THE LAST VERSES OF 

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

By Lord Byron

.....

   The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

   Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

   And monarchs tremble in their capitals.

   The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

   Their clay creator the vain title take

   Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;

   These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

   They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

CLXXXII.

   Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—

   Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

   Thy waters washed them power while they were free

   And many a tyrant since:  their shores obey

   The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay

   Has dried up realms to deserts:  not so thou,

   Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—

   Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow—

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

CLXXXIII.

   Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

   Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

   Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,

   Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

   Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime—

   The image of Eternity—the throne

   Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

   The monsters of the deep are made; each zone

Obeys thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

CLXXXIV.

   And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

   Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

   Borne like thy bubbles, onward:  from a boy

   I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me

   Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

   Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear,

   For I was as it were a child of thee,

   And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here.

CLXXXV.

   My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme

   Has died into an echo; it is fit

   The spell should break of this protracted dream.

   The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit

   My midnight lamp—and what is writ, is writ—

   Would it were worthier! but I am not now

   That which I have been—and my visions flit

   Less palpably before me—and the glow

Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.

CLXXXVI.

   Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been—

   A sound which makes us linger; yet, farewell!

   Ye, who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene

   Which is his last, if in your memories dwell

   A thought which once was his, if on ye swell

   A single recollection, not in vain

   He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop shell;

   Farewell! with HIM alone may rest the pain,

If such there were—with YOU, the moral of his strain.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5131/5131-h/5131-h.htm

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George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), was a British poet.[1][2] He was one of the major figures of the Romantic movement,[3][4][5] and is regarded as being among the greatest British poets.[6] Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.

Byron was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Following graduation, he travelled extensively in Europe, living for seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa, and then was forced to flee to England after receiving threats of lynching.[7] During his stay in Italy, he would frequently visit his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.[8] Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero.[9] He died leading a campaign in 1824, at the age of 36, from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron

======================

In the summer of 1831, the French composer Hector Berlioz was in Rome. The city was sweltering, and to escape the heat he would regularly take himself to St Peter's, sit in an empty confessional and read Byron. "I sat drinking in that burning poetry," he wrote in his memoirs. "I adored that inexorable yet tender nature - pitiless yet generous."

What Berlioz was doing was itself Byronic. Reading Byron in church - entering the world of the poet's outlawed, outcast, criminal heroes - was transgressive, an act deliberately chosen to generate private thrills in a place where no secrets should be kept from God.

Transgression is central to the work of Byron. The poet was to the literature of the past two centuries what Wagner was to music - a defining force that had to be assimilated or rejected if progress was to be made. His "burning poetry" burned everyone. Byron's influence pervaded every art form, and Berlioz was only one of countless composers affected. Not that the results were always successful. Isolated Byronic hauteur sits uneasily, for instance, with the democratic complexity of Italian opera: Verdi's versions of The Corsaire and The Two Foscari do not rank among his masterpieces.

READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/aug/01/classicalmusicandopera.proms2003

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THE NEXT TO VANISH IS THE TRUMP EMPIRE....

[GUSNOTE: IN "HAROLD IN ITALY" BERLIOZ USED SOME OF THE SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE MUSICAL LINES...]

SEE ALSO ANOTHER YOUTUBE VERSION OF THE SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgXW-57UDMc&list=RDAgXW-57UDMc&start_radio=1

Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Andrés Orozco-Estrada

Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14, orchestral work by French composer Hector Berlioz, widely recognized as an early example of program music, that attempts to portray a sequence of opium dreams inspired by a failed love affair. The composition is also notable for its expanded orchestration, grander than usual for the early 19th century, and for its innovative use of a recurring theme—the so-called ideé fixe (“fixed idea” or “obsession”)—throughout all movements. The symphony premiered in Paris on December 5, 1830, and won for Berlioz a reputation as one of the most progressive composers of the era.

After completing medical studies at the behest of his father, who was a doctor, Berlioz rebelliously pursued music and literature, for which he had harboured passions since childhood. In the fall of 1827, at age 24, he attended the opening night of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, performed in Paris by an English theatre company. Because his formal education had exposed him only to Latin and Greek, Berlioz understood little of the language. Nevertheless, he was transformed by the experience and recalled it in his memoirs: “Shakespeare, coming upon me unaware, struck me like a thunderbolt.”

