Tarragona’s Roman amphitheater is remarkable not only for its position overlooking the blue waters of the Balearic Sea but also for the fact that much of it was carved in situ out of the existing bedrock. The structure is 427 feet by 335 feet in size, and, at the time of its completion in the early second century CE, when the city was known as Tárraco, could accommodate an audience of some 12,000. In its early years, the amphitheater was the scene of the usual array of cruel Roman spectacles, and was renovated during the reign of Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (204-222).
Heliogabalus made quite a name for himself—briefly. According to historian Edward Gibbon, he “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury” and was assassinated at the age of 18. So black was his reputation that he was then subjected to damnatio memoriae—the erasure of all references to his existence from the historical record. (The fact that such a practice actually had a recognized name tells us a lot about the time.) Nevertheless, archaeologists have discovered traces of his memory in the inscription celebrating the amphitheater’s renovation. It seems that they found key letters on scattered fragments of marble, allowing them to piece together what would have been a reference to the hated emperor.
Tarragona’s mayor asked modernista architect Josep Maria Jujol to undertake the amphitheater’s restoration in the mid-1920s, but nothing came of the project, and it would be the middle of the century before any serious work was done. Decades later, in 2000, the amphitheater was designated as one component of a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the Archaeological Ensemble of Tárraco.
When Maggie and I are in Tarragona, we stay in a small, family-run hotel a short bus ride up the coast from the amphitheater. After an afternoon of swimming on Savinosa Beach and a light dinner at a chiringuito (beach bar) called Pepe’s & Lugano Restaurant and Chill-out (that’s transcribed correctly, by the way), we can enjoy the view above from our hotel balcony.
September 19 is the anniversary of the death of Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas, arguably his country’s most talented composer.
Born in 1904 on the island of Euboea, Skalkottas began taking violin lessons at the age of 3 (!), and went on to graduate from the Athens Conservatory in 1920. Thanks to a scholarship, he was able to continue his musical education in Berlin, and for a time studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal twelve-tone technique, for better or worse, came to hold sway among a number of composers. Skalkottas adopted aspects of Schoenberg’s method for about two-thirds of his works, including the tone poem or (as it has also been characterized) programmatic symphony The Return of Ulysses (1942). Despite years of effort, I’m unable to appreciate such music, although many composers and musicians clearly can. If you’re curious, you can listen to Nikos Christodoulou conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance here.
Far more enjoyable are Skalkottas’s tonal works, particularly those based on genuine Greek rhythms and melodies. The composer began writing these shortly after his return to Greece in 1933, apparently at the behest of his father, who was a flutist. A further spur was Skalkottas’s involvement with the Greek Musical Folklore Archive of the French Institute in Athens. Here Skalkottas and several other composers and musicians worked on transcribing the hundreds of Pathé recordings of Greek folk music in the archive’s collection. Skalkottas was assigned recordings from the islands of Sifnos and Crete, but he also located some obscure printed scores on his own. According to the Archive’s director. Melpo Merlier, Skalkottas “not only did by far the best work, scientifically, but also worked most conscientiously, and our collaboration proved to be the most pleasant one.”
The composer’s experience at the archive resulted in a short time in his 36 Greek Dances for Orchestra. Those that were performed in Athens proved quite popular, and Skalkottas subsequently revised a number of them and reorchestrated several more for various combinations of instruments before his death in 1949. You can listen to eight of his dances, based on the 1948 edition of the French Institute in Athens and performed by the Urals State Philharmonic Orchestra (Sverdlovskaya, Russia) under the direction of Byron Fidetzis, on YouTube here. You’ll also find others played by Christodoulou and the BBC SO, but the British musicians’ playing is so refined that the performances aren’t as much fun as those by their livelier Russian counterparts.
For the details about the composition of the Dances, I’m indebted to the notes in the 1991 Lyra recordings by Fidetzis and the Urals State PO.The image on the cover of this CD is a watercolor, Dance at Delphi (1830), by William Kinnaird, and is reproduced courtesy of the Benaki Museum, Athens. The portrait of Skalkottas is by an unknown photographer, while the photograph at the bottom was taken (again, by an unknown photographer) in 1949 during the composer’s last visit to Thessaloniki in 1949. Behind him you see the Greek port’s famous White Tower, built by the Ottomans in the 15th century and rebuilt in the 16th.
