Main content
Sorry, this episode is not currently available

Arrivals and Departures

Includes music by Purcell, Eno and P盲rt and poems by Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Louis MacNeice read by Niamh Cusack and Neil Pearson.

Includes music by Purcell, Eno and P盲rt and poems by Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Louis MacNeice read by Niamh Cusack and Neil Pearson.

Readings:

William Blake: Infant Sorrow
Vernon Scannell: First Child
Dannie Abse: Return to Cardiff
Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley: Ithaka
Seamus Heaney (translator): Beowulf
Ted Hughes: The Thought Fox
Elizabeth Bishop: Arrival at Santos
Denis Glover: Leaving For Overseas
Emily Dickinson: There came a wind like bugle
Philip Larkin: Poetry of Departures
Louis MacNeice: The Suicide
John Donne: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Walter de la Mare: Good-Bye

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

1 hour, 15 minutes

Last on

Mon 30 Dec 2019 18:15
成人快手 Radio 3

More episodes

Previous

Pilgrimage

Next

The Sun

See all episodes from Words and Music

Music Played

Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes

  • 00:00

    George Frideric Handel

    Sinfonia: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba

    Performer: The Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood (Conductor).
    • OISEAU LYRE 4105532.
    • Tr5.

  • William Blake

    Infant Sorrow, read by Neil Pearson

  • Vernon Scannell

    First Child, read by Niamh Cusack

  • 00:04

    Peter Hammill

    Autumn

    Performer: Peter Hammill, Graham Smith (violin).
    • Charisma ?CASCD 1125.
    • Tr2.

  • Dannie Abse

    Return to Cardiff, read by Neil Pearson

  • 00:11

    Claudio Monteverdi

    Scene 7: Ulisse. Dormo ancora

    Performer: Fernando Guimaraes, Boston Baroque, Martin Pearlman (Music Director).
    • LINN CKD451.
    • CD1 Tr7.

  • Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley

    Ithaka, read by Niamh Cusack

  • 00:18

    Nikos Skalkottas

    Overture for Orchestra 聭The Return of Ulysses聮

    Performer: 成人快手 Symphony Orchestra, Nikos Christodoulou (Conductor).
    • BIS BISCD 13331334.
    • CD2 Tr13.

  • Seamus Heaney (translator)

    Beowulf, read by Neil Pearson

  • Ted Hughes

    The Thought Fox, read by Ted Hughes (成人快手 Archive recording 'Poetry Society's Diamond Jubilee Recital' broadcast on 10 February 1969)

  • 00:27

    Brian Eno

    1/2

    Performer: Brian Eno.
    • VIRGIN ENOCD 6.
    • Tr3.

  • Elizabeth Bishop

    Arrival at Santos, read by Niamh Cusack

  • 00:35

    Gi脿 il sole?

    • SONY SM2K91135.
    • CD2 Tr15.
  • 00:37

    Chi sia?

    • SONY SM2K91135.
    • CD2 Tr16.

  • Denis Glover

    Leaving For Overseas, read by Neil Pearson

  • 00:41

    Neil Young

    Cortez The Killer

    Performer: Neil Young & Crazy Horse.
    • REPRISE 7599272262.
    • Tr8.

  • Emily Dickinson

    聭There came a wind like bugle聮, read by Niamh Cusack

  • 00:43

    Henry Purcell

    The Witches' Dance

    Performer: Anne Sofie von Otter, Stephen Varcoe, The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock (Conductor).
    • ARCHIV 4276242.
    • Tr19.

  • Philip Larkin

    Poetry of Departures, read by Neil Pearson

  • 00:48

    Gustav Holst

    Neptune, The Mystic

    Performer: English Chamber Orchestra, Simon Rattle (Conductor).
    • HMV HMV5721392.
    • Tr7.

  • Louis MacNeice

    The Suicide, read by Niamh Cusack

  • 00:56

    George Gershwin/Heyward

    My Man聮s Gone Now

    Performer: Miles Davis, Gil Evans.
    • Columbia Legacy 88697491992.
    • Tr9.

