Garry Humphreys, author of a forthcoming book on Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), and I have now received from the archives of the Royal College of Music a link to the score of Somervell’s music for George’s ballet libretto The Blue Cloth (which means the music is now in the public domain), as well as digital copies of the typescript-manuscript version of the libretto from which Somervell worked.
Now that I have read The Blue Cloth, I can say that a number of my suppositions in the earlier post were wrong. Its title page bears the typed address ‘Heathland Lodge’, which we know was where the Calderons lived until late 1912, but that address is crossed out and ‘Well Walk’ handwritten in. Consequently, the typescript of The Blue Cloth must have been created before the Calderons moved to 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, but George worked with Somervell on the ballet after they moved. The typescript The Red Cloth, which was previously the only known copy of the libretto, bears only the typewritten address ‘Heathland Lodge’, so it must predate the version that George and Arthur Somervell worked from, namely The Blue Cloth.
This might suggest that The Blue Cloth is the ‘definitive’ text of the ballet’s libretto, but that too would be wrong! It is, in fact, simply something entirely different. The Blue Cloth is a many-times expanded version of The Red Cloth, divided into numbered acting/dancing passages with gesture-by-gesture descriptions by George and a timeline down the right-hand margin in minutes. In other words, it is the working copy for Arthur Somervell to compose his score from and this is borne out by Somervell’s jottings of bars on the typescript as in the image that follows.
Moreover, we can say that The Blue Cloth is George’s working copy of the libretto too, as nearly every page (and particularly the ending) contains cuts and changes in his hand. Thus it is hardly the definitive libretto text, more a work of stagecraft-in-progress for his collaboration with Somervell. Despite the fact that The Blue Cloth postdates The Red Cloth, it isn’t a finished work for publication. The latter, ironically enough, is the almost clean typescript The Red Cloth, with George’s careful illustrations. Being earlier (1911-12), The Red Cloth must be the version he worked on with Michel Fokine and which, we know from later events (see George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, p. 434), was going into the book of George’s ballet libretti for which Fokine offered to write the preface.
To sum up, The Red Cloth (1911-12) is the slim libretto of the work, almost its barest ‘treatment’ as a ‘Comedy without words’ (its subtitle), and The Blue Cloth (1912-14), subtitled ‘A wordless Comedy’, is the full production libretto. One could say that The Red Cloth is the Ballets Russes libretto, as they were the company that it was intended for under their choreographer Fokine, and The Blue Cloth is the Moscow Arts libretto, as both Somervell and Kittie attest that the Moscow Arts was going to stage it in October 1914. I was therefore quite wrong to suggest the title was changed from ‘Blue’ to ‘Red’ because red in Russian traditionally meant ‘beautiful’; more likely it was changed from ‘Red’ to ‘Blue’ because in the Russia of 1914 red was the colour of subversion. On the front page of Somervell’s copy of the libretto, Red is crossed out of the title The Red Cloth and replaced by Blue, but to complicate matters a square label proclaims the title as ABU-NÂSI, the name of the ‘young donkey’ who plays a vital part in the plot, and ABU-NÂSI is the only title given on page 1 of the typescript of The Blue Cloth. Perhaps George’s use of an Arab word is further evidence that the ballet is a parody of Scheherazade.
Even though The Blue Cloth is a greatly expanded and sometimes radically changed version of The Red Cloth, one cannot say it is a ‘completely new work’ by George Calderon. But taken together with Somervell’s score signed and dated ‘October 1914’, it certainly qualifies as a ‘complete new work’ by George because it is so different from the text of The Red Cloth and thanks to Somervell was finished and ready to be staged.
Plot of The Red Cloth. Setting: the harem of a Cairo sheikh in the early nineteenth century. The Sheikh (40) comes down to breakfast and is conducted to a divan by his wife Hanesha (20), who makes a fuss of him. He eats a ragout that makes him feel queasy, but still goes off to work. Hanesha and her Odalisques make merry. They take a red cloth from a coffer and wave it from a window. Hanesha’s lover Shemseddîn sees the signal and appears. Jubilation and merrymaking. Suddenly they hear the Sheikh returning with stomach gripes. Shemseddîn departs. The women tend the Sheikh, leave him sleeping, and go off to market. Enter a servant to tidy the room. He takes the red cloth, which has been serving as a table cloth, and shakes it out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears, the Sheikh rouses, chases Shemseddîn round the room, bundles him into the coffer, locks it, and goes off to seek justice from the Pasha. The women return, hear Shemseddîn’s knocking, release him, fetch the pet donkey Abu-Nâsi, talk into his ear, put him in the box, and relock it. They hear the Sheikh returning with the Pasha and executioners, and run into the garden with all their wares from the market. The Sheikh describes dramatically how he fought with Shemseddîn. The women return as if from market and Hanesha is flung before the Pasha. The Sheikh opens the coffer imprisoning his wife’s lover, to reveal it is only a donkey. ‘Everyone is astonished and then indignant with the Sheikh’, but the Odalisques explain the Sheikh’s ‘hallucination’ by ‘indigestion’, he ‘laughs heartily at his own mistake’, and the red cloth is spread on the table for celebratory food.
