Private Passions

Dreaming of Private Passions
 

The composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley has presented Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 for thirty years, inviting celebrities to choose and discuss various pieces of music.  The guests are all distinguished in their respective fields.  I will never be invited to take part, but it is fun to play the game, so here are my choices, with the proviso that, with the infinitude of music to draw on, any set could be influenced by any number of factors, ranging from the weather to the season to the vagaries of relationships.
 
Mozart was one of the first names I learned in music.  His Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was on one of the 78s we had when I was a child, with those chords ringing out from a teak wind-up gramophone that sat on the floor of our front room.  Later, when trying to learn the piano, I accompanied someone on the clarinet in a version of the second movement from his Clarinet Quintet.  I am not a pianist, but there is one opus I can just about manage, and there is a certain pleasure in making the notes that were composed so long ago come to life.
 
Mozart – Fantasia in D Minor, K 397 – Angela Hewitt
 
I wish I had progressed further with the piano, but with the excitement of the sixties I was drawn to the guitar.  And this perhaps is why my next choice is Bob Dylan.  I still have the Freewheelin’ LP which I bought on September 16^th, 1965.  And I still play Don’t think twice, it’s all right.....  Bruce Langhorne’s guitar adds to the effect, but it is Dylan’s confident and articulate farewell to a relationship that is so memorable.  It isn’t his greatest song, perhaps, but then given the breadth (and depth!) or his production over more than sixty years, which is?
 
Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
 
So, I played and sang through my teens, and I was in Dublin when the Dubliners were at their height, and I spent a memorable evening at the Old Triangle folk club where I met Luke Kelly. He had a wonderfully clear, controlled voice and as he closed his eyes, tilted back his head and let flow streams of perfectly balanced ballad history the place fell silent.  This is a beautiful song, written by Phil Coulter, which, despite being steeped in Ireland’s contemporary history, touches my own past in my imagination.  
 
The Dubliners featuring Luke Kelly – The Town I Loved So Well
 
I grew up to the Beatles, and they were absolutely a part of everyone’s life in the sixties. I sat though A Hard Day’s Night twice when it came out and hung on their every appearance on TV.  John Lennon had the edge, for me, and on the day he died, some friends and I were involved in a car crash (in Italy) and it seemed that the lights had gone out.  This song is an early one and is perhaps typical of the sixties where many pop songs were about holding hands or dancing or falling in love.  It is perhaps significant, however, that one of his last recorded songs was entitled Woman – I guess some of us grow up?
 
The Beatles – Girl: Rubber Soul
 
On April 28, 1973, Bob Marley and the Wailers came to play in the Great Hall at Lancaster University.  I was living and working in Manchester at the time, but went back up to Lancaster (where I had a toehold) for weekends and this was a great night.  There was something quite new about this music.....
 
Bob Marley and The Wailers – No Woman, No Cry
 
Later I moved to Sheffield and would drink in the pubs down West Street on a Saturday night, and one had a juke box with Rod Stewart’s version of What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me), and the song touched something within me, (though I didn’t listen).  My wife Amanda loved him too, and this recording of Have I told You Lately that I Love You? played her out at her funeral.
 
Rod Stewart – Have I told You Lately That I love You?
 
In 1976 I was appointed to teach at St George’s English School Rome, where my adult life took shape.  And as time went by, I picked up the guitar again and formed a folk group with a friend and some of the students and we performed concerts for Amnesty International, involving my guests Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough and then Adrian Henri, and with others at the Folk Studio and The Fiddler’s Elbow.  They were good days, but I also became interested in Italian music, and history and I visited many churches and monasteries throughout Italy and learned about Palestrina. 

 

 
Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli – Sistine Chapel Choir, Massimo Palombella
 
I also went to the Opera in Rome and ‘discovered’ the joys of Verdi and Puccini. And somehow this led back to Mozart. I had a journalist friend who insisted we went to see Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni, in which Kiri te Kanawa played Donna Elvira.  Later on, when we had moved back to the UK, I ran a school boarding house and Kiri’s son Tom was one of my charges.  On Friday, 20^th June, 1997, Amanda and I were invited to see Kiri at a gala performance at Hampton Court, a wonderful evening, with champagne in the dressing room after the show.  
 
Mozart – Cosi Fan Tutte - Soave sia il vento – Kiri te Kanawa.
 
The supporting artist that night was Andrea Bocelli, and as Amanda was particularly taken with him, the music we played to introduce her funeral was La Voce del Silenzio.
 
Andrea Bocelli – La Voce del Silenzio
 

E chi ho tanto amato

Dal mare del silenzio

Ritorna come un'onda

Nei miei occhi

E quello che mi manca

Nel mare del silenzio

Mi manca sai molto di più…

 
When I lived in Italy, I learned the language, and loved the life, and music was all around.  I particularly liked Francesco de Gregori and his friend Lucio Dalla, and more recently got hooked on a version of Alice, with Ligabue.
 
