sweet’ contralto voice of the singer or the ‘coo’ of the musical bird. He himself enjoys the music of poetry: he lays on alliteration enough in the first line (‘mould / musical … long / light) and the rhythms of the long, leisurely lines are carefully modulated, no one line quite mirroring another.

But if Hardy in the first stanza focuses sharply on the here and now, in the second he adopts a longer perspective: ‘Such a dream is Time’ that past and present are arbitrary and elastic. The ‘coo’ of the archaeopteryx has either been already ‘blent’ (a word Philip Larkin later borrowed for ‘Church Going’) -  into the song of last night’s singer, or it will ‘be blending in the future. Time is as limitless as the prehistoric landscape over which the bird flies is ‘visionless’. It is as unimaginable and as incommunicable as the strange arctic birds who visit Tess of the d’Urbvervilles:

 gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived  …. But of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account, The traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs. (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Ch. XLIII)

This is one of Hardy’s bleakest images of man’s cosmic insignificance. ‘In a Museum’, by contrast, is more ambiguous. ‘The full-fledged song of the universe unending’ recalls Keats’s nightingale whose singing with ‘full-throated ease’ draws the speaker towards ‘easeful death’. But is this indeed a poem about human insignificance in a universe as indifferent to man as the strange birds were indifferent to Tess? Or is ‘full-fledged’ in fact an affirmative epithet, pointing us towards the idea of celestial harmony and the music of the spheres – a harmony and a music of which man is a part?

Besides, what exactly is unending? The song or the universe? Whichever it is, does the word invite us to contemplate bleak endlessness or hopeful continuity? In ‘The Voice’ – a poem written only a year or two before ‘In a Museum’, Hardy had wondered whether the voice that was calling to him really was the voice of his dead first wife, Emma, or just a trick of the wind,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness

Heard no more again, far or near?’

In the end, though, despite his doubts he stubbornly insists the voice is that of ‘the woman calling’. My own reading of ‘In a Museum’ is that while Hardy leaves the question open, the positioning of ‘unending’ as the last word of the poem, and the stress on the prefix ‘un-’ allows at least the possibility of hope. ‘Un-’ can indicate joy, after all: unconfined, unalloyed. ‘Unending’ is a more positive word than ‘endless’, carrying none of the desolation of ‘wistlessness’ or (Hardy’s original choice of word in ‘The Voice’) ‘existlessness’.

Not everyone agrees. Some critics see this poem as a clear statement of his pessimism. But the second line of the second stanza – ‘perished not … blent … will be blending’ seems to me affirmative, a case at least of Hardy’s ‘hoping it might be so’. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this. Seamus Heaney’s sonnet sequence, The Tollund Man in Springtime, has a remarkable poem about resurrection and recreation which ends in a homage to Hardy:

Then, when I felt the air,

I was like turned turf in the breath of God,

Bog-bodied, on the sixth day, brown and bare,

And, at the last, all told, unatrophied.

Hardy famously liked inventing adjectives prefaced by ‘un-’. (The key  scene in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys , where Hector dissects Hardy’s poem ‘Drummer Hodge’, hinges on this). ‘In a Museum’ is ultimately about how ‘the coo of the ancient bird’ hasn’t atrophied either.

 Adrian Barlow

 [photograph: cast of archaeopteryx fossil, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Anglo-German

The Golden Madonna, Essen

Travelling last week across North Rhine-Westphalia, I flew to Dusseldorf and thence by train to Essen, Münster and Bielefeld at the invitation of a group of Anglo-German Associations  (variously the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft , the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft and the Deutsch-Britische Freundeskreis) to lecture on ‘Cambridge Writers and Cambridge Writing’. This was the fourth time I’d accepted such an invitation. As ever, my hosts were welcoming and generous with their time, and my audiences were varied, interested and interesting. The A-V equipment worked at each location. No itinerant lecturer can ask for more.

In Essen, a third time, I visited the Dom to pay my respects to the Golden Madonna, the earliest known carving of the Virgin and Child in the world. She sits, piercing-eyed, in a specially protected chapel on the north side of the Chancel. Essen, like the other industrial cities of the Ruhr, was heavily bombed during the War, and the Golden Madonna was hidden away for safety. After 1945 it was a British soldier who rescued and returned her to her rightful home. Whenever I see her, I recall Lawrence Durrell’s description of the Marine Venus, recovered after the same war from her underwater hiding place off the island of Rhodes:

She sits … now, focused intently upon her own inner life, gravely meditating upon the works of time. So long as we are in this place we shall not be free from her. (Reflections on a Marine Venus, Ch. 2)

