The near disappearance of railway dining cars is something to be sorry about. Save for a few departures to the south-west and a daily service between Cardiff and Holyhead, the days of consuming a meal while speeding along the permanent way are pretty much gone in this country. The restaurant car evoked the great days of train travel: damask tablecloths reflecting sun and shadow, clinking steel cutlery, the surface of a glass of wine or water gently rolling, staff effortlessly balanced as they passed by with steaming silver trays of meat and vegetables.
A microwaved toasted cheese sandwich and a small plastic bottle of warm wine does not have the same impact.
There is a glorious account of a railway lunch in a book I have just read: Flèche, which takes its name from the Flèche d’Or or Golden Arrow, the Anglo-French service that linked London and Paris in the century before the Channel Tunnel.
Author Tony Scotland recounts a journey made on November 30, 1934, by a quartet of illustrious passengers: Igor Stravinsky, his mistress Vera Sudeikina, the violinist Samuel Dushkin and the Francophile English composer Lennox Berkeley. Stravinsky had been in London for a performance of his cantata Perséphone at the Queen’s Hall; Berkeley was returning to his life in Paris.
In a letter to a friend afterwards, Berkeley reported meeting Stravinsky and gang on the boat train. He mentions a game of bridge, and lunch in the Wagons-Lits restaurant, where “quantities of red wine” were drunk. Scotland has imaginatively reconstructed the rest. Alone in the dining car, the two composers discuss their music and their friends, their reconstructed conversations entirely composed of words recorded in other circumstances.
As a fan of both composers’ music (and president of the Lennox Berkeley Society), I read this short book with delight in the second-class carriage of a train heading north. Scotland’s painstaking research captures a romantic era: the “silver-plated pots of steaming coffee” on the Victoria-Dover train; a steward serving champagne and arranging a table for bridge on the Awning Deck saloon of the SS Canterbury; crayfish à la manière ukrainienne and breast of duckling with a 1926 Château Pichon Comtesse in the French dining car.
Issued in a limited, numbered edition, Flèche is published by Shelf Lives, an imprint run by Scotland and Julian Berkeley, Lennox’s son. Another book in their catalogue tells of the chance discovery of a dilapidated Graduale Romanum in a secondhand bookshop. It turned out that this edition of the chants for the Proper sections of the Mass was printed by the pioneering Plantin Press in Antwerp in 1598, using the then new technology which was replacing illuminated manuscripts. Gradual recounts the book’s careful restoration, and traces its role in the history of the Spanish Netherlands during the Counter-Reformation.
In 1934 Lennox Berkeley was taking the train to Paris to continue his lessons with Nadia Boulanger, the great musical pedagogue whose students included Copland, Thomson, Barenboim and Piazzolla. Boulanger’s less-remembered sister Lili will be a focal point of this year’s BBC Proms. She died a century ago in March 1918, aged just 24.
Lili Boulanger was still a teenager when she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, France’s most prestigious composition prize. She was already suffering from the Crohn’s disease that was to kill her a few years later. The dozen or so major works she wrote in her short life suggest a composer who would have become a significant voice in early 20th-century music.
As her health became progressively worse, her Catholic faith grew stronger. The Paris Conservatoire discouraged its students from writing religious music; it didn’t fit with its republican, secular outlook. But that didn’t stop Boulanger making three psalm settings. More might have followed. In her study of the composer, Dr Caroline Potter describes a red notebook filled with nascent musical ideas. It includes a psalm text – probably No 134 – which she considered setting, along with sketches for an unfinished Kyrie.
That Lili attended Mass every Sunday is not surprising – but accounts in her diary of meetings with priests and discussions about theology and prayer suggest a deeper interest in faith. According to the American musicologist Annegret Fauser, in 1916, dressed in white, Boulanger had an audience with Benedict XV. Her final work was a setting of the Pie Jesu written in early 1924.
Too ill to write it out herself, Lili dictated it to her sister Nadia from what soon became her deathbed. The Proms will feature six of her works this summer, including her setting of Psalm 130.
Flèche and Gradual are published by Shelf Lives (shelflives.org) at £15. Petroc Trelawny is a presenter on BBC Radio 3
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