O fortuna, velut luna, statu variabilis

O fortuna, velut luna, statu variabilis...

'O Fortune, like the moon, ever changing' - these are the opening words of the mighty chorus which starts (and finishes) Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. 'Ever changing' expresses the meaning but is maybe a bit loose. Strictly the Latin statu variabilis means 'variable as to state', where variabilis refers back to luna, the moon, and statu is what those who ever suffered Kennedy's Latin Primer at school will recognise instantly as a Dative of Advantage. At least, all those who didn't spend their time defacing the cover of possibly the most hated book since William Caxton so that it read 'Kennedy's Eating Primer'.

(Holmes' Comprehensive Arithmetic, a Scottish instrument of torture banned at much the same time as the tawse, would run it a close second. Decimalisation in 1969 dealt HCA a kindly mortal blow: no more compound interest in halfpennies and farthings or long division of furlongs and chains to instil character into the Scottish soul.)

At the moment I'm on a composition jag, setting as choral music some poems of a little-known French poet called Jules Laforgue. (I've written music on and off all my life, and this is the last bracketed observation in this post.) Laforgue is a sort of late Romantic symbolist, a beat poet of his day. A snappy dresser, as you can see from the portrait below. He died very young after an extraordinary but short career partly as Reader to the Empress of Germany, Kaiser Bill's paternal grandmother. He married a girl called Lea Lee in Kensington. If she was Chinese it's not recorded. Both Jules and Lea died within a year of their marriage.

The line I'm struggling to make singable just now comes from a work called L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon. It reads:

O Diane, à la chlamyde très dorique

'O Diane' is no problem, an address to Diana or Artemis, the goddess associated with hunting and the moon. But à la chlamyde? It has to mean 'with chlamydia', a really nasty sexually transmitted condition where the p - but I won't go into details. How can the goddess of the moon possibly be saddled with this? And très dorique, very Doric?

Neither Wikipedia nor Davepedia are much help. Dorique probably means plain, unadorned, artlessly simple, but I'm not certain. This makes even greater nonsense of chlamyde. How can people sing about artlessly simple Olympian venereal conditions with smirk-free conviction?

It turns out, after consulting several works including Abbott and Mansfield, the classical Greek equivalent of Kennedy, that chlamyde is the French version of the Greek chlamys. Chlamys means a short cloak or mantle, of the sort you see Artemis wearing, and not much else, in statues or her. The chlamys is heavily pleated and closely gathered or ruched, not to say puckered, at the collar. I begin to see a connection . . . but how to express it in music is beyond me. I wonder what Lea Lee thought about it all.

Cousins

Several (well, two) much esteemed fellow bloggers have been trying to trace their ancestry. Perhaps I can help them.

For many years, in fact from about 1945, this painting hung at home, neglected, smoke-stained and finally slightly damaged by fire. Through the layers of dirt and blackened varnish it appeared to be very old, maybe 17th century. The style and the Classical subject suggested Poussin or Claude Lorraine. My mother couldn't remember where she had got it from. It showed Europa, she said, being carried across the Hellespont from Asia Minor on the back of a bull. There were maidens on the shore welcoming her. This was how the European people were founded.

Recently I took it in hand and brought it from Scotland to France to have it cleaned by Aude Ficini, the demure, beautiful and very professional picture restorer in Montpellier.

Before entrusting it to her I took it out of its frame and was mortified to find that it appeared to have been painted on hardboard. H'm. I looked closely with a magnifying glass and found traces of frayed canvas overlapping the backing. Apparently it had been originally painted on canvas, and at some time someone had cut it away from a frame and had glued it on to a sheet of hardboard. Big relief, even though this suggested that at some time it might have been stolen.

Mademoiselle Ficini was very interested. She raised an eyebrow over the hardboard, but she proved the painting's antiquity in an interesting way: she closed the shutters and put all the lights out and passed an ultra-violet light over the painting, saying that anything that appeared black was relatively recent, say post-1850. Only the garland woven between the bull's horns came out black; some later hand had added it. She suggested 1630 as a possible date, and I was enormously gratified. 1630! Why, Shakespeare was hardly cold in his grave, Charles I was on a collision course with Parliament, Europe was in the grip of the Thirty Years' War...

It took Mlle Ficini two months to transform it into a scene of light and clarity. What had appeared to be a big black smudge on the right turned out to be a capacious cave. Far from making gestures of welcome, the shore maidens were frantically urging the bull and Europa to turn back. One of them points to the cave, showing where the bull will deposit Europa, reveal himself transformed into Zeus or Jupiter and slake his wicked troglodytic lust on her.

But that bull looks all wrong, as though the artist couldn't do bulls. He's so placid, so playful, even. He has a suggestion of Moomin about him. You can't imagine Moomin being done for rape, even if the result is the founder of a great continental race. I wondered if the original painter had taken his information from the commonest contemporary account of the legend, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and there it was, on p.73 of my Penguin edition: 'There was no menace in the set of his head or in his eyes; he looked completely placid. Agenor's daughter [i.e. Europa] was filled with admiration for one so handsome and so friendly...'