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September 9 is the birthday of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and in preparation I’ve been researching the famed writer’s short 1863 novel The Cossacks. It draws on Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasus, the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas, in the early 1850s—a time during which Russian forces, aided by their Cossack allies, were involved in a struggle to subjugate the region’s indigenous inhabitants.
Plagued by guilt over his dissolute lifestyle, Tolstoy traveled to the Caucasus in the company of his eldest brother, Nikolay, who was then an army officer and had already served in the region. After proceeding down the Volga River by barge from the city of Kazan, the pair reached Astrakhan, some 60 miles west of the Caspian Sea. From there they traveled by coach to Kizliar, a settlement in the delta of the Terek River, where Nikolay was quartered (and which is now in the Russian “republic” of Dagestan). Shortly afterward, Nikolay’s battery was transferred to a camp near the village of Stary-Yurt (now Tolstoy-Yurt) in order to protect a sanatorium that had been built to take advantage of the area’s hot mineral springs. Writing to one of his aunts, Tolstoy described the setting this way: “This is a large mountain of piled-up rocks. Some of these in their fall have formed grottos; some are still hanging high in the air. In many places streams of hot water are rushing down noisily. The white steam from this boiling water envelops and obscures, in the morning especially, the upper part of the rocks.”
It was here, in a picturesque setting of mountains and streams of steaming water, that Leo spent much of the following three years. Initially, he served as a volunteer beside his brother, but he enlisted formally in the army in February 1852.
The protagonist of The Cossacks, Dmitry Andreich Olenin, is very much a portrait of the young Tolstoy himself—irresponsible, uncertain of himself, and torn in his desires. The naïve young man is billeted in the Cossack village of Novomlinsk; befriends an aging Cossack, Eroshka, whose primary interests are drinking and hunting; tries (not very successfully) to befriend a younger Cossack named Luka; and woos (again, not very successfully) a young woman named Maryanka who will soon be betrothed to Luka. In short, Olenin’s dreams of living as simply as they do are doomed, and although Eroshka appears to care about him, calling him “brother,” it’s clear that the old Cossack’s sentiments are fleeting. The novel’s high point involves a skirmish with Chechen raiders who’ve crossed the Terek River—a skirmish in which Luka is fatally wounded. And yet …
Tolstoy worked intermittently on The Cossacks for years, and saw publication of the first section of it, in the periodical The Russian Herald, only in 1863.
One of the novel’s aspects that I’ve noticed only on rereading is its mixture of elements. In his Rise of the Russian Novel (1973), critic Richard Freeborn describes it as “an ill-assorted amalgam of styles and themes”—a harsh assessment, but one that I understand more clearly now. There are several passages of cultural exposition that are interesting enough in themselves, but otherwise impede the story. But, would Tolstoy have integrated them more fully into his narrative had he written the novel later? I don’t think so, as he was never hesitant to slip miniature lectures into his books, as he does at the end of his vast War and Peace.
As A.N. Wilson writes in his long biography Tolstoy (1988), the writer’s literary career “really began in the Caucasus,” and The Cossacks is the first major achievement of that career.
My Penguin Classics edition of The Cossacks and Other Stories is translated and Paul Foote and David McDuff, and features a detail from the painting Cossacks Charging into Battle by Franz Roubaud (1856-1928). The map of the Caucasus was published by the U.S.S.R. Travel Company in 1930, while the painting Cossacks near a Mountain River is also by Roubaud. The portrait of Tolstoy dates from 1854.
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Corvo is the smallest and northernmost island of the Azores, and (as of 2021) has a population of only 384. Although the archipelago is a part of Portugal, it lies nearly 900 miles west of Lisbon, and is on the North American Plate. So far as we know, Corvo was discovered in 1452 by Portuguese navigator Diogo de Teive, but (and here’s where things get interesting) the mariner is also said to have found a statue on the island of a man sitting astride a horse and pointing … west.
In his Historia del Reyno de Portugal (1530), Manuel de Faria e Sousa describes the discovery this way: “In the Azores, on the summit of a mountain which is called the mountain of the Crow [i.e., Corvo], they found the statue of a man mounted on a horse without saddle, his head uncovered, the left hand resting on the horse, the right extended toward the west. The whole was mounted on a pedestal which was of the same kind of stone as the statue. Underneath some unknown characters were carved in the rock.”
