16 March, 2021
The Nightingale: Music, Poetry & Literature (III)
Modern Times (1900-now)
The sweet songs of nightingales have enamoured humans from the dawn of time, it seems, or at least from the dawn of culture, where we found ways to transform our beliefs and worries, our dreams and awe into words, music and art. We find the nightingale tucked into the furthest recesses of human culture, its nocturnal warblings metamorphosing into a metaphor for artists, paramours and poets over time, feverishly burning the midnight oil in the pursuit of art, love and beauty.
Our deep dive into the nightingale’s influence in music, poetry and literature through the ages comes to an end, with a look at the modern period from 1900 until now. Stravinsky, Bob Dylan, Disney, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey… all have fallen under the nightingale’s sweet spell.
As we prepare to renew this ephemeral connection between humans and nightingales in spring with our Singing With Nightingales, series, here’s a look at a few places over the last century-plus where the bird’s presence has been conjured:
Music
1911 – Granados – ‘The Maiden & the Nightingale’, piano suite from Goyescas
1914 – Milhaud – ‘The Nightingale’ – based on the French text by Leo Latil
1917 – Stravinsky – (Le Chant du Rossignol) The Song of the Nightingale
A symphonic poem written in 1917, adapted from his earlier work Le Rossignol (‘ The Nightingale’) – an opera from 1914. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the same name (see Part II of this blog series), the opera was the first ever written by Stravinsky, but took six years to complete all three acts due to his commissions to write The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring for impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
1924 – Beatrice Harrison – The Cello & The Nightingale
Where our Singing With Nightingales series all began! Beatrice Harrison’s improvised cello duets with a nightingale in her garden was broadcast on the BBC and caused a national sensation, which quickly spread to other parts of the globe as the magic of this unusual performance enchanted people listening at home.
1928 – Ottorino Respighi – ‘The Nightingale’ from The Birds
1939 – ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ (composed by Manning Sherwin, lyrics by Eric Mashwitz)
1950 – Cindarella (Disney) – ‘Oh, Sing Sweet Nightingale’
1965 – The Clancy Brothers – ‘The Nightingale’
1974 – Carole King – ‘Nightingale’
1983 – Bob Dylan – ‘Jokerman’ – “Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune / Bird fly high by the light of the moon”
1989 – Julee Cruise – ‘The Nightingale’
Originally from David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks.
2002 – Norah Jones – ‘Nightingale’
2004 – Leonard Cohen – ‘Nightingale’
2011 – Jackie Oates – ‘Sweet Nightingale’
2011 – Fionn Regan – ‘For a Nightingale’
2011 – PJ Harvey – ‘The Nightingale’
2020 – Cosmo Sheldrake – ‘Nightingale’ Part 1 & 2
Taken from the album Wake Up Calls, recorded over a 9 year period using recordings of bird song featured on a red and amber list of endangered British birds.
2020 – Erland Cooper – ‘A Nightingale Sings Outside Our Window’
Composed after BBC Radio 6’s Chris Hawkins invited composer and multi-instrumentalist Cooper to create a piece highlighting how music and sound can help our mental health, to support Mental Health Week.
Poetry & Literature
C20th – Jorge Luis Borges – ‘To the Nightingale’
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator Jorge Luis Borges was a founder and practitioner of postmodernist literature, a movement in which literature distances itself from life situations in favour of metafiction, self-reflexivity, paradox, fragmentation, unreliable narrators and intertextuality.
On what secret night in England
Or by the incalculable constant Rhine,
Lost among all the nights of my nights,
Carried to my unknowing ear
Your voice, burdened with mythology,
Nightingale of Virgil, of the Persians?
Perhaps I never heard you, yet my life
I bound to your life, inseparably.
A wandering spirit is your symbol
In a book of enigmas. El Marino
Named you the siren of the woods
And you sing through Juliet’s night
And in the intricate Latin pages
And from the pine-trees of that other,
Nightingale of Germany and Judea,
Heine, mocking, burning, mourning.
Keats heard you for all, everywhere.
There’s not one of the bright names
The people of the earth have given you
That does not yearn to match your music,
Nightingale of shadows. The Muslim
Dreamed you drunk with ecstasy
His breast trans-pierced by the thorn
Of the sung rose that you redden
With your last blood. Assiduously
I plot these lines in twilight emptiness,
Nightingale of the shores and seas,
Who in exaltation, memory and fable
Burn with love and die melodiously.
2021 – Sam Lee – The Nightingale
Our very own Artistic Director Sam Lee has written a book about the humble nightingale, tracing its origins in history, ornithology and folklore. Due for release on March 25th, you can pre-order it here.