Francesco de Gregori, featuring Ligabue – Alice
 
As a counterpoint to this romanticism (which I acknowledge is a weakness) J S Bach is another of the masters to whom I listen again and again.  But......  How does one choose?  ‘Cello suites (as my brother Simon played at our mother’s funeral)? Organ works (my father and grandfather sometimes played these)?  Piano works (as I still try to play)?  

That is the difficulty.  And while I don’t really understand it, I can immerse myself in St John Passion and let it wash right through me.  The Matthew Passion, the Cantatas, etc, they all fill my mind with temporary glory, but I think St John is the best.

 
J S Bach – St John Passion – BWV 245 - Ruht Wohl, Ihr Heiligen Gebeine: The Choir of New College Oxford, Collegium Novum, Edward Higginbottom 
 
And now, in a different vein, I include a song by John Prine, about whose sharply witty and humanely warm lyrics I knew nothing before his untimely death in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic.  But his last song, written and recorded only shortly before his death helps me whenever I think back over all the private passions of my life.  And it is also one I have learned to play, perhaps as a counterpart to the earlier Dylan track.
 
John Prine - I Remember Everything
 
And another song which is quite a different thing, though also strongly emotional.  Elton John was not an artist I ever felt close to, but he is music, and some of his songs are inevitably a part of the backing tracks of our lives.  Your Song is a sweet example of how he, and his associates, captivated us in the ‘70s.  Pop music has an enormous reach, and in certain ways it is the twentieth century’s answer to all the opera house excitement in the days of Mozart and Puccini et al....
 
Elton John – Your Song
 
In closure, I would have chosen either Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, an extraordinarily enduring work which a friend introduced to me when we were first at Lancaster University, or for The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, Op. 95, B. 178, composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893, partly because it was one of the first LPs my brother Simon bought to play on our ‘modern’ record player, and also because, a year or more since the death of my wife, I am now entering a new world, and that sense of entering fresh territory excites me and gives me hope.

 

However, the music which I would like to fade away with, is that of Chopin.  Having visited the rooms in Vallombrosa, in Mallorca, where Chopin and Georges Sand spent an uncomfortable winter in 1839, I continue to wonder at the extraordinary melodic creativity that these pieces offer us.  And at the profound melancholy that sometimes settles upon me.  I just wish I could play it!
 
Chopin - Nocturne in G Major, Op. 37 No. 2 – played by Maurizio Pollini
 
 
All these pieces could be anyone’s choices, though anyone could choose infinite varieties of others. It’s a game.  I feel bad about leaving out so many artists and songs (where are Joe Cocker - You Are So Beautiful; Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You;  Merle Haggard - That's The Way Love Goes;  or Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where The Time Goes.... just for examples?)  

It's just a game.  

But ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man......

 

Richard Gibbs

May 3rd 2025

 
 
 

Shades of Shoreditch

Let grief be a fallen leaf

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

William Blake

London

It is almost impossible to miss the eyes.  Amongst the passing crowds, I see all shades of life.  The tide ebbs and flows and there are those who seem to swim fast and well and those who look to drown.  

On a Shoreditch morning little stirs at first, and then, as shutters roll and traffic coughs, the cooking fires are lit and tables set; sweepers flick out the dust and bags and boxes accumulate on the kerb and in the gutters.

Doors open and shut.  Figures meet.

Then retreat into some kind of leafy blue security.

She is still there.  On the corner.  I wonder what she sees.  What she likes?  What she could be wishing for?  Or am I being too intrusive?

All around there are insides, and outsides.

In sides are not exclusive.  I can see them.  I am not excluded, so long as I keep my distance.  Life persists.

Though sometimes it seems that the inside is a lonely place:

Unless your own company is enough?

The out sides may be just as lonely, with a need to make contact:

To stand outside, to talk away:

To walk quickly on by, ignoring the myriad messages, the courting couple painted into the doorway:

Or to ignore the lies fired at us from all around:

Pairs.  Or couples.  Friends.  Or lovers.  

Happy couples?

Unhappy couples?

Hapless pairs?

In mono:

Or is this in stereo?