The Nikolaus Gross Chapel, Essen

 On the other side of the cathedral, by stark contrast, is a small chapel dedicated to Nikolaus Groß, a local miner who became a trades-unionist, journalist and outspoken, heartfelt critic of Nazism. His writings on religion and politics led inexorably to his implication in the July Plot to assassinate Hitler, and thence to his arrest and execution in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin. (I have been to Plötzensee: its hanging chamber is the coldest, bleakest room in which I have ever stood.) Essen’s Nikolaus Groß Abend-gymnasium is named in his honour, and its Director is a good friend of mine. The pictures on the walls of his office embody the tensions and ambiguities of the past century:  photographs of Nikolaus Groß, of Winston Churchill, and of Ernst Barlach’s  Magdeburger Ehrenmahl - for me one of the most eloquent and discomforting of all First World War memorials.

War memorials are much on my mind at present. I have contributed a chapter on British and German memorials after the Armistice of 1918 to a book due out next year, and in the autumn I shall be speaking in Oxford about memory and memorialization at a conference on memorials of the Great War. However, Münster, my next stop, appeared at first to have none. Not surprising, of course, since the city had been flattened by allied bombing.  Still, I liked Munster a lot: it felt at ease with itself. I liked its bicycles and traffic-free streets, its sensitive post-war reinterpretation of the medieval city. Above all, I confess, I loved its asparagus. The annual Spargelfest  was in full swing: my meal of spargel mit westfälische schinken on Tuesday night and the vast stacks of white asparagus spears in the Domplatz market on Wednesday morning will linger happily in the memory.

Asparagus on sale in the Domplatz Market, Muenster

But I was wrong about the war memorials. Straying further than I’d intended, I found my way to the Liebfrauenkirche Überwasser, a wonderfully light and spacious church. The main porch, under the tower, appeared to be screened off by heavy glass doors; but seeing someone else exit that way I followed, finding myself in a wide whitewashed vestibule. I don’t know why I didn’t simply walk out of the door straight ahead, but for some reason I turned and saw, on either side of the tower arch, a pair of tall wooden panels. Each one had two figures carved in relief, almost life-size, almost Expressionist in style: on the left, Ss. Michael and Sebastian; on the right, Ss. Barbara and Theodore. I couldn’t make out the texts above the figures. Then I saw each panel consisted of two shut doors – like an altar triptych closed for Lent. No one was looking, so I opened them out and there, no longer hidden from view, was the roll of the Münster dead from 1914-18. At the head of the list was the inscription Es opferten Ihr Leben: ‘They sacrificed their life’.

Hidden from view – though in quite a different way – was the war memorial at Bielefeld I visited on the last day of my tour. Bielefeld lies in a valley and I had been told there was a memorial, often disfigured, somewhere on the Johannisberg above the city. I needed help to find this and Janette, my guide, led the way across the railway, up the hill and away from the city. At the top of the hill, a hotel: beyond the hotel, a path leading into a wood, the Teutoburger Wald. You have to leave the path and head towards the trees in order to reach the memorial. Further from the centre of the city it could not be: it seems astonishingly, willfully, misplaced. 

The Johannisberger Memorial, Bielefeld

And yet it isn’t. The memorial shows a soldier in uniform but without rifle or helmet. He kneels with his hands raised awkwardly behind him. Only when you come close can you see he is bandaging his wounded head: there is no one to do it for him. Left behind, but at least left alive, he has to fend for himself – it’s as if he has taken to the hills to hide. His gaze is stern and distant: is he looking through the trees, scanning in vain for his dead companions? Is he looking back at the city, reproaching those for whom he fought but who have now abandoned him? This statue, significantly, was erected not by the townspeople but by the army veterans of Bielefeld. I have never seen a lonelier memorial.

 

This sense of loneliness and separation finds its counterpart in a WW2 memorial back in the city centre. Outside the Rathaus, inconspicuous against the flambuoyant architecture of the rebuilt town hall, stands a plain square column, really no more than a tall plinth, with a copper bowl on top. It looks as if an everlasting flame ought to be burning in the bowl, but no. There is apparently nothing to indicate that this is a war memorial at all, just four words on the side of the column: WIR WARTEN AUF EUCH – ‘We wait for you’. In fact, this was erected after 1945 as a reminder that many men from the city were either still in British Prisoner-or-War camps or, more sinisterly, were being used as forced labour in the Soviet Union. I believe that the perpetual flame continued to burn until every one of these missing men had been repatriated or accounted for.

Few things reflect more powerfully than war memorials the conflicted relationship, the similarities and differences between Britain and Germany during the twentieth century.  Think about it. So, if I’m invited to come back and lecture a fifth time, with the centenary of the Great War fast approaching, it is about this subject I’d like to speak.

Adrian Barlow