IMMORTALISED IN MUSIC

Evening Star, Issue 21092, 3 May 1932, Page 9

IMMORTALISED IN MUSIC

RIVERS THAT LIVE IN SONG THE DANUBE. RHINE. AND THE AFTON If some American rivers of song have undergone spectacular changes since the melodies associated them arose, what has happened to European streams which are known better through phrases of poets and composers than the descriptions of geographers? asks an American writer. The power of song to touch the heart and quicken the imagination has given us mental images of rivers in Europe, as in America, which have vitalised those streams for countless persons to whom otherwise they would be unknown or lifeless. The pictures evoked never may have been true, yet they persist and probably will remain indelible so long as the words and music themselves survive. Veracious travellers may protest that the Danube is not blue. Futile gesture. It has been blue to gliding feet and throbbing hearts for a century. If it were not created blue, it has been danced blue, and blue it will remain in Paris, Buenos Aires, and New York so long, as couples sway to the Strauss waltz. Nor does it make much difference what changes may have intervened since our conce'ptions of rivers came to us through famous songs. We tend still to see those waterways as they first wore presented in words and music. Thus ‘ Die Wacht am Rhein ’ has linked that stream indissolubly to Germany, although the river begins in Switzerland, ends in Holland, and was internationalised by the treaty of Versailles. Some European streams celebrated in song have been little affected by time and progress, just as the Suwanee and the Wabash have survived essentially intact in the midst of the generally changing American scene, but naturally such rivers are minor ones. The environment of European rivers of song were more static than that of American rivers up to the World War, but_ since then it has undergone catastrophic upheavals. Even the great Volga, remote from the field of battle from 1914 to 1918, has gone through a period of dramatic transition since, while the Shannon, although unvisited by the spectre of war, has in recent years been clutched by the spirit of industrialism and impounded in a scheme calculated to furnish electric power to all of Ireland. European composers, like those in the United States, have not celebrated only the major streams. Minor rivers that otherwise would have been unknown except locally have been made to flow around the world in song. Who outside of Scotland ever would have heard of the Afton or the Doon were it not for the verses of Robert Burns coupled with plaintive melodies which stir the emotions and implant themselves in the memory ? Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes; Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise; My Mary’s asleep by the murmuring stream, Flow gently sweet Afton, disturb not her dream—has been sung wherever English-speak-ing people live. The origin of the old Scotch air seems not to be known, but Burns attributes the music to his verses about the Doon to Janies Miller. The River Doon, like Afton Water, is an inconsequential stream in Ayrshire, Southern Scotland, but the song about it has penetrated even among persons of alien speech. Story has it that the great Napoleon himself knew Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon. How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair How can yo chant, yc little birds, And I sae weary, fu’ o’ care? To a friend who visited him at St. Helena the imprisoned Emperor is said to have exclaimed : “ The music of England is execrable.! They have only one

Sood melody, ‘ Ye Banks and Braes o’ lonni© Doon.’ The Shannon would have a reputation, of course, without the aid of minstrelsy, yet it would not be what it is without that assistance. The stream is inextricably woven into native mythology and song, yet little of this creation has spread beyond Ireland or at least outside of the ranks' of persons of the Irish race living abroad. In the United States the most widely known song about Ireland’s chief river is the American. made ‘ Where the River Shannon Flows,’ written by James I. Russell. The song, the chorus of which begins, Where dear old Shannon’s flowing, Where the three-leaved shamrock’s growing, has little to keep it alive other than the subject, and one may risk the conclusion that Ireland’s famous river has done more to give currency to the composition than the latter has done to spread the reputation of the stream. The Shannon, after having been for centuries the inspiration of tellers of tales and singers of songs, in our day is destined to become the handmaiden of the machine age. A German firm has trapped the upper waters of the river for use in a huge hydro-electric plant at Ardnacrusha, within sight of the spires of ancient Limerick, the chief city on the Shannon’s banks. From Ardnacrusha radiate “ M'Gilligan’s maypoles,” as the people playfully call the supports for high-tension wires, after the name of the Minister of Industry and Commerce of the Irish Free State, who sponsored the power scheme. Turing to the Continent, one encounters almost at once that greatest of all rivers of song, the Rhine (writes Arthur' Warner, in the New York ‘Times Magazine’). What is it that has made the Rhine the subject of so much song preepus even to people for whom German is an alien tongue? Is it the unusual beauty of Rhine scenery and cities with their richness of history and tradition ? Or is it that the Germans are a notably musical race and have naturally expressed some of their genius in singing of the great waterway which lies chiefly within their borders? Probably it is something of both. Anyhow the result has been to make the Rhine not only known but loved around the world. Although ‘ Die Wacht am Rhein ’ is the song most directly related to the river, this composition has suffered in international esteem, especially since the World War, through association with German nationalism, not to say junkerism. This is somewhat unjust to the song, the music of which was written by Call Wilhelm to the words of Max SchneckcnbergeP. a good many years previous to the Franco-Prussian War, and thus before the German Empire had come into existence. Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein, Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein! may be rendered into English as: — Dear Fatherland, tranquil be thou, The watch stands fast and true upon the Rhine. It took Heinrich Heine to write the master verses on the Rhine. Few will dispute that his metrical story of the legend of the Lorelei—the maiden, who with her song lured sailors to death in the whirlpool at the foot of the towering rock where she lived—is not only the best poetry about the Rhine but the finest about any river anywhere. Various composers, including the great Liszt, have written music for Heine’s verses, but the melody finally accepted by the public is that written by Friedrich Silcher nearly a century ago. To this melody the stanzas which begin, Jcli weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin,

