CB Halloween
Track 1: Nightmare, Artie Shaw
Nightmare, by Artie Shaw. This
is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme comes by kind permission of
the Nabbital-Crashe family, from the famous
Tudor manorhouse of Numbleigh-On-The- -Hill, one of the most haunted houses in
England. The script, written by Mike
Burrows, is a celebration of Halloween.
Untouched by contemporary
attitudes to property and squatters, Halloween, a night for ghosts and spirits,
exists largely in corner-of-an-eye
paleness amid fierce red and yellow tints of trees, mists and bittersweet drifts
or upward spirals of blue smoke and memory from bonfires and chimneys: in the shadows, uncertain sunshine and early lamplight
experienced in old limestone houses and buildings, and the vast darkness and
distant, flame-like lights of an Autumn night out-of-doors, which might as well
be as far-off as the stars or moon between clouds. Is it merely the chill of approaching winter
that one suddenly feels – or a presence of the long, unhappy past? The stories of the past are acted out still, as our stories move
on. Some griefs – and happinesses – are not
to be effaced, whatever the living may think.
A ghost for every room or alcove
and every passageway. And one could go
further in a country home, as the Otherworld’s fairies and witches of old
belief are held back by articles of iron, moving water and prayer, and are
known for their tricks.
Here, as one dunks one’s Sainsbury
fig-roll in Kenco Really Rich in the front room of Numbleigh, and Mike takes a
gingerly look at the antique Green Man andirons beside the Winchester stone
fireplace, it may be Autumn, and it may be superstition, but where generations
of landowning families and their servants have lived, light and shade shift or are
meaningfully still; where cold sinks into the bones and there is the sense of
centuries co-existent with our own, we may be feeling a closeness to the ghost-world
. Now that Mrs Nabbital-Crashe has
returned to the stone kitchen and Amazon.uk , we must express our gratitude to
the Nabbital-Crashe family for their hospitality, not that there is a blazing
log-fire of welcome, or any kind of fire, for that matter, in the grate.
Here’s a Lyric Piece by Grieg,
one of his popular character-pieces for piano.
This one, the 5th number of the Seventh Book, Opus 62, is
entitled simply, Phantom. Is this ghost a haunting memory of an event or
person, or the ghost of a lost feeling or opportunity? A melody generated by rhythm and phrase-structure
and embroidered by trills, repeated notes
and harmonies that look forward to Debussy, the entity passes before
one’s view, the inspiration of an Autumnal-seeming moment. There is no contrasting material.
Track 2: Phantom, Grieg
Thomas Hardy and Gerald Finzi
– two atheistic masters of the uncanny. Finzi devoted many years to reading and setting
the poetry of the sage of Max Gate. His
Hardy songs are arguably among the finest English vocal works produced in the
20th Century. Here is the evocative
song, Voices From Things Growing In The Churchyard,
the penultimate number of his cycle, By
Footpath and Stile for baritone and string quartet.of 1921-22. The composer
withdrew the cycle after publication, as immature, and it was edited and
republished in an edition by his friend
and fellow-composer, Howard Ferguson, in 1981.
The poet imagines the
inhabitants of the churchyard rising, in that they speak through flowers,
grass, trees, leaves and berries in the wind.
From rapt opening through a lutenist-like strain, and characterizations
of the voices, the scrupulous compassion of both poet and composer finds some
sunshine between occurrences of the refrain, “All day cheerily,/All night eerily”.
Track 3: Voices From Things Growing In The Churchyard,
Finzi
One of the ghosts of Numbleigh
is, of course, that of the Henrican Sir Amyas de Hoote, the founder of a
dynasty and doomed to haunt the stables and the neighbouring rough country for
hunting on the Sabbath: he has become a Flying
Dutchman of county circles, an awful warning to the hunter. The de Hootes owned the house and estate from
the dissolution of the monasteries until the late 18th Century, when
all was gamed away on Mr Bunn by the latest head of the family. The gamester, Sir Edward, knew people who
attended Hellfire Club parties, and, being a gambling-enthusiast with a system,
built a Temple of Fortuna on the South side of the park. It was converted into the ruined folly it is
a year later.
Cesar Auguste Franck, pianist,
organist and teacher, enjoyed two periods of inspiration – beginning as a
piano-virtuoso and composer of trios and glittering pieces for solo piano, when
he was mocked for his full name – more
recognizable as Caesar Augustus – and ending as a well-regarded church musician
and important and much-loved figure at the Paris Conservatoire, when he took to
writing orchestral tone-poems and a symphony, besides advancing his reputation as
a composer of chamber-music and instrumental pieces of great maturity.
His highly schematic tone-poem, Le Chasseur Maudit, The Accursed Horseman, was inspired by a German
Ballad written in the 18th Century by G.A. Burger.
The introduction evokes the auditory and spiritual tussle between the huntsman’s
call on horns and tolled-over peace of the Sabbath countryside: the huntsman’s call comes out uppermost; in blustery
air, with asides for the bystander’s reflections, the reckless lord’s horse begins
its wild, staggering career over all physical obstacles, urged on ever more
madly...