Whatever.  Wherever.  We/they parade.  We are observed.  We want to be seen.  But walls have eyes:

The whole world is watching:

Whether we like it, or not:

In an empty room:

Or on the busy street:

And those doing the watching are being watched back:

With that wariness that goes with our instinctive caution. We are not as far removed from the wild as we think:

Characters in a painted scene, subsumed into an unreal reality:

Innocents, like children, ignorant of the greater picture:

Until we come face to face with two dimensions:

Caught sightlessly in the slightly blurry depths of our graininess:

Frayed by uncertainty:

Or framed by the herring-bones of our anxieties:

Or, perhaps, trapped inside our reflections, mummified by doubts:

Until (if we are fortunate?) age begins to allow us to unravel (in comparison with youth):

And we stumble into the cracks between the paving stones, head scarves, shawls and plastic bags protecting us against the unwanted:

And in the meantime, she is still there, on the corner, in her shrouds, her eyes signifying life, seeking solace perhaps, consuming the cruel world around us as the noisy vortex rips past unconcerned.....

I wish her love.

*****

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet

I see her walking now,

And away from me so hurriedly

My reason must allow.

That I had loved, not as I should

A creature made of clay,

When the angel woos the clay, he'll lose

His wings at the dawn of day.

On Raglan Road

from a poem by Patrick Kavanagh

As sung by Luke Kelly

********

Let grief be a fallen leaf

At the dawning of the day

*****

With thanks to Simon Ellingworth for his inspiration 

and to Michael for his company

Glad you passed this way.....

On life and death and such.....

Written in January 1989, in Trevignano Romano, Italy

 

 

Not being much of a churchgoer, I find living so close to the Vatican a bit puzzling, sometimes.  You cannot really understand Italy without knowing something about the papacy and Catholicism: they contribute much to the fascination of this country.  They add, particularly, I think, to the political interest.  For example, just now there is the Cologne Revolution in the news: one hundred and sixty-three middle-European theologians have got together to tell his holiness that he should not meddle with birth control or abortion.  The Vatican, so far, has chosen to ignore it, even though the Italian press is saying it is the most serious threat to John Paul in his reign; more important therefore than the Sandinistas, Ali Ağca or Archbishop Lefebrve.....  We shall see.....

 

I am currently reading The Politics of the Vatican, partly because Peter Nichols (who had lived nearby in Bracciano) died last week and I have had his book on my shelf for years, but also because these questions are important.  The catholic nature of Italy is perplexing, and I wonder how much is ‘religion’ and how much is ‘national character’ and how much is ‘power politics?’

 

Two events occur to me that may have a bearing on this.  One was the brief reign and sudden death of Papa Luciani, Pope John Paul I.  I remember the bells ringing out on the morning of his death (September 28^th, 1978) and the shock and alarm that spread amongst the people, including us, atheists and aliens.  Poor chap, only a month in office, such a nice fellow, and already gone..... buzz, buzz, buzz.....

 

At that time, I used to spend quite a lot of time in the Stampa Estera – the foreign journalists club, where budding international hacks (like Matt Frei) and boozy past masters rubbed shoulders.  There was an exceptional amount of rumour flying about and a far greater number of correspondents than usual were waiting at the bar for something to happen.  The body was lying in state; no-one was doing anything.

 

Then, suddenly, one evening the public was ushered out of the camera ardente and the doors were banged shut.  The press club emptied as the journos raced across town.  “Autopsy!”  The word was on every tongue.  But, no.  In the medieval corridors of the Vatican City a dead pope tells no tales.  No autopsy.  The jaw had flopped open and a little cosmetic bandaging was all that was needed.

 

But, even if it was only gossip and speculation, the pressmen were convinced that John Paul I had been ‘done in.’  Someone was wheeling and dealing behind the scenes and Papa Luciani had served his purpose.

 

Another event in recent Italian history that struck me was the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer (June 14th, 1984) following his death from a brain haemorrhage.  Well over a million people (perhaps a million and a half) thronged to the ceremony which was held in the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome. It was the largest ever funeral in Italian history and the biggest mass gathering there since the second world war. 

Almost a third of the population of the city of Rome attended.

 

Enrico Berlinguer was the Secretary of the Italian Communist party.

 

Antonio and his Topolino

I am also made to think by the sad condition of a friend of ours.  Yesterday we went to visit her in hospital and it wasn’t great.  She is sinking fast, worn out by a struggle against Hodgkin lymphoma (and against chemotherapy) and she is now struggling with bronchial pneumonia.  Her eyes are cloudy and her breathing shallow and rapid.  She doesn’t recognise us – at least, I don’t think she does.  She stirs from time to time and her eyes half open, but she has almost gone.  Her husband stands awkwardly by the bedside, and after a while takes the opportunity provided by our presence to go out for a cigarette.

 

I am not fond of hospitals at the best of times (when is that?) Visiting Amanda in St Mary’s private hospital in Bristol last Christmas was not unlike wandering about an expensive hotel, but it was still a hospital – nobody is there for fun.  This one, in Palestrina, a busy little place at the foot of the Monti Prenestini (famous still for the sixteenth century composer who bears the name of his home town), is actually quite pleasant.  It is light, and clean; the staff are friendly and efficient.

