The Barbarian at the Gate
It was after reading her book ‘The Wandering Scholars’, that I fell in love with Helen Waddell’s verses, translations from medieval Latin lyrics and I have set a number of them, notably in the cycle of part songs, Kiss Thou This Rose. The three poems used in tonight’s piece had been in my mind for some time, but their length rather precluded including their setting in longer cycles.
I had clear pictures in mind when setting the poems, rather than accompanying the choir the trumpets represent a separate strand of the drama. In the first movement they represent the vanished Trojans, in the second Attila the Hun’s hordes and in the third, monks chanting.
In the first movement (Lament for Troy, translated from the Latin of Hugh Primas of Orleans (c1094-1160)) the poet describes the ruinous state of contemporary Troy. Gradually the ghosts of the vanished Trojans appear, distant fanfares gradually develop into a full blown march and the poet pictures Troy at its zenith. Only for the vision to fade and as the distant fanfares return, the poet laments the loss of such glory.
In the second movement (Lament for Aquilea, destroyed and never to be built again, translated from the Latin of Paulinus of Aquilea (762 – 802)) opens with a lone trumpet and the poet lamenting the devastation that Attila’s Huns have wrought on Aquilea. As the poet goes on to describe the events leading up to this, we hear the Hun’s marching towards Aquilea. Finally they leave Aquilea devastated and we return to the lament of the opening. On a historical note, Aquilea was rebuilt, but refugees from it were credited with the founding of Venice (an event depicted in Verdi’s opera ‘Attila’).
The final movement (On the Destruction of Lindisfarne, translated from the Latin of Alcuin (c.735 – 804)), represents a change of mood. In this poem, the raids on Lindisfarne are not described but rather the news causes the poet to meditate on the terrible state of the world and the changeableness of human existence. The writers of all these poems were religious men who used to correspond regularly with each other in letters and poems. For this movement, I pictured a monk receiving a batch of letters and meditating on the state of the world as in the background a Requiem mass is sung in the monastery. The trumpets play a slow moving background to the choral texture, all the notes in the trumpet parts are taken from the plainchant Dies Irae.
Not only were the writers of these poems in religious orders, but their intended audience was also. So, though the poems lament loss in the present world, they have their eyes firmly fixed on the more positive outcome in the next world.
A note about the poets:
Hugh Primas of Orleans: Hugh of Orleans, surnamed the Primate, was legendary within a century of his death. Scholars no longer accept that he was the wandering cleric, dissolute and drunk, portrayed in his satires. He was almost certainly an illustrious scholar, teaching at various centres of learning. As the foremost exponent of the twelfth century classical renaissance, he celebrated the epic themes of Ulysses and the Trojan war in the new fashionable rhyme. Helen Waddell translated his ‘Lament for Troy’ living in a London reduced to rubble during the Blitz.
Paulinus of Aquilea: Alias Timotheus, a Lombard scholar and grammarian, after 11 years of close friendship with Alcuin, he was appointed Patriarch of Aquileia. There he composed his alphabetical planctus on the city that Attila had sacked in 452. Forboding for the future may have been in his mind as well, as the heathen Magyars, whom he had striven to convert, descended on the city and attacked it. Helen Waddell considered it 'the greatest, perhaps the loveliest lament of the Dark Ages.’
Alcuin: Alias Flaccus, the first and greatest of the distinguished line of English clerical schoolmasters. At 50, he left York to give Charlemagne's Palace School in Aachen the learning that stemmed from Bede's Jarrow and Lindisfarne. He reformed the liturgical Calendar, secured a single and lasting pattern of worship, compiled the Vulgate Bible, compiled texts with music for 18 Masses, supplied military marches for the troops, and was Abbot of Tours for the last 8 years of his life. Helen Waddell said of him: 'Nothing could make Alcuin a spectacular saint, but nothing could make him less than an English gentleman: there is no other word for it.'
Helen Waddell was the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary in Tokyo. Despite gaining a First-Class Honours degree from Queen's University, Belfast in 1911, she spent the next 10 years looking after her aged step-mother. She would one day salute this 'lost decade' as the most fruitful period of her mental life, it gave her time to think. In 1921, whilst giving a lecture on Medieval Mime, she questioned the accepted theory of its purely liturgical origin and set herself to inquire into the independent secular tradition. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of her courageous pioneering. Until then, medieval Latin had been the monopoly of the philologist and historian. So into this realm of generalisation and declamation that Helen stepped with her retinue of saint and scholars, of men and women abounding in vitality and intellectual activity. She accomplished this task single-handedly, there was no critical apparatus. Her book, 'The Wandering Scholars' was published in 1927, before any of the standard works on the period had appeared. But only 20 years lay between this first work and her last work of note, after that she inexplicably stopped translating.
Robert Hugill
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