And in his Chronica do Principe D. João III (1567), Portuguese historian and court official Damião de Goes has this to say: “In the island of Corvo … there was found on the top of a hill on the north-west side, a stone statue placed on a ledge, and consisting of a man astride on the bare back of a horse,… with one hand on the mane of the horse, and the right arm extended, the fingers of the hand folded, with the exception of the index finger, which pointed to the west.”
Early accounts also mention that the statue and the pedestal were removed and sent to Lisbon, but over the following centuries, as such things are wont to do, they’ve disappeared.
There have been more recent and far more scientific investigations into the early history of the Azores, however. Writing in a 2021 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Santiago Giralt (Geosciences Barcelona and the Spanish National Research Council) suggest an alternative theory for the discovery of the archipelago. In “Climate Change Facilitated the Early Colonization of the Azores Archipelago during Medieval Times,” the scientists write, “The occupation of these islands began between 700 and 850 CE, 700 years earlier than suggested by documentary sources. These early occupations caused widespread ecological and landscape disturbance and raise doubts about the islands’ presumed pristine nature during Portuguese arrival.”Theydate the “first appearance of unequivocal evidence of human activities” on Corvo itself to 850 CE, plus or minus 60 years.(That’s the island you see above in a photograph taken by Luissilveira and reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
In the past, commentators have suggested that the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians (who would have sailed into the Atlantic from the Strait of Gibraltar) may have been responsible for the statue. However, Giralt’s team posit a discovery at the end of the early Middle Ages by people “from northeastern Europe”—in other words, the Norse. It was a period when the “westerly winds were weaker, facilitating arrivals to the archipelago from northeastern Europe and inhibiting exploration from southern Europe.” They cite “variations in pollen, plant macrofossil, [and] charcoal particles,” mention that “northern European mice contribute significantly to the Azorean mouse gene pool,” and refer to the “presence of the archipelago on maps before the official Portuguese discovery.” You can read the entire paper here.
Such scientific studies are admittedly less exciting than a mysterious lost statue, but they don’t quite rule out the possibility that it once existed. Not quite. After all, horses were important in Norse culture. In addition, there are confirmed remains of a Norse settlement northwest of the Azores at L’Anse aux Meadows on the shore of Newfoundland in Canada, and there may well be more. It’s intriguing that the tantalizing accounts of the vanished statue that I’ve mentioned seem to be somewhat in accord with the most modern scientific discoveries. It’s either a coincidence, or …
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When we visited the Cornish port of St Ives in 2016 with Maggie’s sisters and niece, we were disappointed to discover that the Tate St Ives, one of the renowned Tate galleries, was closed for renovation. However, we paid two visits to the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden, and, in addition, learned about several other artists who had lived and worked in the area, including Alfred Wallis.
Since August 29 is the anniversary of Wallis’s death, this is a good time to consider his work, which is as evocative as it is, to our “educated” eyes, unsophisticated.
Wallis, who was born in 1855, was apprenticed to a basket maker before becoming a deep-sea fisherman, working on ships plying the waters of the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland. Wallis married Susan Ward in 1876, but continued fishing for a time, although he turned to waters closer to home. In 1890, the couple moved to St Ives, where Wallis sold scrap as “Wallis, Alfred, Marine Stores Dealer.”
Wallis took up painting only in 1922, following the death of his wife. However, he was entirely self-taught. He had no concept of perspective, and relied on discarded scraps of cardboard and the like for “canvases” and paint he bought from ship chandlers. His subjects were the marine world that he had experienced. As he explained, he painted “what use To Bee out of my memory what we may never see again.”
Wallis was “discovered” in 1928 by professional artist Ben Nicholson and his critic friend Adrian Stokes, who were visiting Cornwall. Nicholson bought one of Wallis’s paintings, and later described seeing his works as “an immensely real experience.” Wallis’s latter years were spent in a workhouse, but he continued to paint thanks to Nicholson and Stokes, who provided him with the materials he needed. Wallis died in 1942.
The founder of the Cambridge, England, art gallery Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede, also befriended Wallis and bought a number of his works in the 1930s.
Nicholson and his equally talented wife, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, moved to St Ives in 1939. Although Nicholson was as far as anyone can imagine from “unsophisticated,” touches of Wallis’s vision show up frequently in his works from this time. In particular, Nicholson’s harbor views and sailing ships are clearly indebted to the older artist’s vision.
