NOSPR / Ellis / Tarcholik - NOSPR

Siegfried arrives at Fafner the dragon’s cave and awaits the beast. Yet it is not the creature that occupies his thoughts as he rests beneath the linden tree. The rustling of leaves, the singing of birds, the gentle breeze – these are the subjects evoked in Forest Murmurs, and Wagner needs no words to paint what is, in effect, his own libretto entirely through music. It is a compositional vision quite distinct from that presented in Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), but the whole (Der Ring des Nibelungen) Ring of the Nibelung abounds in artistic contradictions.

This nature-centred conception found its successor in Ralph Vaughan Williams, a British composer who saw music as both a philosophical pursuit and the authentic voice of indigenous islanders. The violin plays no mean part in his thinking – it was his ‘musical saviour’ from the tedium of childhood piano lessons. That deep affection for the instrument resonates throughout The Lark Ascending, a pastoral tone poem inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same title. The British rendition of musical contemplation reveals a surprising kinship with its German counterpart.

And what of France? Following the nineteenth-century Siegfried and the half-century younger Lark Ascending, Francis Poulenc’s suite from the ballet Les Animaux modèles (The Model Animals) may seem unexpectedly gentle, even though it was composed during the war years (1940–1943) and its protagonists include a lion, a bear, and death. The suite, a musically refined interpretation of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables, draws inspiration from the paintings by the Le Nain brothers.

Maria Wilczek-Krupa