 

When we visited last, just before Christmas, Isabella was very weak, but she could still talk.  She sat up to eat a little and she was able to make it to the bathroom on her own.  From her bed she could see an unkempt garden, with tall pines and sunlight on the straggling grass.

 

This time, an old woman has been moved into the second bed in the room, propped up, unconscious.  She breathes noisily through a respirator and drains slowly into a plastic bag that protrudes from under the bed-clothes.  Her daughter hangs around.

Antonio, his mother (Anna), Hannah and Amanda in March 1992 (Sarah on the way)

 

We are close to Isabella’s family.  Her brother, Antonio, is one of my best friends.  I knew their father, and both Amanda and I have a warm relationship with their mother, a Sicilian who met and married an English serviceman at the end of the war.  Isabella is my age, and I have known her for a dozen years.  Her eldest son, Thomas, is eleven and shares my birthday.  His twin brothers, Edward and Richard, were three last October.

 

What can you do?  Does faith, or medical knowledge, prove useful in these circumstances?  She does not appear to be suffering, and I think she is just slipping away, slowly.  The family are suffering more than her, now, keeping watch, day and night, taking her agony on themselves.  She has been ill for over a year, and last summer, in an isolation unit in Rome, was possibly the worst of it for her.

 

But how do we account for, or cope with, such a going out at such a comparatively young age?There is so much living left to do.  If there is a God, then what is He playing at?

 

Or is this the kind of emotional request that religion tries to respond to?  We don’t know or understand and therefore we blame God?  

Cave

 

Two days have passed. Yesterday we saw the last of Isabella, her coffin manhandled and roped down into the cold gloom of her husband’s family tomb. My mind is crowded with images and ideas: the aunt waving addio into the gaping cavern, held back by Antonio as if she might be drawn in.

 

What can be the compensations?  That we learn how precious life is?  How important the family can be?  The Santuario della Madonna del Campo at Cave was full and while all the support couldn’t keep Isabella alive, it will allow her to live on.

 

Do we treasure each sunrise more because we lose a loved one?  Do we live more intensely?  I would like to think so, but in this cold morning when I see the bright face of Isabella photographed in her garden a few years back, full of who-knows-what hopes, I cannot help but feel that Fate has a cruel hand, and that there is nothing waiting for us but a hole in the overcrowded earth.

 

The priest who officiated at the funeral service wore fine clothes, and waddled about, his old body full of archaic well-being.  He conducted the Mass as it were any other (which, to him, it was) taking his time, wiping the chalice, raising the wafer to catch the sun, with the practised air of an old pro’.  And he flicked his ‘holy’ water this way and that, and preached as if, almost as if, he meant it.  

 

The mother was not there; she stayed at home with the twins.  Thomas wasn’t there; he was with his cousin.  Gianfranco, Isabella’s husband, and Antonio, stood at the back of the church, the chills of the damp foundations affecting them more than the priest.  They were not impressed; they did not participate in the Mass.

 

A rich cousin, in his shearling, came and went, slightly impatiently, at the door.  A nun, and some children, sang a few responses obligingly.

 

The apse above the altar, by the way, had a curious fresco on it.  I was quite far from it, but it might have been from the mid twentieth century: workers in their realism, even though it may have portrayed a miracle.  Labourers toiled in the fields at the edges, but in the centre some bare-backed men were lifting a stone, and a little boy was pointing.  Angels flooded toward the scene and light poured down from heaven. Under the stone was a black patch, an inkblot, a stain.

 

What had these people discovered?  That ecstasy lies under a stone?  That there is no point in searching?  That if you believe then even an oil slick under a rock can become the truth?

 

Isabella is under that slab now, and there is nothing I nor anyone can do about it.  One day our times will come, faith or no faith; rites, liturgy, scripture, or not.

 

When we came out of the church, however, I have just remembered there was a bird singing; a robin, clearly whistling in the evening as the lowering sun glanced off the bare limestone hillside above the road where the cars whirred by oblivious.  The birdsong was beautiful, and, despite its territorial and warning usage, it was strikingly, movingly, right.  That’s the most religious thing I have heard all day, remarked Antonio.  

 

 

By coincidence, I recently acquired a record which includes a tribute to an Irish singer, Luke Kelly, who I met many years ago in Dublin.  He was someone I admired enormously; a strong, heavy, working-class Dubliner, and his death at 43, from a brain tumour, shocked me.  The tribute, written by Mick O’Keeffe but sung by Christy Moore, is very fine, and the last lines, which today I find most fitting (and which I like to apply to my loved ones) are:

Fond memories are all we have

When we think of you today

Your name we’ll always honour – (Luke)

We’re glad you passed this way.....

 

That was then.....