William Blake – { feuilleton }

Symphonie Fantastique

1955. Cover art by Jane Sinnickson Flora.

The programme for the symphony (1845 version) by Hector Berlioz:

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations—all this forms the subject of the first movement.

Part Two: A Ball
The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his “ranz des vaches” the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

1958. Cover art by Richard M. Powers.

The programme for the symphony (1855 version) by Hector Berlioz:

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

Part Two: A Ball
He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roars of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae.

1958. No cover artist credited.

1959. Cover art by Hieronymus Bosch.

1960. No cover designer credited.

1964. Cover art by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Continue reading “Symphonie Fantastique”

The Return of the Sorcerer

The story’s first appearance in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931. No illustrator credited.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery is a series I’d have happily watched if one of the UK channels had rebroadcast it in the 1980s, the way that Channel 4 did with the original Twilight Zone. This weekend I watched for the first time the opening episode of Night Gallery‘s third and final season, an adaptation by Halsted Welles of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Smith is a writer whose works are still mostly neglected by film and television but he was in good company in Night Gallery, a series which featured adaptations of stories by a number of fellow Weird Tales writers including HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. The story is one of Smith’s modern-day horror tales in which a poverty-stricken translator is offered a lucrative position at an old and sinister house, a place where a fearful occultist requires translations of an ancient volume. The Arabic text turns out to be passages from an early edition of everybody’s favourite forbidden tome, the Necronomicon, and Smith’s story, which was published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in 1931, is the first outside Lovecraft’s own to mention the book, thus beginning the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos by other hands.

The Night Gallery adaptation was broadcast in 1972. Unlike the first two seasons, where episodes ran for an hour, the third season reduced the running time to under 30 minutes which doesn’t give director Jeannot Szwarc (credited as Jean Szwarc) any time to build up the suspense, if he was capable of such a thing. If you’ve ever seen any of Swarc’s feature films you know not to raise your expectations. As a compensation for the absense of atmosphere we get some striking set designs and a decent cast. The fearful magus, John Carnby, is played by Vincent Price, encountering the Necronomicon for the second time in his career after he’d earlier used the book to summon an eldritch monstrosity in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. Bill Bixby plays the wary translator, while Patricia Sterling is Carnby’s toad-loving partner in Satanism, an addition to the story by Halstead Welles, whose presence adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. The episode could never be considered a lost classic but I enjoy seeing stories by the Weird Tales writers making their first infiltrations into the wider culture. This one is worth watching for Vincent Price and the magical decor alone. I think I ought to go looking for more Night Gallery episodes.

More of those Cocteau hands-through-the-wall. Bixby’s character doesn’t seem very perturbed that the scarlet hall is filled with mysterious vapours.

Mystical decor: on the left, Frieda Harris’s Ace of Discs from the Thoth Tarot deck; on the right, The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

Mystical/Satanic decor: the painting in the background is Frieda Harris’s Ace of Cups from the Thoth Tarot deck.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• Illustrating Zothique
• The Plutonian Drug
• More trip texts
• Yuggoth details
• The Garden of Adompha
• The City of the Singing Flame
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

Televisual art

A few words of praise for The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes’ eight-part TV series about art in the 20th century. Not that it’s ever been lacking in praise—it was lauded from the outset back in 1980—but, having read the book of the series twice, then dipped back into it on regular occasions, it occurred to me recently that I’d not seen the series itself for a very long time.

If you don’t know—and is anyone today really unaware of this?—Hughes was commissioned by the BBC and his employers at TIME magazine to travel the world presenting a history of modern art from the 1880s to the end of the 1970s. The series was part of a run of costly co-productions that flattered viewers with colour television sets (still a luxury item in the UK) while engaging the intellect; Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and David Attenborough’s Life on Earth established the template that Hughes was required to follow. If you have the time and the money, the globetrotting is the easy part of an enterprise such as this. Much more difficult is making sense of the increasingly fragmented development of art in a century of two world wars and rapid technological change. Hughes did this by selecting a single route of evolution for each episode, often missing out significant artists or entire movements, then winding back the clock in the following episode to trace a different route that included the neglected names. Some of them, anyway. In the introduction to the book he admits the difficulty of trying to summarise a century of complex aesthetic activity and philosophy in a mere eight hours. The book is inevitably much more thorough, making the TV series seem like a sketch beside it; but there are good sketches and bad ones, and this one is exceptional.

Hughes had an enviable talent for lucid explanation, an ability to tell you what was important about an artist or an idiom or an artistic development in a few simple, memorable sentences, free of jargon or the obfuscation that bedevils art criticism. This is best seen in his collected reviews from TIME magazine, Nothing if Not Critical (1991), which offers bite-sized appraisals of individual artists or group shows, from the Renaissance to the present day. Difficult to do well when you’re limited to a few hundred words, near impossible when you have to explain something using a minimum of words while simultaneously talking to a camera and walking down a busy Paris street. Some of his statements, like the following one, have been lodged in my memory for years:

A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin, but this in a parking lot is just bricks.

“This” being Carl Andre’s oblong of 120 firebricks, Equivalent VIII, a minimalist sculpture that caused a huff of outrage from the philistine British tabloids in the 1970s. Hughes’ comment occurs when he examines the way that galleries in the same decade became frames for creations such as Andre’s, works that wouldn’t be recognised as art without the building they were situated in.