So there you are, Vicus and Dave. I suppose that makes you cousins.

Good morning, Croatia

When I was about 15 someone gave me a cravat, a thing of great loveliness, rich in swirled Paisley arabesques in custard yellow and strawberry jam red. I adored it and wore it on every possible occasion, at one time getting into trouble for attempting to subvert the school uniform. School uniform - it pains me to type this ghastly admission - included a straw boater and a dashing green waistcoat with brass buttons, if you were a member of a select society called the Zetountes, which is Greek for 'seekers'. To my mind all that it needed to proclaim the ultra-fashionable Zetounte*-about-town was a brilliant yellow cravat. Others thought differently.

In any case not long afterwards the cravat became associated with those of a certain sexual orientation and my cravat never left its drawer. "Why don't you wear your cravat any more?" my mother asked once. "It suits you so well. I rely on you to wear it on Sunday, please. Denby Williamson is coming. He is just the man to appreciate it."

Denby Williamson, a man of perfumed middle age, was gay. His father had been curator or keeper of the last Tsar's Fabergé collection. Denby Williamson had inherited several Fabergé pieces, on which my mother had cast envious eyes. But my cravat stayed in its drawer.

Living in France many years later I rediscovered it. Other significances, never current in France, had long since died out, I imagined. I dared it once more, and found my earlier fashion fire rekindled. Passing a tailors and outfitters in Essex during a recent visit to the UK I went in, on the offchance that they might have some dusty tissue-wrapped relics in some distant stock-room. I was surprised to find several in prominent display. Could it be that they're now back in fashion? Could they still have those old connotations?

Well, who would care in France? I came out the richer by three gorgeous silken beauties, and the poorer by - but I'm ashamed to tell you. I'm now obsessed with wearing cravats, especially in winter, tucked confortably into open-necked polo shirts.

Denby Williamson died twenty years and more ago. No Fabergé came our way.

* I KNOW the singular of 'Zetountes' should be 'Zetous'. And the word 'cravat' comes from Hrvatska, which is what the Croats call their country.

In my end is my beginning, for the time being, anyway

I can't stay away any longer.

Better to walk alongside the great English bloggers, Vicus Scurra, Dave, ur-Patroclus, Z, Rog, Belle de Jour etc. than creep about in the shadow of their comment threads. So Lydian Airs breathes again.

(I expect I subconsciously kept my options open with the photo I doctored slightly when I packed up last July. It wasn't a symbolic sunset at all. It was a winter dawn over the western Mediterranean, taken from a bedroom balcony somewhere that wouldn't be a secret any more if I said where it was.)

Speaking of bedrooms, while heading for Scotland a few days ago with the ever-stunning J. we pitched up at nightfall at The Collingwood Arms in Cornhill on Tweed, right on the Border. We'd known this hotel from years back, when it was comfortably scruffy but none too warm in winter. It's had a terrific makeover since, taking much of its inspiration from Cuthbert Collingwood, Nelson's vice-admiral at Trafalgar, who had family connections in north Northumberland.

The bedrooms are named after the men-of-war in Collingwood's Trafalgar division. You may well wonder what goes on in bedrooms with REVENGE or COLOSSUS painted on the door. As for us, they put us in POLYPHEMUS, the supposedly one-eyed giant out of Homer's Odyssey. The Greek name means 'chatterbox'. Very suitable for a returning blogger

And 'undreds of beautiful women lay stretched out on the ground

Having now returned from foreign parts, I have much pleasure in dedicating this post to my friend Dave, in the hope that the link below will give him some innocent, seemly and much-deserved enjoyment.

http://www.trilulilu.ro/alonewolf/bd7734ac84d023?video_google_com=

(Full screen, volume up.)

Oh, all right, you too, Rog.

And Mr T-S.

And everyone else.

Creation of the World

Rich and heady times, here in this little corner of the Languedoc. My 8-strong multi-national chamber choir, called Les Jeudistes because we rehearse on Thursday evenings, is building up for performance of its major project this year. We're lucky enough to have an extraordinary venue for singing: Le Prieuré de St Julien, shown above in its setting of vineyards and cypress trees. This is - or was - a jewel of Romanesque architecture, perfectly proportioned, finely built in dressed ashlar with dark red sandstone trimmings, dating from c.880 AD, roughly the time of King Alfred in England. It must have cost the earth, then. Ecclesiastical vandals arrived in about 1680, adding the stone tower and belfry in coarse masonry and widening the nave, throwing the original apse and altar off centre and ruining the proportions. But they carved into the new masonry a cockleshell, signifying a halt on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella, and they left an acoustic perfect for small choirs.