  • John Donne

    A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, read by Neil Pearson

  • 01:02

    Jacques Brel

    Ne Me Quitte Pas

    Performer: Jacques Brel.
    • El Records 5013929318533.
    • Tr17.

  • Walter de la Mare

    Good-Bye, read by Niamh Cusack

  • 01:07

    Arvo P盲rt

    Nunc Dimittis

    Performer: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Paul Hillier (conductor).
    • HARMONIA MUNDI HMU 907401.
    • Tr8.

Producer's Notes: Arrivals and Departures

Our lives are made up of arrivals and departures, comings and goings, entrances and exits.聽 This programme announces its advent in grand style with Handel鈥檚 Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.聽 Originally composed as an interlude at the beginning of Act III of the oratorio Solomon, this piece of music has acquired a life of its own, becoming a popular choice at weddings to accompany the entrance of the bride.

Probably the most significant arrival we experience is birth.聽 William Blake鈥檚 Infant Sorrow presents this as a troubling event 鈥� the world is hostile and the child is unwanted.聽 The parents in First Child by Vernon Scannell are also anxious about the impact that this new arrival will have on their lives, but although these fears are largely assuaged once the child is born, they are replaced by other concerns about the well-being of this vulnerable infant in a threatening world.

If they survive these dangers, eventually children grow up and leave home.聽 In Autumn, Peter Hammill sings from the point of view of a father, left feeling bewildered and resentful following his children's departure: 鈥淭o our sorrows they were quite deaf/And as soon as they could they left us to our tears鈥�.

We may leave our childhood homes behind, but sometimes we return only to find that arriving in a place which used to be so familiar can be uniquely disorienting, an experience described here by Dannie Abse in Return to Cardiff.聽

One of the most celebrated homecomings in European literature is that of Odysseus, finally returning to the island of Ithaca after the decade-long Trojan War and a further ten years of storm-tossed peregrinations around the Mediterranean.聽 In Monteverdi鈥檚 Il ritorno d鈥橴lisse in Patria, the hero sees Ithaca again for the first time in twenty years as he awakes, confused, on the shore.聽 C. P. Cavafy encourages the reader to set sail for Ithaca, but cautions us that what we experience on the journey is more important than the eventual arrival at our destination.聽 This Odyssean triptych concludes with Nikos Skalkottas鈥檚 overture The Return of Ulysses.

Arrivals can be a cause for joy and celebration, but they can also be a source of dread, in this case the arrival of Grendel at Hrothgar in Seamus Heaney鈥檚 translation of Beowulf.聽 However, on this occasion the fiend鈥檚 orgy of bloodlust is not going to play out as he anticipates.聽 But it鈥檚 not just monsters that can make a dramatic entrance during the hours of darkness.聽 In The Thought Fox, Ted Hughes conjures up an incarnation of something more abstract travelling inexorably towards him through the night 鈥� inspiration.

Some places, such as airports and train stations, are defined by arrival and departure.聽 They only exist as an introductory or valedictory envelope for a more substantial place 鈥� the city or country that we鈥檙e visiting or leaving.聽 With his first ambient release 鈥� Music For Airports 鈥� Brian Eno sought to create music that was 鈥渁s ignorable as it is interesting鈥�, much like the architecture of airports themselves.聽聽聽

While seaports are more substantial 鈥� settlements in their own right - they also have an atmosphere of transience and churn.聽 Elizabeth Bishop鈥檚 Arrival At Santos captures the impatient curiosity of the tourist enduring the inevitable rigmarole of landing at a port and being processed through immigration before travelling on to their desired destination.

