Vincent d’Indy’s Joyous Symphony

March 27 is the birthday of Vincent d’Indy, who was born on this day in 1851 in Paris.

D’Indy (dan dee) came from an aristocratic family, and seems to have been introduced to music by his grandmother. He began taking piano lessons when he was ten, which is about the right age for such undertakings, and subsequently became acquainted with the music of Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner. He also served in the infantry during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and, apparently to fulfill his family’s wishes, studied law.

After the war, however, d’Indy devoted himself entirely to music, studying under Cesar Franck and even, for a time, the great Franz Liszt. There followed a busy career that included conducting, helping found and administer a school of music known as the Schola Cantorum, and so on. However, he’s remembered today for his richly harmonic compositions, primarily his 1886 Symphonie sur un chant montagnard française, or Symphonie cévenole. We know it in English as the Symphony on a French Mountain Air, and you can listen to it played by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Robert Casadesus on the piano, here.

Lithograph by F. Morieu; Lemercier & Cie, Paris

(A word about geography: The word cévenole in d’Indy’s title is a reference to a cultural region and range of mountains in south-central France, the setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic account Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. The area includes part of another region, the département of the Ardèche, which was d’Indy’s ancestral home.)

While d’Indy called his work a symphony, it makes prominent use of a piano. However, the composer didn’t intend to write a concerto—a piece in which the instrument dominates. A more precise term is sinfonia concertante, a work in which a solo instrument plays a contrasting role with the orchestra. In any case, the symphony makes prominent use of a melody d’Indy actually heard during one of his summer vacations in the Ardèche.

Writing in Vincent d’Indy and His World (Oxford UP, 1996), Andrew Thomson explains that during those vacations, the composer met with the area’s local musicians on Fridays in order to encourage and help them with their playing, practiced with local orchestras, and even played the harmonium in a local church on Sundays.

D’Indy’s enchantment with the Ardèche and the melody he heard there are both evident in the symphony, which practically sings with the joys of the open air and life in the mountains. What could be better?

♫ ♫ ♫

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Navigating the Strait

Matthäus Merian the Elder, after; *Scylla et Charybdis,* c.1700

Grove Koger

The strait I have in mind lies between the northeastern tip of Sicily (the Punta del Faro) and the region of Calabria on the “toe” of the Italian boot (the Punta Pezzo)—the Strait of Messina.

At its narrowest, it’s a bit under two miles wide, and, like quite a few straits and other geographical features, it seems to have accumulated a number of significant “associations”—mythological, historical, geological, and even literary. In other words, it’s both a locus (or particular location) and a focus (or center of activity).

Henry Fuseli, *Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis,* 1794–1796

The Strait is routinely identified with the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of the Odyssey, the passage in which Odysseus and his men sail, or at least row, between a rocky shoal (the six-headed monster Scylla) and a dangerous whirlpool (Charybdis). Odysseus seems to have had a way with goddesses, in this case Circe, who advised him to sacrifice a handful of his men to Scylla rather than lose all of them, along with his ship, to Charybdis. It was, in other words, a difficult choice, and has led to the phrase that’s still in use today—usually by those who have no idea of its origin.

There’s actually a small town in seaside Calabria known, a little ominously, as Scilla, as I’ve learned from a 2022 book by Marco Benoît Carbone, Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic). Carbone’s survey has led me through a thicket of myth and mythic associations (not to mention a few tangles of academese), but it’s alerted me to a number of intriguing issues relating to the area. One involves a local scholar, Franco Mosino, who has determined to his satisfaction, if no one else’s, that the author of The Odyssey had actually lived in the area and had revealed his true identity by way of an acrostic in the ancient text! Carbone calls the theory a “local-centric worldview.” It’s a new term to me, but clearly one that shapes a lot of our thinking.