I wrote about our visit to St Ives in “Taking the Lay of the Land” for the Spring 2017 issue of Laguna Beach Art Patron Magazine, which you can read on Issuu on pages 44-50. I also wrote about the area in “Memories of Cornwall” in my World Enough post for July 13, 2021.
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Maggie and I have enjoyed several visits to Athens over the years, and one our many fond memories of those visits involves a tortoise living in the Agora, the large open area lying in the heart of the city beneath one of the slopes of the Acropolis.
If memory serves, we encountered the tortoise in both 2011 and 2016. It’s usually been ambling along munching grass or heading toward a rock-lined puddle to enjoy a drink of water, which it finds thanks to the local caretakers, who thoughtfully leave a tap dripping. On one occasion, we followed it into a jumble of fallen stones, where it worked itself into a corner and pulled its head in. We took the hint and left it to its reptilian dreams.
In more specific terms, the animal seems to be a Greek or spur-thighed tortoise (Testudo graeca), a species found throughout the Mediterranean world. We spotted quite a number of them near our hotel in the eastern Menorcan town of Es Castell in 2003, but the one in the Agora is the only one we’ve paid much attention to. We have no idea what sex it was, or what its age was, and, to tell the truth, there may be more than one. Whatever the case, you can find several reports online, including this brief YouTube video from 2012.
Now my good friend Pamela Francis, who was in Athens recently for a conference of the International Lawrence Durrell Society, has told me that another member of the society, Gregory Leadbetter, had encountered the tortoise, and I’m including a photograph (above) that he’s generously allowed me to share. Gregory spotted yet another one on the Acropolis itself, but given the fact that, at its lowest point, the rocky citadel rises to nearly 200 feet above the city, I suspect that it may have had some help.
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We owe Jacques Ibert’s well-known suite Escales to a happy series of circumstances.
The young Frenchman had just finished his studies at the Paris Conservatoire when World War I broke out, prompting him to join the navy. Subsequently, he sat for the scholarship known as the Prix de Rome and proceeded to win a grand prize on his first attempt—an almost unheard-of success. Within a short time, Ibert and his bride, Rose-Marie (Rosette) Veber, had embarked on their honeymoon, visiting Spain, Sicily, and Tunisia. Only then did they reach the Villa Medici in Rome, where the scholarship would allow the couple to live for several years.
Prix winners were expected to submit examples of new works to the administrators of the award, and Ibert submitted Escales as one of his.
Was the piece, which remains Ibert’s most famous composition, the fruit of his experiences in the navy? No. As he later wrote, he often regretted that his “occasional sea-sailings during the war” allowed him to experience nothing more than the quays of Toulon and the “foggy shores of the Belgian beaches.” Instead, the piece derived from his honeymoon cruise with Rose-Marie, and it displays an aural sheen reflecting what were surely happy times.
Escales actually reverses the order in which the pair visited the locales in question. Its first movement, Rome—Palerme, evokes the alluring spell of the Italian capital and the Sicilian port, beginning with a sinuous melody for oboe before moving on to a livelier section recalling the ecstatic Italian folk-dance known as the tarantella.
The piece’s second movement, Tunis—Nefta, features an oboe solo reproducing a tune Ibert heard being played in the Tunisian oasis of Nefta. As he later wrote, “It helped me to recreate in music the atmosphere and the memory of the landscape and scenery where I spent several weeks.”
Ibert named his lively conclusion Valencia, a reference to the Spanish port. It recalls Emmanuel Chabrier’s España (1883) and Claude Debussy’s Ibéria (1905-08), as well as the music of Ibert’s Spanish cousin, the great composer Manuel de Falla, who had encouraged his French relative to pursue a career as a composer and whom Ibert and his bride visited on their honeymoon.
The brief sections of Escales are often referred to as the musical equivalents of picture postcards—small, picturesque images meant suggest an equally (and often unrealistically) picturesque reality. I think of them instead as travel posters, so I’ve illustrated today’s post with colorful examples representing the locations involved. And when you’ve finished reading, you can enjoy a live performance of Escales featuring Alain Altinoglu and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony on YouTube here.
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I read Barry Unsworth’s 1980 novel Pascali’s Island for the first time years ago, but now that I’ve reread it, I’m more impressed than ever. It’s as close to perfect as any piece of writing I’ve ever encountered.
