First of the Few and the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue by William Walton

"The First of the Few" was a British wartime film from 1942 about the creation of the Spitfire aircraft and the superhuman production efforts led by its designer R. J. Michell. William Walton wrote the score for the movie and later extracted the "Spitfire Prelude and Fugue" from the cues:



The prelude was developed from the music for the opening credits of the film. Broadly stated fanfares and a lyrical escalation prepare a march that begins at [0:45]. The concert version extends the march by redeveloping the fanfare music as a transition, and it does not have the fade away used in the film.

The fugue appears near the end of the movie where it is used as a classic device for intensification. At [1:26:00] everyone is looking for Mitchell but even his wife is unsure of his whereabouts. He has gone to see a doctor [1:26:16] and discovers that his health has been compromised. "I'm afraid your a rather sick man, Mr. Mitchell." says his doctor. Mitchell learns that if he rests he will survive, but if he continues to work he will live only another 6 or 8 months.

[1:27:49] Mitchell resurfaces at work. He is told that "the plane needs to be ready in 12 months: that's all the time we can give you."

"It will be ready in 8 months," he says over the fugue theme, "because that is all the time I can give to you."

The fugue spins in six-bar phrases and gathers momentum. There is a brief sequential episode [1:28:52] and then the subject returns in an intensification where scenes from the factory are overlaid on images of Mitchell's face.

A surprising feature of the concert-version fugue is a lyrical centerpiece for solo violin. This music was woven in from a musical cue in a powerful central scene that appears in the midst of the struggles to complete the spitfire in the film.

Mitchell enters a darkened room [1:29:51], and opens a bay window. The violin interlude voices his sacrifices. He looks out the window and listens to the birds. His wife comes in the room and the music becomes suspended in their conversation.

They talk, gradually, about his imminent death, and Mitchell decides to rest. But he glances down [1:33:58] at a newspaper headline: "German Bombers Wipe Out Spanish Town." The lyrical music begins again, and he moves forward, working at full speed.

The fugue is reprised [1:34:36]. Elements of the march played during the opening credits are fused into the fugue, until the march and fugue are combined in counterpoint. The plane is pushed onto the runway.

The music was shaped carefully by ideas from the film and it is wonderful to hear how, when heard as an independent concert piece, the music whispers of its origins.

Spirits of the Dead City; Elizabeth Hurley in Aria 1987

“Glück, das mir verblieb” is one of the great love songs of the operatic literature but it is not expressed as love between the two characters who sing it. Paul loves Maria his wife who has died, not Marietta, who is singing, in spite of a strong resemblance to his wife. Marietta does not love Paul, she is self-absorbed; just beginning to bloom.

How can we blame Bruce Beresford, who wrote and directed a segment based on this music for the film “Aria” in 1987, for wanting to express a more direct kind of love? The movie is a collage of ten operatic arias interpreted by ten different directors who were free to break from any traditional associations, or even break from any similarity to plots from the operas themselves.

He was fortunate to have the screen debut of Elizabeth Hurley who undresses during the song. Peter Birch plays her counterpart. It is tough to see the traditional names “Paul” and “Marietta” assigned to them in the credits, their portrayal has nothing to do with either of these operatic characters.

Hurley seemed to be Marietta in life more than in this film. Her website says that she entered a ballet boarding school at age twelve. Folks remember that she was the one to whom Hugh Grant was romantically attached when he was charged with soliciting the services of a female prostitute in 1995.

I wish Beresford chose not to have the actors lip-sync. They make simple German seem like Vulcan language. But more than the mismatched language correspondences, the lack of musical breathing is an obstacle.

Still, once one gets past these flaws, the juxtaposition of the lovers with breathtaking images of Bruges develops connection between the lovers and the city in a way that is impossible in a staging:

Glück, das mir verblieb, (Joy, sent from above,)
rück zu mir, mein treues Lieb. (Hold me close, my true love.)
Abend sinkt im Hag (Darkness ends the day)
bist mir Licht und Tag. (You will light my way.)
Bange pochet Herz an Herz (Fear is throbbing in our hearts)
Hoffnung schwingt sich himmelwärts. (Hope itself soars heavenward.)

Interlude [1:23]:
[Paul:]
Wie wahr, ein traurig Lied. (How true, a sad song.)

