Skip to main navigationSkip to main content
The University of Southampton
MusicPart of Humanities

A Dream of Germany: Musical Reflections of the Great War Event

Professional concert series
Time:
13:00 - 13:50
Date:
13 November 2017
Venue:
Turner Sims University of Southampton Highfield Campus Southampton SO17 1BJ

For more information regarding this event, please telephone Louise Johnson on 023 8059 8424 or email L.L.Johnson .

Event details

A concert as part of the University's "Great War: Unknown War" programme of study days, lectures and performances.

Mark Wilde, tenor
Joseph Spooner, cello
David Owen Norris, piano

Programme
Edward Elgar: Chantons Belges! (in English) (1857-1934)
Sigfrid Karg-Elert: War Songs (1877-1933)
F.S. Kelly: Song premieres (1881-1916)
Gabriel Fauré: Funeral March for cello and piano (1845-1924)
David Owen Norris: Think only this (b.1953)

Chantons Belges! was Elgar’s response to the invasion of Belgium that opened hostilities on the Western Front in 1914. Subtitled ‘Carillon’, in homage to the numerous belfries that were being destroyed in the bombardments, it sets words by the Belgian poet, patriot and refugee, Emile Cammaerts, who was the son-in-law of the very first Angel in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Marie Brema. The English translation is by Tita Brand, Cammaerts’s wife, who gave the first performance (in French) with Elgar conducting.

Sigfrid Karg-Elert had made piano transcriptions of Elgar’s First & Second Symphonies for Novellos. His transcription of the Symphonic Study Falstaff was never published. It bears the ominous postscript: Leipzig, on the 6th day of mobilization 1914. Karg-Elert signed up as a regimental musician, and composed strophic War Songs ‘in the folk style’. (David Owen Norris has recorded the transcriptions of Falstaff and of the First Symphony.) The two songs selected here show the poet Richard Dehmel following exactly the same trains of thought as Rupert Brooke.

Mark Wilde has found unpublished songs in the F.S. Kelly Archives in Australia. Kelly, born in Sydney, was an Olympic gold medallist in rowing (for Great Britain, in 1908), and a close friend of Rupert Brooke. Brooke (who died on the way to fight in the Dardanelles in 1915), the composer W. Denis Browne (killed in the Dardanelles in 1915) and Kelly (who survived Gallipoli but was killed in France) were members of a group of classically educated subalterns affectionately known by their men as ‘The Latin Club’. In the song ‘O Venus’, Kelly unaffectedly sets Horace in the original!

The slow movement of Fauré’s second Cello Sonata began life as a piece for military band composed for the dedication of the Inextinguishable Flame for the Unknown Warrior at the Arc de Triomphe.

David Owen Norris’s Think only this sets poems by John McCrae (In Flanders Fields), Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke: the title is taken from Brooke’s poem The Soldier. The cycle was first sung by Philip Langridge. Ian Partridge has broadcast the piece on Flanders Radio. It has been recorded both by Langridge and by Mark Wilde.

This programme has been drawn in part from the repertoire of the concert series A Dream of Germany, which our artists today performed in Oxford and London in 2014. The title is drawn from Henry Chorley, the music critic of The Athenaeum, who wrote in 1839 while visiting Leipzig: ‘Now I am indeed in the musical Germany of which I have so long dreamed.’

Free admission

For details of further events in the Great War: Unknown War programme, please visit: Great War Unknown War website

A Dream of Germany

Related Staff Member

Great War: Unknown War

November 2018 will herald one hundred years since the end of World War One, otherwise known as the Great War. The University of Southampton will mark this significant centenary through its Great War: Unknown War programme, launching in June 2017.

Events will include exhibitions, concerts, study days, a film month and lecture series which will run from June 17 - November 18. Our aim is to explore a wide variety of topics and subject matter, therefore you will find events relating to history & politics, archaeology, music, religion, literature and art.

Great War: Unknown War website
Privacy Settings