GRATIANA

That song fascinated me. It was very simple: a stately eight-bar measure repeated with subtle development on the piano, almost like the ground of a passacaglia; above it the tenor line soared in praise of the woman dancing and singing as though "the Graces danced and Apollo played", leaving the floor "paved with broken hearts." Simple indeed, by a totally unfamiliar composer setting 17th-century verse, yet the effect was magical.

I try to imagine the scene: a polished floor with the single figure in a long white dress gravely pacing out the steps, lit by a beam of light from a circular window high on the far wall, but I cannot distinguish her features at all. Was the song inspired by any real woman, I wonder, or by an inner vision of more than earthly beauty, transcending the human as widely as the human surpasses the ape?

The background becomes clearer. Figures are moving along a colonnade, some richly attired, gaily conversing among themselves with much laughter; others in sober blacks and greys, silent or engaged in earnest discussion. While the song lasts they are sufficiently restrained for a vestige of courtesy to hold between them. It ends, and they separate, gradually breaking into derision on one side, bitter recrimination on the other.

The scene shifts to a series of battlegrounds with dreadful slaughter, then again to a public space in which a white-shirted figure emerges from a window on to a scaffold, kneels at a block and is beheaded. More battles, century upon century, continent on continent, with deadlier weapons, ever-increasing devastation and mounting carnage, figures reaching millions in a single decade, "a whole generation lost". The song rises again in imagination over those fields. Once, it seems long ago, I remembered the name of the composer; now, alas, onnly that he is among the dead.

November 2014