Music For A Fallen King

[richardfinegold]

I know that the Forum is supposed to be Polics Free, but in view of the fact that there was a very important Felony Conviction on my side of the pond yesterday, what musical excerpts would be appropriate to commemorate? I keep coming up with Funeral Music suggestions but something more like a King being deposed, if not actually beheaded, would be more appropriate. Perhaps the world of Opera has some guidance

[smittims]

Hmmm... Opera tends to deal with the deaths of heroic martyrs, not quite appropriate in this case, or beautiful young women. All I can think of off-hand is the march in Act 3 of Vaughan Williams' Pilgrim's Progress where Pilgrim is frog-marched off to jail. Then there's the March to the Scaffold from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, which the young organist Edward Elgar once played at a wedding c.1877, .

[french frank]

Don Giovanni?

[Forget It (U2079353)]

Somehow this passage from Eliot comes to mind ...

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.

[Belgrove]

George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence perhaps?

[Serial_Apologist]

Peter Maxwell Davies Eight Songs for a Mad King.

[vinteuil]

... it wd be appropriate in this instance for the King to be a subject of ridicule. I propose le Roi Ouf in Chabrier's l'Étoile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%A9toile_(opera)

.

[oliver sudden]

Then there's the March to the Scaffold from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, which the young organist Edward Elgar once played at a wedding c.1877, .

Brilliant.

I suppose the famous marches aren’t exactly impeccable in the plot department either. Given that in one of them there’s a couple that is only linked due to the influence of certain substances, and in the other the groom catches the next swan out of town.

[richardfinegold]

I love that Elgar wedding story. I haven’t heard the 8 Songs For A Mad King since I worked in a record store in my University days. We had a recording on the Nonesuch Label. Was the soloist Jan DeGaenti? The manager of the store hated it. He was a very ‘handsy’ letch’ with female staffers and one of them would constantly put the album on in the days before she quit to annoy him. So perhaps some relevance to the current situation

[pastoralguy]

How about Nancy Sinatra’s ‘How does that grab you, Darlin’?’

[eighthobstruction]

....grind his bones to make my bread..... (as he left the court) Widor's Symphony in F, Movement 5 -Toccata.........Onward.....

[vinteuil]

....grind his bones to make my bread...

I love wiki! - checking up on :

Fee-fi-fo-fum
I smell the bones of an Englishman,
Be alive, or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread

I find :
"Charles Mackay proposes in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe that the seemingly meaningless string of syllables "Fa fe fi fo fum" is actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic, and that the complete quatrain covertly expresses the Celts' cultural detestation of the invading Angles and Saxons:

• Fa from faich (fa!) "behold!" or "see!"
• Fe from Fiadh (fee-a) "food";
• Fi from fiú "good to eat"
• Fo from fogh (fó) "sufficient" and
• Fum from feum "hunger".

Thus "Fa fe fi fo fum!" becomes "Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger!"

hmmmmmmm.....
.

[Roger Webb]

... it wd be appropriate in this instance for the King to be a subject of ridicule. I propose le Roi Ouf in Chabrier's l'Étoile




.

But perhaps not Chabrier's 'Le Roi malgré lui'....although translated as 'The King in spite of himself' might fit, the more accurate 'The reluctant King' certainly won't!

This particular Roi (Henri de Valois) was assassinated in 1589.....you never know🙄

[eighthobstruction]

....you never know

Fa Fa Fa , Fa Fa, Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa - Psycho Killer....quest que ce.... (one too many Fa - I've gone too Fa)

[Master Jacques]

I haven’t heard the 8 Songs For A Mad King since I worked in a record store in my University days. We had a recording on the Nonesuch Label. Was the soloist Jan DeGaenti? The manager of the store hated it. He was a very ‘handsy’ letch’ with female staffers and one of them would constantly put the album on in the days before she quit to annoy him. So perhaps some relevance to the current situation

No, the classic Fires of London recording under the composer features - unforgettably - the composer/singer Julius Eastman. Nonesuch and Jan De Gaetani suggests George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, rather than anything by Max - I don't think she performed Miss Donnithorne's Maggot (feminine mirror to the Mad King songs) but would be glad to be corrected.