I recognized the tune at once. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles in the air, on land and sea.”
How delicious to know that the music was originally comic bombast.
But then, it’s generally known that the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner is a tavern chorus. They must have had a higher class of drunkard back in the day.
For opera fans, there is a readily available video of a good Le nozze di Figaro featuring Benjamin Luxon, from Glyndebourne 1973. Here is the Glyndebourne archive entry: https://www.glyndebourne.com/archive_performances/le-nozze-di-figaro-15-august-1973/; and here is a link to the performance: https://www.operaonvideo.com/le-nozze-di-figaro-glyndebourne-1973-skram-te-kanawa-von-stade-luxon/. Luxon and Kiri te Kanawa are the Count and Countess, Knut Skram and Ileana Cotrubas are Figaro and Susanna, and - perennial heartthrob of mine - Frederica von Stade is Cherubino. Other players are excellent too, especially Nucci Condo as Marcellina. A really enjoyable performance to watch, as the players are all very good and evidently enjoying themselves.
24 May 2020 at 16:07
Anonymous said...
Thanks for this! I love the Tear performance of A.A. Milne Pooh and other songs and poems set by Harold Fraser-Simson - which settings you can clearly tell Nigel Hawthorne knew, from his Pooh Penguin audiobook work (also delightful). Why are these splendid recordings not constantly available? (Sadly only got an evasive answer the time in inquired of Penguin about the latter...)
Luxon gives a master-class here in something I wondered about when I sang in choirs as a boy - before my voice changed and ended that: What should a solo singer do with his hands? In that Figaro I mentioned, Luxon is a wonderfully haughty Count. At the end of Act I, when he banishes Cherubino to the army, I have the impression Frederica von Stade is genuinely frightened of him. Good acting by both.
28 May 2020 at 17:34
Robert Tear and Benjamin Luxon were the performers I first saw doing this piece; the recording seems to have been filmed from the TV screen, some years later. Tear and Luxon were among the leading British operatic and recital singers of that era* - and revived many of the 'parlour songs' from the 19th and early 20th century.
The show depicted in the video was a long-running (30 years) and popular BBC programme called The Good Old Days, which was a pastiche Victorian-ish Music Hall filmed in an old theatre in Leeds.
The "Gendarmes Duet" is an excellent piece, with music by Offenbach (a good enough tune in its own right to become a favourite march in the USA) and the robustly witty English lyrics later added by HB Farnie. One of the few comic songs to match Gilbert and Sullivan.
We're public guardians bold, yet wary And of ourselves we take good care To risk our precious lives we're chary When danger looms, we're never there But when we meet a helpless woman Or little boys that do no harm
We run them in, we run them in We run them in, we run them in We show them we're the bold [or beaux] gendarmes We run them in, we run them in We run them in, we run them in We show them we're the bold gendarmes.
Sometimes our duty's extramural Then little butterflies we chase We like to gambol in things rural Commune with nature face to face Unto our beat then back returning Refreshed by nature's holy charm
(Chorus)
If gentlemen will make a riot And punch each other's heads at night We're quite disposed to keep it quiet Provided that they make it right But if they do not seem to see it Or give to us our proper terms
(Chorus).
*Tear and Luxon show the strengths and weaknesses of the voice
training methods - and selection processes - associated with the English
choral tradition; both were part of Benjamin Britten's clique at one
time. Tear, for example, has a technically robust but hard voice,
excellent diction and intelligent 'pointing' of the lyrics. He was best in 'character' tenor roles, rather than the usual heroic lead parts. To my ear,
both voices have overtones that blur the focus of the notes, so that one
is unsure whether the intonation is a bit off, or not. This is common
defect of chorally-trained English tenors (notably Peter Pears!). These qualities seem to be derived from the nature
of the chorister's job - he must be able to sing difficult music, at
sight, on a daily basis; and be intelligent enough (like Tear) to get a
singing scholarship at one of the leading universities. All of which
means that sheer beauty of vocal tone is sacrificed - since many/ most of the
most beautiful singers are not good at reading music, and are of modest
intelligence.
Note added: I've come across an interesting 1982 interview with Luxon, which makes clear that his own background and abilities were very different from Robert Tear; for example he states that he does not have perfect pitch and was not a brilliant sight reader. But he says that most modern singers do and are; by contrast with earlier generations when all sorts of people became professional singers: people, at least in England in my generation or the generation before, just wandered into singing from just about every profession you could name. Hardly anyone “trained” to be a singer. It just didn’t happen. Most of my contemporaries were truck drivers or miners or engineers, architects, bank clerks, school teachers… What Luxon does not say is that there is a big price to pay for this technical expertise when it comes to solo singing - and that price is reduced beauty of tone; which is, after all, what singing is mostly about for most ordinary people.
"The Gendarmes duet - as good as G&S"
7 Comments -
It's been many a decade since I heard that. I now remember liking it when I was a boy. Where could I have heard it? In a Panto, maybe?
P.S. "gambol".
24 May 2020 at 12:45
@d - Thanks, corrected (I lazily cut and pasted the lyrics).
It used to be the kind of song performed in student revues and the like; and these two did in on tv a few times.
24 May 2020 at 14:12
Please, Sir! Please, Sir! Please Sir!
I know where I heard it after boyhood. We sang it at my rugby club. After beer had been taken we used different lyrics.
24 May 2020 at 14:15
I recognized the tune at once. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles in the air, on land and sea.”
How delicious to know that the music was originally comic bombast.
But then, it’s generally known that the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner is a tavern chorus. They must have had a higher class of drunkard back in the day.
24 May 2020 at 16:01
For opera fans, there is a readily available video of a good Le nozze di Figaro featuring Benjamin Luxon, from Glyndebourne 1973. Here is the Glyndebourne archive entry:
https://www.glyndebourne.com/archive_performances/le-nozze-di-figaro-15-august-1973/;
and here is a link to the performance:
https://www.operaonvideo.com/le-nozze-di-figaro-glyndebourne-1973-skram-te-kanawa-von-stade-luxon/.
Luxon and Kiri te Kanawa are the Count and Countess, Knut Skram and Ileana Cotrubas are Figaro and Susanna, and - perennial heartthrob of mine - Frederica von Stade is Cherubino. Other players are excellent too, especially Nucci Condo as Marcellina. A really enjoyable performance to watch, as the players are all very good and evidently enjoying themselves.
24 May 2020 at 16:07
Thanks for this! I love the Tear performance of A.A. Milne Pooh and other songs and poems set by Harold Fraser-Simson - which settings you can clearly tell Nigel Hawthorne knew, from his Pooh Penguin audiobook work (also delightful). Why are these splendid recordings not constantly available? (Sadly only got an evasive answer the time in inquired of Penguin about the latter...)
David Llewellyn Dodds
25 May 2020 at 05:01
Luxon gives a master-class here in something I wondered about when I sang in choirs as a boy - before my voice changed and ended that: What should a solo singer do with his hands?
In that Figaro I mentioned, Luxon is a wonderfully haughty Count. At the end of Act I, when he banishes Cherubino to the army, I have the impression Frederica von Stade is genuinely frightened of him. Good acting by both.
28 May 2020 at 17:34