When You're a Guest

The trouble with being a guest, is you basically have to behave yourself,...you can't speak out of turn, and you are extra polite,...at least that's the way I was brought up. However, do you know what I mean when I talk about the other voice?...You know the one that wants to say all the things that you know are going to upset the whole evening and turn it into a battle of opinions etc?...How come we are so polite? Or maybe you aren't, but tell me honestly, do you really and truly say the truth?

Maria :)

bunches

If you go up on Cotswold along of Jenny Lind
You'll hear the same old melodies a-singing in the wind.
It's still the ancient pattern, and you hardly know it's there,
You say it is grey weather and the swinging of the mare.

The Prime Minister of England, Mr Cameron by name,
He lives upon the Cotswold, and his family does the same.
And Rupert Murdoch's editor, she lives on Cotswold too;
And when they're riding side by side they talk about the news.

I used to work the saw horse, I don't touch it any more;
My son does all the sawing, when there's anything to saw.
And when the plain of Cotswold is all supercharged with fogs,
He runs me up a trailerload of beech and cherry logs.

The crowns of winter woodland decline into the mist
I've got a shotgun but I only use it when I'm pissed.
The only thing I ever hit's a global activist.

The larks were high in frothy June, when eyes of heaven burn;
We gate* to watch the cardinal balloons of high Colerne.
The rocks of Box and high Colerne are made of little balls;
And ladies still at smart motels traverse those golden vestibules.

*dial. "stand by the garden gate"

to be sighed off as "partially complete"

When the Kurfürstensonaten were published in 1783, they were said to be the work of an 11-year-old boy. But Beethoven was then 13, so perhaps their prodigious claims were a little exaggerated. They are three piano sonatas - No 33 in E flat, 34 in F minor and 35 in D. (These numbers are conveniences, simply appending them onto the end of the 32 piano sonatas that people usually talk about.) You can listen to them in Jenő Jandó's rendition on Naxos (Vol. 10 of the complete Piano sonatas).

Keith Anderson's sleeve-notes say: "Their interest must lie in hints of the composer's later development and even in suggestions of themes that were to appear in other mature compositions."

For the relativist, the word "must" is inadmissible here - this, as mentioned several times on this blog, involves assumptions encoded in the word "juvenilia" that are almost universally held but are impossible to defend. And in fact, what could be more self-fulfillingly dreary than to listen only for hints of the future?

*

(Camille Saint-Saëns, giving a recital, age 10, offered to encore by performing any one of the 32 from memory.)