[Marietta:]
Das Lied vom treuen Lieb, (The song of a true beloved,)
das sterben muss. (who must die soon.)

[Marietta:]
Welche Mühen Sie? (What troubles You?)

[Paul:]
Ich kenne das Lied. (I know the song.)
Ich hört es oft in jungen, (I heard it often in younger,)
in schöneren Tagen. (in better days.)

At [2:37] Beresford cuts away to images of bridges and reflections. Slowly undulating water, empty squares, white birds. Bruges: city of melancholy charms.

[Paul:]
Es hat noch eine Strophe-- (It has yet another verse--)
weiß ich sie noch? (Do I know it still?)

Second Stanza [3:07]:

[Paul:]
Naht auch Sorge trüb, (Joyful days may flee,)
rück zu mir, mein treues Lieb. (Hold me close, my faithful love.)

[Paul and Marietta:]
Neig dein blaß Gesicht (Time will pass away)
Sterben trennt uns nicht. (But true love will stay.)
Mußt du einmal von mir gehn, (Though we have to part in pain,)
glaub, es gibt ein Aufersteh’n. (Believe, there is an afterlife.)

Aufersteh'n is a powerful word. It is the first word in the poem by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock that was used by Mahler for the finale of his second symphony. It is often translated as “resurrection;” it need not be.

As the word "Aufersteh'n" fades so do the characters themselves [4:13].

Statues and quietly falling snow--white as birds--cadence the images from The Dead City. Beresford has captured the resonance of present and past in Bruges.

"Joy, sent from above;" a song of complicated love from Die Tote Stadt

"Glück, das mir verblieb" (joy, sent from above) is a song of complex and broken love in the opera "Die Tote Stadt" (The Dead City) by Erich Korngold (1897-1957).

The central character, Paul, has chosen to identify with the city of Bruges; an old city perched on the northern tip of Belgium; cold and desolate. Bruges has an affluent past but only ghosts seem to remain: bridges, statues, monuments and houses.

These structures are more beautiful, more ornate, more carefully crafted than anything practical requires. They speak of finding and expressing poetry in life and leaving that poetry behind, surrendered but never abandoned.

Maria, who was Paul’s wife, lit the way for him. He cannot reconcile her death. He grieves by holding her memory and associating her with the city itself. Why? This seems unhealthy. Release her and move on. This is the advice that Paul gets from his friend Frank. Frank is sensible.

Paul has transformed Maria’s death into the poetry of his own life. Paul believes his love with Maria is eternal. He does not articulate how this whole thing will work. That is why I like him. His conviction does not have the confidence of religion. Is he delusional? Yes and no.

Every day he walks the streets of Bruges and sees Maria metaphorically in the visual beauty left virtually abandoned all around him. One day Paul believes that Maria has returned to him. He sees her during one of his walks. Is he delusional? Yes and no.

A young dancer has randomly found her way to Bruges. She is wearing clothes that look like Maria’s and she is breathtakingly beautiful. She is young. She spins her life from instant fascination. No one can resist her. Men will give her anything. Anything is possible.

Did they speak during Paul’s walk? How is it that she shows up at his house? Is it just coincidence?

In "Die Tote Stadt" we aren’t given answers. But she takes Maria’s scarf from Paul and wears it playfully, admiring how it looks in the mirror. She can incorporate elements and motives from Maria’s life because her own life is only beginning to be composed.

Paul calls her Maria. “No,” she corrects, “I am Marietta.” Paul will not relent. In a portrait, Maria plays the lute. Paul hands Marietta the lute. “Are you,” she asks, “one of those old master painters?” This part of Paul’s life is not a symbol in her own life but is a motive from his.

Marietta doesn’t play the lute but does offer to sing a song. The song is “Glück, das mir verblieb.” She calls it a sad song and says she doesn’t know why she likes it because she is not often a sad person and doesn’t enjoy being sad. She is just a kid, in the transition before life becomes shaped by loss and pain and unspeakable joys.

The music is made from practically nothing:



In this production there is a huge Edwardian upright against the wall of the room where Marietta and Paul interact. When Angela Denoke as Marietta offers to sing this sad song, a young boy enters, pauses with the slightest of bows, then sits down with his back to the camera as an actor accompanist. Denoke shuffles the pages of the sheetmusic in her hands and holds them in front of her as she sings the first verse.