Plot of The Blue Cloth. The setting is still the Sheikh’s harem, but the period is later: his wife smokes cigarettes. She is called Zillah. The set is different and the blue cloth ‘hangs over gallery balustrade up R’. The Sheikh’s entry is more portentous and Zillah ‘blandishes him’. Preparation of the ragout takes up much more stage business, during which the donkey ‘wanders on’. The women are directed to act ‘Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Honour and glory to Abu-Nâsi! His bells jingle. They surround him and talk to him’ and there is even more business with him. When the Sheikh has left, feeling queasy, the women take the blue cloth from the balustrade and wave it out of the window. When Shemseddîn appears, Zillah kisses the blue cloth, spreads it on the table, and the women have a party. The Sheikh returns. After much ado and a lullaby, he falls asleep and the women go off to market. The servant shakes the blue cloth out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears.There is much more business for him this time as he plays up to ‘Zillah’ on the divan, who is actually the Sheikh. It ends the same way: the Sheikh imprisons Shemseddîn in the coffer, goes to fetch the Pasha, the women release Shemseddîn and replace him with Abu-Nâsi. They rush off with their ‘marketings’ before the Sheikh appears with the Pasha. On their reappearance ‘from market’, there is more business before the coffer is opened, the blue cloth is spread on the table for a feast of fruit, and all ends in ‘General Dance’.
One must admire Arthur Somervell for finishing the music despite never seeing George again after 4 August 1914. Mind you, he wrote in his memoirs that the action was ‘quick and very amusing’, so he must have enjoyed it (according to George’s timeline, the ballet should have lasted about 30 minutes). Somervell completed it by the middle of October 1914. At that time George was on his way to a hospital at Dunkirk to be treated for a benign enlarged prostate. He was wounded at Ypres on 29 October 1914 and returned to London on 1 November. It’s surprising that, so far as we know, he never contacted Somervell again, but we know that George’s commitment to the Front overrode so much else.
When war was declared, Martin Shaw had finished the music for George’s and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor but the project had to be dropped because something based on a German fairytale was no longer performable in Britain. Somervell’s commitment to George and the future of The Blue Cloth is moving: if he hadn’t kept George’s libretto and completed his own music after the outbreak of war, we would never have known The Blue Cloth existed. Let us hope that the music will be given its first performance soon, and one day the ballet.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 28
Costume parade after completing ‘Armageddon’ in 49.18 minutes
11 February 2024
Do not be put off trying an ‘Escape Room’ because you fear claustrophobia: you aren’t actually locked into it, you simply have to solve a series of problems (often involving locks) in order to complete a narrative within a set time and thereby regain your ‘freedom’.
Yesterday Sam2 gave me for my birthday an hour in one in Cambridge with the rest of the family. We were ‘locked’ in a very realistic space station whose task was to stop an approaching asteroid from annihilating Earth (‘Armageddon’). We had to work out in an hour how, in the absence of the incapacitated crew, to put the correct information into a large control panel that would enable us to fire a missile at the asteroid and destroy it.
To get the information, you had to notice everything around you very quickly and work out how it might be connected. Lateral thinking. Rather arithmetical at times. The four of us noted different things, then pooled our information to solve one puzzle after another. Being a family, we found working as a team easier than we had expected. At times you bounce along, at others you are stumped. We were doing very well until the last clue needed to fire the missile. It seemed that we had exhausted everything. I had noticed a tiny symbol inside a letter on a notice board that we hadn’t used. I kept coming back to it, but concluded each time that it was irrelevant. With time running out, we had to phone the games master for a clue. It turned out that the ‘symbol’ depicted the workings of an unassuming item in the room, which we had all thought was simply functional and not part of the puzzles. When we interacted with it, we could see the digits on its components that we needed to fire the missile.
Truly, I haven’t enjoyed a game so much in ages!
24 February
On Twitter a sickening video, probably taken by a drone, of a large bird of prey feeding off the neck and brain of a dead Russian soldier.
An acquaintance’s Russian friend writes: ‘Our life more and more resembles living on a desert island. Railway communications with Europe have been suspended and now the Post has announced that it’s not accepting items for abroad. There are fewer and fewer air services, and very few airline desks open in Moscow. The sanctions are impacting more and more on people’s everyday lives.’
Russians also seem increasingly insulted by the cynicism of the ‘election’. The murder of Navalnyi (a catacomb Christian) was obviously a brutal desperate measure. On television, even Putin cronies like Medvedev and Peskov are beginning to sound and look desperate.