It's a big moment for me, not only as Les Jeudistes' conductor but as a composer as well. We're performing a work I've called Sounds and Sweet Airs, a suite of twelve settings of Shakespeare songs for choir and piano. Shakespeare buffs may recognise the title as something Caliban says in The Tempest. Where we would say première for a first performance, the French say création, and, as these songs haven't been performed anywhere else in their entirety, the posters advertising the concert announce création mondiale, world première. H'm. I hope it's not world dernière as well. Here we are in a photo taken 2 years ago, performing Vivaldi's Gloria with a small orchestra.

The twelve songs are:

1. Orpheus with his lute (Henry VIII)
2. Fie on lustful fantasy! (Merry Wives of Windsor)
3. Tell me, where is fancy bred? (The Merchant of Venice)
4. Sigh no more, ladies (Much Ado About Nothing)
5. O mistress mine, where are you roaming? (Twelfth Night)
6. Blow, blow, thou winter wind (As You Like It)
7. Come away, come away, death (Twelfth Night)
8. Full fathom five thy father lies (The Tempest)
9. Jog on, jog on the footpath way (The Winter's Tale)
10. Fear no more the heat o' the sun (Cymbeline)
11. When that I was and a little tiny boy (Twelfth Night)
12. You spotted snakes with double tongue (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

Any reader finding him/herself near Le Prieuré de St Julien on Friday 19th June at 8.45pm is naturally more than welcome to drop in. It's free. When I've worked out how to do it I'll put these songs on line.

Here's the first page, Orpheus with his lute. I do have software which produces beautifully printed music, but those opening sextuplet arpeggio sweeps, like opening curtains, are so complicated on the computer keyboard that I find it's easier and quicker to write them by hand.

36 Steps to Vienna: 13 Slugs, Snails and Irish Girls (2)

Having left our bodily imprints in the furrows between rows of turnips, we picked our way as the sun was rising through the pink-flowered wood and rejoined the slip road. We glanced up and down: there seemed to be no fewer hitch-hikers than the evening before. Had they been there all night, vainly waving thumbs at headlights?

Where we emerged from the wood there two lumpish girls of about our age, tousled and grimy, wearing baggy khaki shorts and what looked like army boots with bobby-socks that would have been white a few days before. That I can only remember what encased their lower halves tells its own story. One had an Irish tricolour on her rucksack. We tried them in English, but they were so uncommunicative that it was hardly worth the effort of speaking to them in any language:

- Hi. Where are you heading for?
- Istanbul.
- How long have you been here?
- Since Sunday.
- What, day and night?
- Aye. Bugger off, the pair of you. The queue starts up there.

She may have said 'the pair of yez', but I don't remember. Nor can I remember any witty, acerb, telling response to this. As the long day passed, and as by midday we'd only moved two places down the queue, the desperation of the Karlsruhe trap began to bite with all its savage force. The Irish girls had probably been afraid that their chances of a lift, already slender, would be reduced even further if they were apparently accompanied by two boys. Nobody ever stopped for groups of four. Besides, girls always had an advantage, although those girls (still there, about a dozen places down) hadn't done much to promote their femininity. It wouldn't have been easy for them, of course, to present a roadside vision of loveliness and more if they were sleeping rough like us.

The traffic rolled past, mostly accelerating hard, largely ignoring the roadside ripple of waving thumbs. The queue system didn't really work. There might have been a slight advantage in being first in the queue, but the few drivers who stopped did so quite arbitrarily. Down at the start of the slip road a car deposited a kilted hitch-hiker, who swung his rucksack on to his back, strode across the road and waved his thumb at the first car to pass, which stopped for him. A bolt of monstrous anger, like an electric shock, flashed up the queue. Fists were waved, one- or two-fingered gestures made, imprecations shouted in many languages, and I daresay lifelong anti-Scots prejudices formed.

The afternoon passed, under a sweltering August sun. There was nothing there, just a sun-bleached grass verge, litter-strewn, a pervading hopelessness mingled with petrol and diesel fumes, dust and hot tarmac. No mirages of little roadside cafés with bright awnings and ice-cold beer shimmered in the distance. The romance of this very road and no other, of this very point outside Karlsruhe being the gateway to the fabled east, to Vienna, to Budapest, to Istanbul and beyond to Persian lands afar, to Shangri-La and distant Cathay soon vanished, chased headlong by thirst and dirt, noisome fumes and the sensed hostility of fellow hitch-hikers. Newcomers appeared and took sullen station beyond us. Some said 'Servus!' as they trudged past, a greeting I hadn't known before. Each approaching vehicle spawned an embryo of hope, aborted despair as it sped past. Our water was done, in part squandered trying to rinse slug-slime off my brow in the night. We exchanged some plums with some French neighbours for a half-fill of what they called George's gourd, his water bottle.

George and I spoke less and less. We had now been in this desolate spot for 24 hours. Gefängnisvogel was a false prophet, his religion of transcendental motation a snare for the simple-minded.

Evil, frustration-fuelled thoughts began to swirl up from the depths. Should we pack up and go home? Would I be better off on my own?