I was at WGBH's Christmas Celtic Sojourn last night, and Robbie O'Connell, nephew of the late great Clancy Brothers, sang John McCutcheon's moving "Christmas in the Trenches", a true story from World War I, when front-line soldiers, acting on their won, opted out of the madness and the murder, if only for a day. The high command was incensed--they felt it didn't showw the proper deadly martial spirit, and court-martialed some of them. But for a day there was peace.
Two versions, the first a live fairly recent performance by John, the second a video set to a recorded live performance with John's intro about meeting some of those soldiers seventy years later.
That was effective. The narrator's voice is beautiful.
I can't say that I often think of Edgar Allen Poe, but, when I do, I think of two things: the Taiwanese professor who taught Poe's period at Wayne State and who pronounced his name "Gar AhLawn Po;" and of Simone de Beauvoir asking why Poe's stature is higher in Europe than in America.
Here is a very different piece inspired by Gar AhLawn Po. The Alan Parsons Project does The Raven:
The late Eric Wolfson wrote a musical called Poe which seems to have run for only 3 days but which was recorded at Abbey Road Studios. Vocalist and heartthrob Steve Balsamo played Poe. Here is Steve singing "Immortal," which is the main song from the show.
Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, intending to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explained in his 1846 follow-up essay "The Philosophy of Composition". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens.[3] Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and makes use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout.
"The Raven" was first attributed to Poe in print in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. Its publication made Poe widely popular in his lifetime, though it did not bring him much financial success. Soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated, critical opinion is divided as to the poem's status, though it remains one of the most famous poems ever written.