Published in the United States as The Idol Hunter, the novel opens quietly in the form of a report from a Turkish agent and informer, Basil Pascali. He lives on an island in the North Aegean Sea near the coast of Asia Minor, and has been filing weekly reports on the island’s life for twenty years, but he’s never received a reply. He’s paid regularly for his work, but as the amount has never increased, he lives in a single room in near-poverty. He’s hopelessly in love with a foreign painter, Lydia Neuman, but she feels nothing more than friendship for him.
The year is 1908, and while the island’s population is predominantly Greek, they’re ostensibly subjects of the dying Ottoman Empire and its sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Unrest is rampant, however, and there are frequent episodes of insurgency in the hills. The island is ripe for revolt, and, as an agent of the hated Turks, Pascali is acutely aware of the danger he lives in: “It may be days or weeks but I am as good as dead.”
It’s at this time that another of the novel’s main characters appears on a boat from the Turkish port of Smyrna (Izmir). He’s Anthony Bowles, an English traveler “in fawn-coloured suit and paler hat” who registers at the Hotel Metropole. Innately and deviously curious, Pascali sneaks Bowles’ room key from the front desk while Bowles is eating in the dining room, searches his room, and finds the small marble head of a woman and … a revolver.
As Pascali has hoped, Bowles subsequently hires him as an interpreter, in this case to help him negotiate a short lease for a tract of coastal land owned by the Commandant of the Ottoman garrison, Mahmoud Pasha. As an archaeologist, Bowles explains, he’s interested in the islands that claim to have been the final resting place of the Virgin Mary, and although—“of course”—he has no intention of removing any artifacts he might find, he “wouldn’t be happy if everything wasn’t quite legal and above-board.”
As the novel progresses, we become aware of an intricate pattern of duplicity involving all of the novel’s characters. Bowles is clearly planning a ruse, and, in time, we realize that Lydia is involved in some sort of plot, as is Mahmoud Pasha himself. Pascali conceives one of his own, and, in a short period of time, the deceptions topple into disaster.
Unsworth traveled and lectured in Turkey and Greece during the 1960s, and his knowledge of their frequently conflicting cultures informs Pascali’s Island. The novel was nominated for the Booker McConnell Prize and, in 1988, filmed by James Dearden with a trio of brilliant actors—Ben Kingsley as Pascali, Charles Dance as Bowles, and Helen Mirren as Neuman. Shot on the Greek islands of Symi and Rhodes, it’s just as good as the novel—and that’s a rare accomplishment.
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An image shared on Facebook the other day caught my attention, but not only because of its subject, which was otherwise intriguing enough.
The work is the oil you see at the top of today’s post. It’s by an artist I’d never heard of, George de Forest Brush, who, it turns out, was born in Tennessee in 1855. Like so many American artists of that period, he studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but subsequently became fascinated with the lives of Native Americans. Brush was also interested in what we know now as camouflage, and, with friend and fellow painter Abott H. Thayer, actually patented a method of painting ships in order to render them less visible.
The painting in question is Orpheus, which dates from 1890 and which shows the mythological Greek musician and poet playing music on his lyre for several hares. Orpheus was noted for his exceptional musical abilities, and so the subject was a natural one. And yet the painting somehow manages to transcend its ostensible subject.
The primary reason Brush’s painting caught my attention, however, was its resemblance to another painting by a better-known American artist, Elihu Vedder, who had been born a generation earlier, in 1836. Like Brush, Vedder studied art in Paris, but went on to spend most of his adult years in Europe.
Vedder is generally described as a symbolist painter, one of a number of artists who employed imagistic metaphors as a means of embracing truth by transcending “mere” surface reality. The artists who worked in this manner have largely faded from sight, but their works can still be arresting, even (or perhaps especially) when the absolute truths they were espousing were less than clear. Vedder’s works in particular are worth our attention, and I hope to write more about him some day.
In any case, Vedder’s painting—The Young Marsyas Charming the Hares—strikes me as the more accomplished of the two works. It dates from 1878, twelve years before Brush painted Orpheus, and is livelier in terms of color and composition. Plus it includes more hares …
If, like me, you haven’t heard of Marsyas before, he was a satyr who, according to legend, recovered a flute that Athena had created but discarded. The goddess is said to have disliked having to puff out her cheeks to play the instrument, creating an appearance which she apparently believed was unbecoming. Marsyas is credited with then creating music for the abandoned flute. He came to a bad end when he challenged the god Apollo to a contest, but Vedder’s painting ignores the larger tale and simply captures the satyr playing his instrument, to the delight of the hares who’ve gathered around him.
