Paddy Leigh Fermor has always been one of my favourite travel writers, ever since I read a collection of his letters (highly recommend) several years ago, but I didn't get around to reading any of his books until last week, when I picked up A Time of Gifts in an East Anglia charity shop. A spirited account of his solo trek from Rotterdam to Istanbul, undertaken at the remarkable age of eighteen, it's erudite, beautifully written and packed with great stories.
An observation of Fermor's which particularly chimed with me was that 'people who need poetry' accumulate a 'private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorised as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.' I [can] hardly ever do this for whole poems; certain from Tennyson's ridiculously catchy (in a sad, stirring way) In Memoriam are an exception, and I almost know off by heart the famous extract from The Cure at Troy, but I do amass every day chunks of poems which I sense will accompany me for a lifetime. Italian poetry has given me a great deal. Dante's 'L'amore che move il sole e le altre stelle' is one of them. Montale's E il vuoto ad ogni grado is another. And earlier this week I found another heartbreaking line, this time from Luigi Pirandello:
E l'amore guardò il tempo, e rise
And love looked at time, and laughed
I went back to listen to MacGregor's recording of the Art of Fugue after a while. There is- and I will say it to anyone who will listen- something uniquely monumental about that piece. The Hammerklavier and Schubert's D960 are the only two pieces which have ever come close. As soon as the seeds of the first fugue are sown, you just know you're in for something extraordinary. The colossal architecture Bach raised always reminds me of the story of the man who built a cathedral on his own.
I've been trying to understand why people like Lipatti's recording of Chopin's waltzes so much. It's a good recording, but nowhere near a reference for me; sure, played from the heart, and naturally enough, but also kinda rushed in patches, and lacking nuance for me elsewhere. It just didn't get me to sit up, in general. However, I discovered Cziffra's 1962 recording of the set today, and I really appreciated it. The thing about Cziffra's take was the big, brash textures, which turned otherwise easily polite pieces into something else altogether. Friedman did the same for Chopin mazurkas in an unpublished recording I blogged about earlier.
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