Read Online Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins - Free Book Online
Authors: Charlotte Higgins
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Caractacus preparing to face the Romans in battle; he also provides the tale with a romantic subplot, giving the British hero a daughter, Eigen (named after one of the Elgars’ neighbours in Malvern), who is in love with a young Druidic bard.
The Britons having been defeated, the scene changes to Rome. Addressing the emperor, Caractacus appeals not to Claudius’sreputation, as in the Tacitean original, but to his more delicate, romantic feelings, pleading on behalf of ‘my guileless daughter’ and her lover. Claudius pardons the family, and the cantata ends with a chorus foretelling the glories of the British empire, taking its cue from the prophecies of Rome’s future greatness in the
Aeneid
. In early versions of the piece’s vocal score, Elgar had even used as an epigraph a quotation (‘a land pregnant with empires …’) from the sixth book of Virgil’s epic.
But jingoism is not the only mood in the work. By far its most affecting passages relate to the defeated Caractacus, with whom Elgar strongly identified. While writing the cantata, he and his wife, Alice, stayed in the shadow of the Herefordshire Beacon in the Malverns, which – with its impressive Iron Age hill fort – local antiquaries thought was the site of the rebel’s final battle. Elgar marinated himself in the landscape, walking the hills and the woods. When Caractacus makes his final appeal to Claudius, he sings:
We lived in peace, was that a crime to thee,
That thy fierce eagle stoop’d upon our nest?
A freeborn chieftain, and a people free,
We dwelt among our woodlands, and were blest.
The word ‘woodlands’ is repeated when sung – a moment of shattering poignancy. Elgar wrote of it to his friend A. J. Jaeger: ‘I made old Caractacus stop as if broken down … & choke & say “woodlands” again because I’m so madly devoted to my woods.’ It is as if, for Elgar, Caractacus is sprung from the land – from the very woods and the mountains. The unpleasant sentiments of the last chorus mask, in truth, a complicated web of potential sympathies and allegiances (was not the British empire the ‘fierce eagle’ of its day, swooping upon other nests?). In the end, Elgar’s Caractacus will not be pinned down.
Thornycroft’s bronze sculpture group,
Boadicea and Her Daughters
, which gallops along the Embankment at Westminster Bridge in London, was finally erected in 1902, after decades of toil and fund-raising. The horses had been modelled on some of Prince Albert’s – they rear up terrifyingly, their ears pinned back against their heads, their eyes wild. Boadicea stands, arms raised in victory, the fine fabric of her dress pressed back against her body by the onrushing wind. Her daughters lean to each side of her. Scythes flail from herwheelhubs. The gold-lettered inscription on the plinth is from William Cowper’s poem ‘Boadicea: An Ode’, which was written in 1780.
Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they.
It is a fascinating harnessing of an earlier text. The statue itself is a not-very-occluded reference to Queen Victoria (an association aided by the fact that Boudica’s name is derived from the Celtic word for ‘victory’). The co-opting of the lines, in the context of the sculpture, is clear: they vatically proclaim that the Romans may have had a great empire, but Victoria’s is greater still. Boudica is harnessed as a kind of ancestor figure for the later queen and empress. But she is a puzzling, troubling model: for after all, like Caratacus, she was on the losing side.
Cowper’s poem is set just after Boudica’s flogging: she is ‘bleeding from the Roman rods’. She seeks counsel from a Druid, ‘sage beneatha spreading oak’, who foretells the destruction of Rome: ‘Rome shall perish – write that word/ In the blood that she has spilt.’ But at length,
Other Romans shall arise,
Heedless of a soldier’s name;
Sounds,
The Britons having been defeated, the scene changes to Rome. Addressing the emperor, Caractacus appeals not to Claudius’sreputation, as in the Tacitean original, but to his more delicate, romantic feelings, pleading on behalf of ‘my guileless daughter’ and her lover. Claudius pardons the family, and the cantata ends with a chorus foretelling the glories of the British empire, taking its cue from the prophecies of Rome’s future greatness in the
Aeneid
. In early versions of the piece’s vocal score, Elgar had even used as an epigraph a quotation (‘a land pregnant with empires …’) from the sixth book of Virgil’s epic.
But jingoism is not the only mood in the work. By far its most affecting passages relate to the defeated Caractacus, with whom Elgar strongly identified. While writing the cantata, he and his wife, Alice, stayed in the shadow of the Herefordshire Beacon in the Malverns, which – with its impressive Iron Age hill fort – local antiquaries thought was the site of the rebel’s final battle. Elgar marinated himself in the landscape, walking the hills and the woods. When Caractacus makes his final appeal to Claudius, he sings:
We lived in peace, was that a crime to thee,
That thy fierce eagle stoop’d upon our nest?
A freeborn chieftain, and a people free,
We dwelt among our woodlands, and were blest.
The word ‘woodlands’ is repeated when sung – a moment of shattering poignancy. Elgar wrote of it to his friend A. J. Jaeger: ‘I made old Caractacus stop as if broken down … & choke & say “woodlands” again because I’m so madly devoted to my woods.’ It is as if, for Elgar, Caractacus is sprung from the land – from the very woods and the mountains. The unpleasant sentiments of the last chorus mask, in truth, a complicated web of potential sympathies and allegiances (was not the British empire the ‘fierce eagle’ of its day, swooping upon other nests?). In the end, Elgar’s Caractacus will not be pinned down.
Thornycroft’s bronze sculpture group,
Boadicea and Her Daughters
, which gallops along the Embankment at Westminster Bridge in London, was finally erected in 1902, after decades of toil and fund-raising. The horses had been modelled on some of Prince Albert’s – they rear up terrifyingly, their ears pinned back against their heads, their eyes wild. Boadicea stands, arms raised in victory, the fine fabric of her dress pressed back against her body by the onrushing wind. Her daughters lean to each side of her. Scythes flail from herwheelhubs. The gold-lettered inscription on the plinth is from William Cowper’s poem ‘Boadicea: An Ode’, which was written in 1780.
Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they.
It is a fascinating harnessing of an earlier text. The statue itself is a not-very-occluded reference to Queen Victoria (an association aided by the fact that Boudica’s name is derived from the Celtic word for ‘victory’). The co-opting of the lines, in the context of the sculpture, is clear: they vatically proclaim that the Romans may have had a great empire, but Victoria’s is greater still. Boudica is harnessed as a kind of ancestor figure for the later queen and empress. But she is a puzzling, troubling model: for after all, like Caratacus, she was on the losing side.
Cowper’s poem is set just after Boudica’s flogging: she is ‘bleeding from the Roman rods’. She seeks counsel from a Druid, ‘sage beneatha spreading oak’, who foretells the destruction of Rome: ‘Rome shall perish – write that word/ In the blood that she has spilt.’ But at length,
Other Romans shall arise,
Heedless of a soldier’s name;
Sounds,
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