On that night, however, Berlioz was fascinated by more than the work of the revered English poet: he was enchanted by Harriet Smithson, the young Irishwoman who played Ophelia. That enchantment soon turned to obsession as Berlioz haunted the stage door and inundated Smithson with love letters only to have his advances ignored. Motivated by the pain of unilateral love, Berlioz began after three years to compose an elaborate quasi-autobiographical piece of program music, a symphony that would depict a disconsolate lover driven to the brink of suicide by his lady’s indifference. That work became Symphonie fantastique: épisode de la vie d’un artiste, or simply Symphonie fantastique.

Berlioz declared in his memoirs that the music portrays the dreams of a young man who, in the aftermath of a failed love affair, has taken an overdose of opium. The first movement, which begins gently but increases in intensity, is intended to depict the delights and despairs of love. The second movement, an elegant waltz, evokes a ball where the lover again encounters the woman he can never possess, now in another man’s arms. The idyllic strains of the third movement portray his attempt to escape his passions by traveling to the countryside, but, as memories of the unattainable woman return to his thoughts, the tone grows sombre. The composition takes a highly dramatic turn in the ponderous fourth movement, when the young man imagines that he has murdered his beloved and is about to be executed for the crime. The music depicts his march to the guillotine, where his last thought is of the woman he loves. In the final movement, he is in hell at a witches’ sabbath over which his beloved herself presides, surrounded by echoes of the ancient hymn Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”), from the Catholic requiem mass.

Aside from its pioneering role as a symphony with a program—that is, with a story to tell—Symphonie fantastique is remarkable for its use of the idée fixe, which surfaces in every movement and unites the entire work. The recurring theme is essentially the tune of the beloved, representing in its varying moods the woman’s ever-changing image in her lover’s eye. Berlioz’s idée fixe paved the way for the development of similar compositional devices in the mid-19th century, including the thematic transformations associated with the works of Franz Liszt and the leitmotifs of Richard Wagner’s operas. Symphonie fantastique also constituted the largest-scale symphony composed by anyone to that time, with its five movements spanning nearly an hour and a dauntingly large orchestra that employed new wind instruments—such as the ophicleide (predecessor of the tuba) and the valve trumpet—as well as doubling on the harp and timpani parts.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Symphonie-fantastique-Op-14

====================

In 1829, at the age of twenty-five, Hector Berlioz was gripped by a strange and harrowing nervous condition. For a year he wrestled with bouts of feverish excitement and insomnia, interspersed with blank intervals of exhaustion and depression. Musical ideas assailed and tormented him, whirling him into ecstatic frenzies and then dropping him like a limp rag doll. “So many musical ideas are seething within me”, he wrote to a friend, “oh, must my destiny be engulfed by this overwhelming passion?”. “This imaginary world”, he wrote to his father several months later, “has become a real malady”. But the work which was gestating inside him remained chaotic, out of focus, impossible to fix or transcribe. Then abruptly, in March of 1830, the fever broke. Over the next six weeks he wrote the entire Symphonie Fantastique, some movements apparently scribbled almost automatically in a single night. On the 16th April he wrote to his friend and collaborator, the librettist Humbert Ferrand, including his first draft of the Symphonie’s programme.

The narrative of the first three movements is one of unrequited love: the protagonist yearning for his beloved, encountering her at a ball, imagining her in the pastoral setting of a meadow. But the final two movements make a violent and shocking transition into fantasies of delirium, nightmare and death. This transition in the story is effected by a plot device which has since become familiar, but was in its time strikingly novel: the protagonist takes a large dose of an intoxicating drug, opium. In his letter to Ferrand, Berlioz explained the narrative as follows:

“Movement 4 – In a fit of despair he poisons himself with opium; but instead of killing him the narcotic induces a horrific vision, in which he believes he has murdered the loved one, has been condemned to death, and witnesses his own execution. March to the scaffold; immense procession of headsmen, soldiers and populace. At the end the melody appears once again, like a last reminder of love, interrupted by the death stroke.

Movement 5 – The next moment he is surrounded by a hideous throng of demons and sorcerers, gathered to celebrate Sabbath night. They summon from far and wide. At last the melody arrives. Till then it had appeared only in a graceful guise, but now it has become a vulgar tavern tune, trivial and base; the beloved object has come to the Sabbath to take part in her victim’s funeral. She is nothing but a courtesan, fit to figure in the orgy. The ceremony begins; the bells toll, the whole hellish cohort prostrates itself; a chorus chants the plainsong sequence of the dead (Dies Irae), two other choruses repeat it in a burlesque parody. Finally, the Sabbath round-dance whirls. At its violent climax it mingles with the Dies Irae, and the vision ends.”

https://mikejay.net/opium-and-the-symphonie-fantastique/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

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         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 SEE ALSO: frankly...