To Marietta this is a sad and lovely song. To Paul it is, and was, his life.

Between verses the song is magically suspended, as songs are not supposed to be--it is taken out of time. It is delayed while Paul reflects on the situation [1:31].

[Paul:]
Wie wahr, ein traurig Lied. (How true, a sad song.)

[Marietta:]
Das Lied vom treuen Lieb, (The song of a true beloved,)
das sterben muss. (who must die soon.)

[Marietta:]
Welche Mühen Sie? (What troubles You?)

[Paul:]
Ich kenne das Lied. (I know the song.)
Ich hört es oft in jungen, (I heard it often in younger,)
in schöneren Tagen. (in better days.)

Es hat noch eine Strophe-- (It has yet another verse--)
weiß ich sie noch? (Do I know it still?)

This is opera at its best—-the magnification of emotion outside of time.

While the great tenor Torsten Kerl begins the second verse, Marietta is frantically looking for the verse in her music and when she finds it joins him for the final four lines.

“Glück, das mir verblieb” is one of the great love songs of the operatic literature. How can one resist the idea that it is not expressed as love between two characters? Paul loves Maria, not Marietta for all her eroticism. Marietta does not love Paul, she is self-absorbed; just beginning to bloom.

Tippett Sonata for Four Horns; in October Light by John Gardner

Michael Tippett (1905-1998) wrote his Sonata for Four Horns in 1955 for the Dennis Brain Quartet. The Sonata was recorded by the Barry Tuckwell Horn Quartet on an infamous recording released by ARGO where it was paired with Tippett's second symphony.

On the cover of that album, taken by Axel Poignant (1906-1986), Tippett is sitting on a couch looking over at us. He is ready to either scowl or laugh. It is an expression familiar from his music.

Near the end of John Gardner's novel "October Light," written in 1976, a peripheral character named Terence Parks is listening to this recording of the Tippett Sonata. It is a section called "Terence on Pure and Subservient Art:"

"Terence Parks sat in the corner chair in the green living room of his parents’ house, . . . listening to the Tippett Sonata for Four Horns and trying to think, or rather struggling with a chaos of old and new feelings, in a sense old and new ideas. [...]."

"Nothing in his father’s large record collection was more familiar to Terence than the Tippett Sonata: happy music, he’d always thought; but tonight it had dark implications he’d never before noticed. Not that the music wasn’t happy even now—in general, at least—and not that he wasn’t himself feeling something like happiness, or at any rate feeling stirred up, uplifted by excitement—though at the same time fearful. Even talking with Margie last night he hadn’t worked out the exact way to say it, but he was onto something. He had made, or perhaps was on the verge of making, a discovery. It had to do, it seemed to him now, with walking in the rain with Margie Phelps, and with the mad old man’s shotgun, and with music. [...]

"He closed his eyes, listening to the Tippett and summoning up her image, a light, still core in a swirl of change, chaos and dissonance, leaping darkness." [...]

"Terence had listened to the Tippett often. In the beginning he couldn’t have said why except, of course, that it was for horns, and he was a hornist. It was not 'thrilling' or in the usual sense 'beautiful' or any of the things that make particular pieces 'universally appealing,' as his teacher at school would say [...] It was a piece to daydream by—-or to remember by, as he was remembering now (but with unusual intensity), his consciousness closed like a fist around last night. And also the music had been for him a kind of puzzle, one he was reworking now, this moment.

"When he had first begun to listen to it, once having gotten past his interest in the tone, the hurry of sixteenth notes, he had asked himself what it was that the music reminded him of—-the first movement, for instance:


(Live performance by the Cambridge University Horn Quartet)

with its medieval opening and surprisingly quick flight from any trace of the medieval, a hustle-bustle of sweetly dissonant liquid sounds, sometimes such a flurry that you’d swear there were dozens of horns, not just four-—and he’d tried various ideas: the idea that the image was of threatening apes, harmless ones, small ones, chittering and flapping unbelligerent arms in a brightly lit jungle; the idea that the picture was of children at the beach in sped-up motion. [...]

"Then it had come to him as a startling revelation—-though he couldn’t explain even to his horn teacher Andre Speyer why it was that he found the discovery startling—-that the music meant nothing at all but what it was: panting, puffing, comically hurrying French horns.