But what of those looking out to sea, waiting for that longed-for ship to appear on the horizon?聽 In Puccini鈥檚 Madame Butterfly, the ship that finally brings Pinkerton back to Japan also carries a bitter cargo of heartache for Cio-Cio-san.聽 Pinkerton doesn鈥檛 have the courage to break the news to Butterfly that he has married someone else and has only come back to collect his son 鈥� he tells her maid, Suzuki, not to wake her 鈥� leaving his wife Kate and the US consul Sharpless to deliver the blow.聽

Pinkerton is a lieutenant in the US Navy and the New Zealand poet Denis Glover was also a naval officer.聽 A life spent serving at sea is marked by repeatedly leaving one place and heading for another and is rarely attended by more peril and uncertainty than during wartime, as we see in Glover鈥檚 poem Leaving for Overseas.聽

A hostile force 鈥榙ancing across the ocean鈥� and making deadly landfall on a foreign shore is the subject of Neil Young鈥檚 Cortez The Killer, a song about the Spanish conquistador whose arrival in the Americas spelt the end of the Aztec civilisation.

In Emily Dickinson鈥檚聽 There came a wind like a bugle, sudden devastation hits a small town, but the source this time is natural rather than human 鈥� a powerful storm.

If one of the most notable arrivals in classical literature is Odysseus鈥檚 return to Ithaca and his subsequent routing of the suitors who had taken residence in his home, then surely one of the most famous departures is that of Aeneas from Carthage, leaving Dido in suicidal despair.聽 This poignant moment is depicted here in Purcell鈥檚 opera Dido and Aeneas.

Aeneas is unsure as to whether he should leave Carthage to fulfill his destiny, or stay with the woman he loves, and Philip Larkin is equally ambiguous about the merits of turning one鈥檚 back on all that is familiar.聽 In Poetry of Departures he acknowledges the bracing thrill that the idea of walking away from his current life gives him and yet, at the same time he sees such a move as 鈥渁rtificial/Such a deliberate step backwards鈥�.

In contrast with these abrupt departures, Neptune 鈥� the final movement in Holst鈥檚 The Planets 鈥� is notable for the gradual nature of its ending.聽 One of the first pieces of orchestral music to feature a fade-out, Holst stipulated that the women's choruses were "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed", and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance".

These voices may dissolve into silence, leaving no trace, but absence is often most vividly and painfully denoted by what is left behind.聽 Louis MacNeice鈥檚 poem The Suicide provides a meticulous portrait of an office, formerly occupied by a man who has just thrown himself out of the window.

My Man鈥檚 Gone Now from Gershwin鈥檚 Porgy and Bess is Serena鈥檚 lament after her husband is killed in a brawl.聽 Her sorrow at this sudden and permanent departure is poignantly expressed here by one of the most eloquent voices of the 20th century 鈥� Miles Davis鈥檚 trumpet.

John Donne is insistent that there should not be a comparable outpouring of grief when he dies 鈥� the spiritual bond between him and his wife will endure despite him taking leave of his earthly existence.聽 In the event, Donne outlived his wife by 14 years and deeply mourned her death.

Ne Me Quitte Pas sees an abject Jacques Brel begging his lover not to leave him.聽 Brel鈥檚 live performances of this song were often gut-wrenchingly emotional, conveying the profound pain and terror of the prospect of the loved one closing the door behind them, never to return.聽 This melancholy finality also resonates through Walter de la Mare鈥檚 poem Good-Bye.

We must go 鈥� it can鈥檛 be put off any longer.聽 Rather than raging against our leave-taking, better to be resigned to it.聽 In the Gospel of St Luke, the aged Simeon is content to die, having seen the infant Jesus and held him in his arms 鈥� Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace. So let us depart in peace with Arvo P盲rt鈥檚 setting of the Nunc dimittis.


Torquil MacLeod

Broadcasts

  • Sun 11 Sep 2016 17:30
    成人快手 Radio 3
  • Mon 30 Dec 2019 18:15
    成人快手 Radio 3

The hidden history of plant-based diets

The hidden history of plant-based diets

Forget social media influencers - the meat-free movement started with the Victorians.

Books website

Get closer to books with in-depth articles, quizzes and our picks from radio & TV.

Gallery