have been translated into the language of every people that cares for Occidental music. Not far from the beginnings of the Rhino, but on the other side of the watershed, are the sources of another stream. While the Rhino flows northwest, this other flows east for 1,750 miles from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. In volume the Danube is the greatest river in Europe, though exceeded in length by the Volga. Outside of Europe it is exceeded both in volume and in length by a number of streams, but historically and internationally, it fairly may be called the greatest river in the world. Its waters touch the soil of seven different nations. It has been a highway of conquest and commerce since European history began. Greeks, Romans, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Turks, Slavs, French, Germans—all have travelled it. Trajan, Attila, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon have used it as a highway for their armies. Trajan had an inscription in his honour hewn in giant letters in the rock of its banks which remains to this day. Knights in plumes and glittering armour voyaged down the Danube op .three

Crusades in the Middle Ages, while in our century the World War began along its, banks. Yet its fame has been spread around the world not by history but by the flowing rhythm and rippling of Strauss’s famous ‘ Blue Danube ’ wait?. To-day the Danube is a blue stream in spirit if not in colour. It is a “ sick river” still suffering from the fever of war. Theoretically under international control, practically it is a no man’s land still blasted by ruin. It has not nearly regained its pre-war commerce and “ frontier formalities ” made travel upon it troublesome. Whereas before the war one could travel one stretch of almost 100 miles without official interruption, it is necessary nowadays over the same route to undergo five Customs inspections and have six different kinds of money. Old and new mingle along the banks of the Danube. The Czecho-Slovakiaus have made the modern port of Bratislava—which the Teutons still call Bressburg and the Hungarians remember as their ancient capital of Pozsony, Stone piers line the river, and great swinging cranes toss tons of cargo about like tissue paper on the docks where rail and water transport meet. The almost perpendicular walls of the famous Iron Gate—through which the Danube passes where Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Rumania come together—rear their forbidding facades as always, but most of the river cities have experienced great changes since the war. Vienna, formerly the centre of the great Hapsburg Empire, has become a secondary city. Men and women still laugh and chatter and make love in its cafes, but the Schonbrunn palace, the favourite residence of Emperor Jb'rancis Joseph up to his death there during the war, houses an orphan asylum. Castle Durnstein, where the minstrel Blondel is said to have found Richard Coeur de Lion imprisoned after the third Crusade, still commands the river, as does Schloss Sigmaringen in which the Hoheazollern princes once lived. Life ,in the German cities along the Danube has been dimmed but not extinguished in the post-war decade. The bridge at Regensburg surveys the pageant of the Danube as it has for eight centuries, while the spire of the Gothio cathedral at Ulm, rising almost as high as the Washington Monument, seems oblivious of the recent scourge of a devastating war and an unhealing peace. In America, at least, the Volga was nothing but a five-letter word until the boat song became popular. its movement and melody caught the public ear and, even without English words created a wealth of imagery, true or false, about a > river which before had been an unpictured stream in an unknown land. The song has had various English renderings, one of which runs:— Eh, ugh-nyem 1 Eh, ugh-nyem! Pull away, boys, pull away! Eh; ugh-nyem! Eh, ugh-nyem! Pull away boys, pull away! See the birch trees most in sight! Home we’ll reach before the night. The Volga boatman seems still to correspond to the images evoked by the song, but in the few years since the World War the river has Seen more cataclysmic changes than took place tor decades previous. Revolution and counter-revolution battled along its banks, and hardly bad the Red army disposed of Denikin when the consuming drought of 1921 came with even more implacable ferocity. The great basin of the river, the home of 50,000,000 people, is the bread basket of Russia, and when the crop there failed a famine ensued which was only partially alleviated by the assistance of the outside world, including America. Mother Volga could do nothing for her children m those days bub weep for the tragedy along her shores. Yet since then recovery and change have come with bewildering swiftness. River traffic, which seemingly was deposed and dead iu 1922, began to revive a couple of years later, and now tbe Volga in summer is alive with grain barges moving downstream and oil barges coming up. Among them steamboats make their way, including an express line of twin-screw, thirteenknot vessels between Nijni-Novgorod and Astrakhan, which bear names like “ Year of the October Revolution,” and other reminders of the new regime. Such reminders are everywhere along the Volga. What used to be the timber port of Tzaritzin has become Stalingrad and has, of course, a Lenin street running through it. Samara has run the gamut from devastation to prosperity in a decade. Ten years ago, blighted with famine, it was a city of dead and dying. Trade and industry had ceased, and it seemed that the city might never rise again. But to-day it is the greatest commercial centre of the Volga, a railroad junction, the seat of busy flour mills, and a point of bustling trade in grain, cattle, and dairy products.

The environment of Europe’s great rivers of songs, like that of the Hudson, the Potomac, the Mississippi, the Rip Grande, and the Sacramento in America has experienced spectacular changes since the best-loved compositions about the waterways were writ- ' ten. Yet much of the old civilisation and spirit persists, and the streams themselves, like those in America, flow on without essential change or despoils ' tion except for an over-increasing con- V tamination of the water. A great river seems to dominate the land and the people along its banks, to engulf them in its mystery, to sweep them along in a current of life and tempo of which is. its creation® a«i ihgirs.« ' * Aj