"That had been, ever since—until tonight—-what he saw when he closed his eyes and listened: horns, sometimes horn players, but mainly horn sounds, the very nature of horn sounds, puffing, hurrying, getting in each other’s way yet in wonderful agreement finally, as if by accident. Sometimes, listening, he would smile, and his father would say quizzically, “What’s with you?” It was the same when he listened to the other movements: What he saw was French horns, that is, the music. The moods changed, things happened, but only to French horns, French horn sounds.



There was a four-note theme in the second movement [1:00] that sounded like “Oh When the Saints,” a theme that shifted from key to key, sung with great confidence by a solo horn, answered by a kind of scornful gibberish from the second, third, and fourth, as if the first horn’s opinion was ridiculous and they knew what they knew.

"Or the slow movement: As if they’d finally stopped and thought it out, the horns played together, a three-note broken chord several times repeated, and then the first horn taking off as if at the suggestion of the broken chord and flying like a gull—except not like a gull, nothing like that, flying like only a solo French horn. Now the flying solo became the others’ suggestion and the chord began to undulate, and all four horns together were saying something, almost words, first a mournful sound like Maybe and then later a desperate Oh yes I think so, except to give it words was to change it utterly: it was exactly what it was, as clear as day—or a moonlit lake where strange creatures lurk—-and nothing could describe it but itself. It wasn’t sad, the slow movement; only troubled, hesitant, exactly as he often felt himself.

"Then came—-and he would sometimes laugh aloud—-the final, fast movement. Though the slow movement’s question had never quite been answered, all the threat was still there, the fast movement started with absurd self-confidence, with some huffings and puffings, and then the first horn set off with delightful bravado, like a fat man on skates who hadn’t skated in years (but not like a fat man on skates, like nothing but itself), Woo-woo-woo-woops! and the spectator horns laughed tiggledy-tiggledy-tiggledy!, or that was vaguely the idea—every slightly wrong chord, every swoop, every hand-stop changed everything completely. [...] It was impossible to say what, precisely, he meant.

"Terence’s stomach was suddenly all butterflies, as if something terrible were about to happen, some great evil, some monster in the music, about to emerge. Whiffle-whiffle-whiffle! went the second, third, and fourth, humorous but threatening, perceptibly malevolent, the tip of a dangerous iceberg. The first horn sailed over them, oblivious as a child or fool, in an entirely wrong key.

"Last night Terence had explained his theory, as he’d had it worked out then, to Margie Phelps, realizing as he talked that he was talking about her—-the scent of her, the way her hands moved, the way she walked just a little pigeon-toed (he wouldn’t have her walk any other way), unique as a snowflake and, in Terence’s eyes, infinitely more beautiful. 'I mean, everything should be what it is,' he’d said, 'you know? Absolutely free.'

"With a solemn expression she’d looked up at his face—-she’d been watching the ground as he told her all this, not speaking except now and then to ask a question: 'How do you think of things like that?' she’d said. 'I could think for a million years and never come up with it!' Only now, in retrospect, was he fully aware of the darkness all around them and swirling up within them, two innocents chattering, while the old man schemed murder and Aunt Estelle, in the car, sat trembling.

"Margie’s words, her perfectly serious expression, had transformed him, given him value and potential. So it had seemed to him and seemed to him now. She had seen him, seen his seeing of the music, and he had therefore seen himself.

"Something stirred in the music, darting from dark place to dark place. His eyes snapped open. Had he slept for an instant? For an instant at most; yet he seemed to have dreamed of the suicide—-the story his aunt had told him years ago of the young man hanging calm as stone in his attic, in the house below him, Mozart. In the dream—or perhaps inside Tippett’s music—-Terence had stared at the faceless, still figure and had realized someone was in terrible danger, drifting out of key, out of orbit toward nothingness, toward emptiness and itself. Margie?, he wondered in brief panic. Ed Thomas? Aunt Estelle? For a split second he understood everything, life’s monstrosity and beauty. Then he was listening to the horns again.

"His father, on the couch, opened the center-page foldout and looked at it without interest, then raised his eyes and looked at Terence. 'What’s the matter?' he said, grinning.

" 'Nothing,' Terence said, and blushed."