Is there a return to visionary Romanticism these days on classical music stations? In the last few months, I've heard an unusual number of works that heavily influenced me in my youth. Each of them has a passionate, rhythmic force or hypnotic lyricism: Leopold Stokowski's dynamic orchestral transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor" (written for organ); Alexander Borodin's "Polovetzian Dances"; Ernest Chausson's "Poème" for violin and orchestra; and Ralph Vaughan Williams' "English Folk Song Suite."
The Stokowski transcription of Bach had an explosive impact on me when I first heard it on my parents' 45 RPM record before I had even entered kindergarten. This week Philadelphia's WRTI played a spectacular recording of it by the Philadelphia Orchestra (for whom the transcription was originally done), conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. The sonorities of those massed strings could make the earth shake.
The "Toccata and Fugue" is so thunderous, propulsive and over-the-top that it seems to prefigure the Led Zeppelin phase of early heavy metal. It's a clash of the titans: We're overhearing two quarreling aspects of Bach himself. The heroic, questioning, yet tragic individual voice looks forward to Romanticism, while the orderly affirmation of transfiguring collective faith looks back toward medievalism.
The Vaughan Williams "English Folk Song Suite" has special meaning to me because it was a splendid set piece of my concert band in the early 1960s at Nottingham High School in Syracuse, N.Y. The clarinets do a lot of heavy lifting in that piece. Alas, I played clarinet very badly (I was always last seat, third section), partly because I longed to play the drums -- considered unsuitable for a girl in that era.
To my surprise, I recently discovered that the "English Folk Song Suite" was originally written for military band and was not, as I had always thought, transcribed from an orchestral version. The date was 1923 -- a year after the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which registered the devastating disillusion of the generation that had lived through World War I, with its obscene carnage (over 8 million killed to redraw a few borderlines).
Thus Vaughan Williams' juxtaposition of folk song motifs with military riffs was a poetic relinking of British culture to its pre-modern agrarian past. That's exactly what Led Zeppelin did in their signature song, "Stairway to Heaven," which begins with the pipes of the medieval English countryside (whose fragrant herbs appear in "Scarborough Fair"). The savagery of war, with its wanton waste of young lives, would be purged and spiritually transcended through art.
But before purgation and transcendence, the bloodshed must stop. Bring the troops home from Iraq now.
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Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her July letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
About the writer
Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems."
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