People who raise rabbits (hares’ close relatives) know that they respond positively to soft, gentle music; in other words, they’re almost mesmerized or charmed by it. Were Brush and Vedder aware of the fact? I wonder.
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Novelist, playwright, short story writer, memoirist—W. Somerset Maugham (whom you see below in a 1927 portrait) was one of the most famous and highly paid authors of his time. And although he enjoyed traveling, his visit to the islands of the Pacific during World War I may strike us as oddly timed.
However, as Maugham explained in a letter to a friend, the trip “was forced upon [him] accidentally by the fact that during the war [he] was employed in the Intelligence department, and so visited parts of the world which otherwise [he] might not have summoned up sufficient resolution to go to.” Maugham’s orders dealt in particular with the islands of Samoa, which had been devastated by volcanic eruptions and racked by civil wars—conflicts that had been exacerbated by the intervention of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Germany and the United States had eventually divided control of the islands, but with the opening stages of World War I, troops from the British Dominion of New Zealand had occupied the German islands. Maugham was expected to evaluate the uneasy situation.
Spurred by his long-standing interest in French painter Paul Gauguin (whom you see below in a self-portrait from 1889), Maugham went on to visit Tahiti in February 1917, staying at the Tiare Hotel in the capital city of Papeete and managing to find a few people who had known the artist, including Gauguin’s friend Louvaina Chapman. In turn, Chapman introduced Maugham to a female chieftain in a settlement near where Gauguin had lived. As a result, the writer learned that, during his ultimately fatal struggle with syphilis, Gauguin had been cared for by a farmer, and, in gratitude, had painted images on the panels of several of the farmer’s glass doors. One of the doors remained in passably good shape, and Maugham promptly paid 200 francs (twice what the farmer asked), took the door off its hinges, and carried it to his car.
In time, Maugham was able to display the door, dubbed Tahitienne debout, or Tahitian Standing, in his Villa Mauresque near Cap Ferrat on the Riviera. While palpably Gauguin’s work, it’s not among his best. The same is true of Maugham’s 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence, whose protagonist Charles Strickland was inspired by Gauguin. It may be Maugham’s most famous work, but while Strickland’s appalling selfishness is a match for Gauguin’s own, Maugham seems to have no insight into the painter’s great talent. The stories he collected in Ashenden; or, The British Agent(1927), which were inspired by Maugham’s work in the intelligence service, are better, while The Narrow Corner (1932) and The Razor’s Edge (1944) show him at his very best.
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July 18 is the anniversary of the death of Portuguese composer and conductor Joly Braga Santos, who died on this day in 1988 in Lisbon, the city of his birth. He was the best symphonist Portugal has ever produced, but it’s to British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who urged his Portuguese friend to study folk music, that we may owe what seems to be his most popular work, his Symphonic Variations on a Popular Song from the Alentejo. The piece dates from 1951, and reworks the tune of a folksong that Braga Santos heard in Portugal’s south-central province. Maggie and I were lucky enough to visit the Alentejo in 2017, and have fond memories of its plains, gentle hills, and broad, overarching skies.
Braga Santos (below) was visiting his mentor, Luís de Freitas Branco, who spent many of his summers in the province at his house near Reguengos de Monsaraz southeast of Évora. Freitas Branco himself had written two suites celebrating the Alentejo, the first in 1919 and the second in 1927. Having listened to them recently, I have to admit that they’re pleasant and well-done but not arresting. I may need to give them another chance.
However, Braga Santo’s Variations are among the most beguiling pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Unlike the older composer’s suites, they flow seamlessly together, avoiding the start/stop quality that sets of variations often involve. Braga Santos found the folksongs from the province “of mesmerizing originality and grandeur”—qualities that he reproduced in his Variations. Today, therefore, I urge you to sit back and let them roll over you.
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The photograph of Reguengos de Monsarazat the top of today’s post is by Vitor Oliveira and is reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. The YouTube recordings I’ve linked to are performances by the Ireland RTE National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Portuguese conductor Álvaro Cassuto.
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