Search - Strauss, Gould, Reins :: Enoch Arden: Poems by Tennyson Op 38

"Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost."...

Sébastien Melmoth | Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS | 12/03/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

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This most unusual 1961 collaboration between GG and British actor Claude Rains was originally issued on LP in a limited edition pressing of only 2000 copies which quickly disappeared amongst Gould aficionados.



The unique character actor Rains (b.1889) had in his youth been a protégé of Beerbohm Tree--brother of Max Beerbohm and impresario of the Haymarket Theatre (London), wherein he had staged the première of Wilde's second society play, A Woman of No Importance (1893).

Rains--whose English diction was impeccable, having also worked with the great Shakespeareans John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier--knew well how to express blank verse, and so his recitation of Tennyson's lyrics attains a remarkable vivacity.



Like other great artists, Tennyson had a time of great "popularity" (later 19th Century), followed by later times of disfavour (post-WWI/post-WWII), followed yet again by a time of resurgence of interest in his art (later 20th Century).



None less than the great poet and brilliant critic T.S. Eliot has indicated that Tennyson "had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton [combined with] the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown." Eliot concludes, "Tennyson is the great master of metric as well as of melancholia; I do not think any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for vowel sound, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish. Tennyson is the saddest of all English poets."

Only shallowness can prevent us from seeing this.



In his times of disfavour Tennyson has naturally been criticized as being maudlin, sentimental, and long-winded. But we must remember that in past ages people had more time: more time to read; more time to think and reflect. The mammoth constructions of Wagner and Proust for example require much time to apprehend. And so it is with some long poems which Eliot says "are better worth reading than most long modern novels."

Tennyson's contemporary, the perspicacious philosopher and critic J.S. Mill, insists that the reader must approach "poetry in the spirit in which it ought to be approached, willing to feel it first and examine it afterwards. Readers will never enter into the spirit of it [the work of art] unless they surrender their imagination to the guidance of the poet." Withal, Mill notes two of Tennyson's chief characteristics: sentiments and imagery: Tennyson's excellence of scene-painting and his power of creating states of human feeling.



And so we come to Tennyson's 1864 poem of "Enoch Arden" which was an immediate "popular" hit and subsequently translated into major European languages. One A. Strodtmann made a translation into German, and this Richard Strauss used in creating his turn-of-the-century melodrama (1897). Strauss' Enoch Arden consists of explicit tone painting to support the aforementioned imagery and sentiments featured in Tennyson's narrative. It should be remembered that public readings were a popular form of entertainment in that era.



Tennyson's narrative is unquestionably sentimental but expressed in gorgeous verbiage, and in this current era--(which I personally term "The New Dark Age")--the human feelings, attitudes, and actions portrayed in the poem may in fact be a comfort to us now.

In any case, Strauss' melodrama is a remarkable artifact of cultural history.



Now, Strauss wrote very little piano music, and Gould adored Strauss' aesthetic: so he jumped at the chance to get any Strauss under his fingertips. In an happy event, Rains was available and so the recording easily transpired.

Would that there were more music to the score, but in actuality there are not a great many notes under the narration and in between the sections of the long poem (over 900 lines) which is of course recited in the original English with considerable expunctions of the text.



As to the narrative itself, a story is told of a northern fishing village wherein three children dwell: Enoch Arden, Philip Ray, and Annie Lee. Suffice it to say both boys love the girl who eventually marries both in succession after Enoch is lost at sea. It's an archetypical "castaway tale": Enoch survives over a decade on a desert isle only to return and with great emotion renounce (for their benefit) the family he had lost.



The great scene where Enoch reveals his true identity to his landlady (lines 870-96), unto his death and the laconic conclusion,



And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral (910-11),



could be seen by turns as outrageous Victorian sentimentality, or as genuinely moving humanity--according to one's own maturity and self-awareness.

(It parallels the pathos of Little Nell's expiration in The Old Curiosity Shop of which Wilde made the classic remark, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.")



In any case, Bazzana says of Gould's incisive articulation of Strauss' musical-poetics, "he creates an atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy. He played it with great feeling and with real understanding of its late-Romantic idiom."



The recorded sound is interesting with Rains' recitation having just the correct amount of distance and reverb, while Gould's piano is close and up-front.

The combination lends this issue a most remarkable ambiance.



TT~:55mins

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See too:

Tennyson's Poetry (Norton Critical Editions)

Collected Works of Max Beerbohm

Seven Men and Two Others (Prion Humour Classics)

Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot

Selected Essays

J. S. Mill: 'On Liberty' and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Utilitarianism (Oxford Philosophical Texts)

Oscar Wilde

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Notorious

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Richard Strauss: Ophelia-Lieder, Op. 67; Enoch Arden, Op. 38; Piano Sonata, Op. 5; 5 Piano Pieces, Op. 3

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