The explication is very familiar but I’d forgotten about all the foreign travel. This seems profligate at times although it’s only the same as David Attenborough flying to a remote jungle to film a lemur or a lizard. Paintings and sculptures seen in their natural habitats, as it were, together with the locations that inspired them: van Gogh’s Arles, Matisse’s Côte d’Azur, de Chirico’s Turin, and so on. One of the axioms of Hughes’ criticism, repeated here as elsewhere, was that art has to be studied in situ, not appraised via mediated representations, whether that means halftone dots in a book, 16mm film delivered by cathode ray tube, or a gallery website. It’s an attitude I sympathise with even though I don’t visit galleries very often. Sculptures have a physical presence that doesn’t reproduce at all, while paintings are more subtle or more dramatic or more detailed or more dimensioned when you’re standing in front of them. Piranesi’s prints are big; William Blake’s paintings are very small; Max Ernst’s engraving collages are not only smaller than you expect but they’re also toned by age; Picasso’s canvases reveal the direction his brush was travelling when he painted a line in a single stroke…

Hughes and Complex One, an artwork that few people are allowed to visit.

Something else I’d forgotten about was the artist interviews in the later programmes, especially those with land artists Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria. The final episode in the series examines the collapse of the idea of the avant-garde, with land art being presented as work that can’t be bought by wealthy collectors or appropriated by mass media. Hughes treks into the Nevada desert to see Heizer’s Complex One which at the time was all that existed of the massive site known today as City; Walter De Maria is seen walking through The Lightning Field in New Mexico accompanied by synthesizer chords from Jean-Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe. Electronic music abounds in this series, from Peter Howell’s clanging Radiophonic theme, to extracts from albums by Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno, Music For Films being a popular choice with TV producers at the time. It’s notable that the phrase “the shock of the new” only occurs once, near the very end, possibly as a capitulation to the BBC who Hughes says chose the title for him. In a later book, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir (2006), you’ll find another of those memorable statements:

Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.

I’m following this with a re-viewing of Hughes’ multi-part American Visions (1996), a history of American culture that I’ve not seen since its first broadcast. The Shock of the New is all over YouTube if you require it, also at the Internet Archive. The series took three years to create and was broadcast at 8:00pm on Sunday evenings to an audience of millions. They really don’t make them like this any more.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Hughes, 1938–2012
• Land art

Weekend links 579

Untitled painting by Larry Kresek.

• “A good comparison might be Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull, Appalachian folk singer Hedy West, or the early-70s home recordings of German actress Sibylle Baier; spellbound female voices possessed of an uncanny emotional honesty.” Andrew Male on the songs of Karen Black. In 1989, the first issue of Psychotronic Video profiled Black’s remarkable acting career which was cultish enough for the magazine to give her the “psychotronic” label.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor Press, In A Sound World by Victor Segalen, “a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space”.

• At Messynessychic: Inside the Imaginarium of a Solarpunk Architect, or architectural designs by Luc Schuiten, brother of comic artist and illustrator François Schuiten.

• De Strijd der Werelden, 1899. The first illustrated book version of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds was a Dutch edition with drawings by JH Speenhoff.

• New/old music: Words Disobey Me (Dennis Bovell Dub Version) by The Pop Group, part of a forthcoming Bovell remix of the group’s debut album, Y.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Sunik Kim, FACT Mix 817 by Malibu, and Rhythmic Asymmetrical Wyrd by The Ephemeral Man.

• “Whatever we call them, and whatever else they might be, they are, in fact, printed paintings.” Joseph Visconi on William Blake’s monoprints.

• Curious Music announces Moebius Strips, an audio installation by Tim Story from the sounds and music of Dieter Moebius.

• At Dangerous Minds: Richard Metzger‘s confessions of an analogue vinyl snob.

• Strange Flowers departs from tradition by offering a summer reading list.

• Moebius 256 (1977) by Zanov | Moebius (1981) by Cyrille Verdeaux | Elena’s Sound-World (2014) by Sinoia Caves

The Blake Video

More from the website update. One of the pages buried in the site is an appendix to my design for Angel Passage, a William Blake-themed CD by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins that was released on Steven Severin’s Re: label in 2001. In addition to designing the CD I also created a video accompaniment for the sole performance of the piece at the Purcell Room in London in February of that year. The old web page showed screen shots of the video, and very small ones at that, so as well as updating the page itself I’ve replaced the thumbnails with the original shots.

The video was created in a rush five days before the performance, and only finished the night before I departed for London, so was rather lazily done in places. I’d just taken delivery of a new G4 Power Mac without which I wouldn’t have been able to do any video editing at all. Raw material was artwork scanned from books plus a stack of VHS tapes, including a TV documentary about Blake that provided a few relevant shots of contemporary London. Another essential component was a borrowed video player that could play both VHS and MiniDV cassettes, as well as connect to the computer. The assembled footage was recorded to a MiniDV master cassette which I still have somewhere although I’ve no idea whether it’s still viewable, and have no way to watch it in any case. Those MiniDV players had a tendency to mysteriously render their tapes unplayable which I think may have happened to my tape when I came to try and archive it after the performance. This is fitting in a way, Alan was always adamant that the music-based readings he was doing at this time were one-off events, and the video was only intended to augment the reading, not be watched away from the performance. Copies of the CD still circulate so the work hasn’t vanished altogether. Alan and Tim collaborated on three readings in this series, together with two earlier outings, The Birth Caul and (with David J) The Moon And Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre Of Marvels. We’re overdue a reissue of the entire Moon and Serpent discography.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Blake in Manchester