A sudden whispering hush mutes
even the huntsman’s horn... Note the tritone
derived from his music – now overt and chilling... Diabolus
in musica! Doom is sounding in
strings and trombones... The swing of
unearthly bells is in the eddying air of strings and woodwind... Final-sounding chords bring something else on
the wind – agitated rhythms pass on to the Sentence. The Accursed Huntsman will hunt on to
eternity, day and night, never to rest, driven on by the Wild Hunt of legend. And so, in the midst of horror, already
whipping up on his way and moving into the far distance, he leaves us.From the
standpoint of thematic transformation, scoring, sensitivity to the elements and
instinct for theatre, it’s an extraordinary feat of imagination to have come from
a dutiful church-organist and professor in his sixties.
Track 4: Le Chasseur Maudit, Franck
Spare a thought for those who have
gone far beyond basking, sun-drenched naturism.
Then again, although Summer’s over, think of how hot and weary of heat
overdressed mortals can become. Surely,
there is something to be said for supernaturism? As Dan Russo and his Oriole Orchestra opined in
the 1920s, Tain’t No Sin to take off your
skin and dance around in your bones!
Track 5: Tain’t No Sin, Russo
The Ghost’s High Noon, as
everyone knows, is midnight. On October
the 31st, the Eve of All Hallows, how much more evidently is that the
case? We shan’t be at Numbleigh-on-The-Hill
on the 31st. By all accounts,
normal laws of physics are held at nought on the estate. If there’s Sir George, the dandy of Mayfair, taking
off his skin and dancing in his bones in the library, here’s Lady Joan, the
grey lady, dressed in monochrome Elizabethan fashion, who haunts the passageway
to the master bedroom, her back to the viewer and alternately wringing her
hands and weeping into a handkerchief.
Her face ought to be a picture. More
of her anon. Then, there are the
portraits in the gallery at the top of the sub-neo-classical main stairs; a
succession of wicked lords and ladies, all subject to the curse of the dying
witch or abbot, and, come the night of the 31st, doing very well on
it; stepping down from their gilt frames to be much as ever they were – or – as
in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Ruddigore - to encourage the latest baronet
to maintain their family tradition of at least
one-crime-a-day wickedness.
Here, the ancestors sing of
their delight in being ghosts.
Track 6: When The Night Wind Howls, Sullivan
From spirits who discover that,
as they are ‘practically alive’ they need not be dead at all, to the world
outside light opera. Every old ghost was
a new ghost, once, stepping out of the sheath of flesh and blood much as
imagined by the poetess, Fredegond Shove.
The change here is made a still more solemn and mystical event,
shimmering with wonder and compassion, by the magical realism of Vaughan
Williams. Here is his setting of The New Ghost.
Track 7: The New Ghost, Vaughan Williams
Engelbert Humperdinck was a Wagnerist
whose music turned principles of The Music of The Future and the Assembled Artwork
of Music-drama as exemplified in the operas of The Master to as wonderful ends
in such fairy-tale, childhood-centred theatre-pieces as Hansel und Gretel and Die
Konigskinder. Here is the orchestral description of the
Witches Ride, Prelude to Act Two of Hansel
and Gretel.
The de Hoote family of
Numbleigh boasted no known witches or warlocks, perhaps mainly as they kept
themselves to themselves when not burning witches. The eccentric Sir Isaac, who flourished in the
late 17th Century, manifests himself as a sulphurous stench in an
outhouse now let to holiday-makers, but, however insistently the old ash-tree
taps at the window on lonely nights, he was, in fact, a serious amateur
chemist. The mysterious disappearances
among villagers of his day, and odd goings-on both in the churchyard and on the
bare turf summit of Numbleigh Hill were mere stories put about by the
neighbouring gentry whose fortunes were ruined and whom, thanks to his own
great good luck, he could kindly buy out.
Track 8: Witch’s Ride, Humperdinck
Lady Joan de Hoote, the Grey Lady
mentioned earlier, endures unlifelike stature from the end opposite to that endured
by some other celebrated ghosts. Some
walk with their head tucked underneath their arm, while she walks the
passageway to the master-bedroom complete at the top, but with miserable figure
abridged at the knees owing to the vanity of her great-great-grandson: he it was who had the floor of the manor-house’s
first storey raised by just over a foot
in order to feel tall at least somewhere in his house. When she has her feet up and chews the spirit-fat
with fellow-spectres, she most likely admits that the effect of keeping to the
floor as it was in her day adds gratifyingly to her strange power.
Classical Break came from
freezing Numbleigh Hall, courtesy of the
present owners, the Nabbital-Crashes, to whom we extend a lighted swede-lantern
and prayer for benighted souls. Do we accept
their invitation to attend the Numbleigh Halloween-party? In lieu of that desperate act, we play out with the Grey Lady Joan’s
favourite number, these days, according
to Mrs Nabbital-Crashe. With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm,
performed by Cyril Smith and Rudy Vallee’s Connecticut Yankees! This was
Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.
Today’s script was phoned in by Mike Burrows. Goodbye!
Track 9: With Her
Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, perf. by Cyril Smith and Rudy Vallee’s Connecticut
Yankees.
-“My swede has no nose.”
-“Your swede has no nose? How does
he smell?”
-“Terrible.”