3 March
We are now two months behind with producing my book of stories The White Bow:Ghoune, which Sam&Sam were to bring out this spring. There are all kinds of extraneous reasons for this, but the main one is that I started writing the penultimate story intending it to be 10,000 words and it is expanding towards 25,000. It could easily be made into a short novel, but I shall never go there. It’s subtitled ‘A science fiction’ and the scientific dimension, I must admit, took longer to research than I was expecting. It concerns the scents that male butterflies shower the females with during courtship. These can be smelt by humans, whereas the scents produced by the female butterflies to direct males cannot. The male of the continental Cleopatra Brimstone, for instance, scatters a scent described in a classic publication of 1945 as ‘rich and powerful, freesia’. I remember a hyperactive little colony of Green-Veined White butterflies when I was a boy that smelt subtly of lemon (1945: ‘lemon verbena’), but I did not know at the time what produced it.
Male of the Cleopatra (Gonepteryx cleopatra)
10 March
I finished the first draft of my translation of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ on 3 February and have been fiddling with it ever since. It’s time now to leave it alone…until the next time. I think I have rendered the Alcaic metre as closely as I can in English. The metre will certainly have a weird effect on some readers. But that all goes with the other-worldly, some might say ‘mad’, sense of the poem. The most unsatisfactory part of the version (for me) is that I have had very slightly to pad it with adjectives because German nouns tend to contain more syllables than English ones, leaving feet to fill. The choice of these monosyllabic English adjectives has been agonising. On the other hand, adjectives are one of the English language’s most natural strengths, so I don’t think they stick out in the translation; which I entitle ‘Susette speaks’. I will post an image of it on 15 April.
15 March
I am going through my library trying to create a bit of space here and there for new books. This morning I came upon three by a Russian prose writer whom I will not name, but who was born in 1937 and regarded in the late Soviet period as highly original, off piste and somehow dissidental. One of them, a collection of short stories, was given to me in Moscow in 1970 by a very literate Russian friend, and I understood that the book was much sought after. The second is an offprint of a long short story published in 1988 and inscribed to me by the author on his visit to Cambridge that year. The last is his first long novel, nicely published in Russia the following year (350 pages plus 50 pages of self-commentary), which caused a stir amongst Russianists so I thought I should buy it.
The sad fact is, I have tried to read these works on at least four separate occasions over the years, but never been able to get further than the first few pages. Let me leave that fact there. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. What sticks in my mind about this author is the day — I see from his lengthy inscription that it was 19 July 1988 — that I spent taking him round Cambridge at the request of the British Council. I showed him places associated with famous Russian cultural figures, such as Newnham College where Turgenev met women undergraduates, the Senate House where Tchaikovsky received an honorary degree, the sports shop in Trinity Street above which Nabokov lived as an undergraduate, then I suppose we had lunch somewhere, although I can’t remember it, and in the afternoon he had a mission: to go to the Singer Sewing and Knitting Centre in Cambridge and buy for £130 a sophisticated sewing machine. We did this. He paid in cash and took the machine away with him, first to London then to the USSR. However, he was so well informed about the export sale of British sewing machines that he knew he could claim back the VAT on it (£20) if he filled out a special form in the shop, with his Moscow address, passport number etc, which he did. Obviously, there was no feasible means of Singer refunding him in Moscow, so the ruse was for me to give him the £20 there and then and Singer to pay me the refund by cheque later, which they did.
As it happened, I did not have an extra £20 in my wallet, so before accompanying the writer and his sewing machine to Cambridge station we went to an ATM that had recently been installed in a wall off the market. The writer had never seen such a device before and hung back warily when I went over to it. ‘What,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you mean to say people can just take money straight out of a wall?!’ ‘Well,’ I replied as I got the cash out, ‘you do have to have it there in the first place! One day, perhaps Russia will have them.’ ‘No it won’t!’ he thundered at me with sudden vehemence. ‘Russia will have a path of its own! It will always do things its own way, not imitate you in the West’. It turned into a veritable tirade. I must admit I was slightly shocked, and I remember blaming myself for making such an unguarded comment. But in retrospect I shouldn’t have been shocked. This man was a Russian ‘intellectual’ through and through, almost a parody of one in his extreme literary cleverness, and time has shown that ‘scratch a Russian intellectual and you find a Great Russian nationalist underneath’ (to paraphrase V.I. Ul’ianov).
23 March
Russian icon, 16th century
My favourite icon subject is The Myrrh-Bearing Women. This was the second earliest depiction of the Resurrection, but it became superseded by the apocryphal subject Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. Note that in the example above, the resurrected Christ is not present in the background as the ‘gardener’; he’s not there at all. In his place is a terrifying archway, with a symbolic city above it. Both archways are mouths of Hell. The angel in the foreground, the empty tomb and the haloed women are the strongest possible opposites to that nothingness and death, hence they embody the triumph of the Resurrection. For us, perhaps, it is too easy not to realise that this icon works through visual counterpoint.
Happy Easter!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.