Albert Henry Payne, Steel engraving of the Strait of Messina, 1840

The strait was the scene of a catastrophic earthquake in 1908, the “largest seismic event ever recorded in southern Europe” since measuring instruments were introduced, according to G. Barreca et al in “The Strait of Messina: Seismotectonics and the Source of the 1908 Earthquake.” Writing in the July 2021 issue of Earth-Science Reviews, they point out that the causes of the catastrophe “have remained elusive” and make their own suggestions about the underlying issues. Famed travel writer Norman Douglas visited the scene from his home on Capri to make a donation to the survivors, and, in his eccentric novel The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Frederick Rolfe included an episode involving the rescue of a young woman in the quake’s aftermath.

The strait is also frequently the site of the Fata Morgana, an odd mirage in which an object such as a boat is seen in distorted form floating above the horizon. The phenomenon’s suggestive name is a reference, if you follow it back far enough, to the enchantress Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend.

*The Fata Morgana, as observed in the Harbour of Messina,* from *A Library of Wonders and Curiosities Found in Nature and Art, Science and Literature,* 1884

For years now, Italians have debated the possibility of constructing a bridge across the Strait. It’s a project that would be enormously costly and that, given the seismotectonic situation that led to the 1908 earthquake, seems to me to be wildly unwise. But it’s a complicated issue worth examining another day.

Finally, I’ll mention a purely personal association with the Strait: Millennia after Odysseus’ fraught passage, my first wife and I passed through the strait one peaceful night on a ship of the Turkish Maritime Lines. Both shores were ablaze with lights, and although our ship made its way slowly, the experience didn’t last long enough to savor adequately. But we were on our way to more adventures, and I suspect that our thoughts were probably racing far ahead.

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The Fraught Voyage of the Cleopatra

George Knight, *Cleopatra’s Needle Being Brought to England, 1877*

Grove Koger

It’s an instance drawn from what we might call “Annals of Pillage”—a seemingly endless stream of thefts and near-thefts by the conquerors from the conquered. The most famous such act probably involves the so-called Elgin Marbles, removed from Athens’ famous Parthenon by Lord Elgin’s workers during Greece’s occupation by the Ottoman Turks. But the predations that have been visited upon Egypt have actually been worse. One particular instance stands out, although it proceeded perfectly legally.

There are actually two obelisks that have been referred to as “Cleopatra’s” (although they have no meaningful connection with the Egyptian queen), but the one I’m writing about today can be found on the Victoria Embankment in London. Carved out of syenite, a reddish granite, it was originally erected near what’s now Cairo, and moved centuries later, in 13/12 BCE, to the port of Alexandria, but had long since fallen into the sand.

It seems that the Sultan of Egypt and Sudan, Muhammad Ali (who was neither Egyptian nor Sudanese), offered the obelisk to Britain in 1819 in commemoration of Britain’s victory over France in the 1798 Battle of the Nile. However, Britain didn’t take Ali up on the offer at the time, and half a century would elapse before the saga of this particular obelisk really begins.

British engineers John and Waynman Dixon were visiting Egypt in 1872, and in October of that year decided to examine the obelisk where it lay in the sand near the shore. They came up with a plan, apparently on the spot, for acting on Ali’s 1819 offer. They would fit an iron cylinder (with six internal, watertight bulkheads) around the obelisk, add a rudimentary superstructure, hire a small crew, and arrange to have a steamer tow the cylinder to England. The words are easy to write, but, given the fact that the 68-foot obelisk weighed about 186 tons (!), the task proved time-consuming and, of course, difficult.

After the preliminary work had been completed, two steamers were engaged to pull the cylinder out to sea, but it sank immediately. A diver discovered that it had been pierced by a massive piece of submerged building stone and had taken on water. What’s more, no one had closed the bulkheads, so the entire cylinder had flooded!

Repairs took several arduous days to complete, but, on September 7, 1877, the tugs were able to pull the cylinder free and tow it to dry dock, where the superstructure was welded to the top and two long keels to the bottom. The actual voyage then began on September 21, when the British steamer Olga set out from Alexandria’s harbor with the cylinder, now suitably christened the Cleopatra, behind it.

The first problem arose several days into the voyage, when the cable pulling the Cleopatra became detached, but it was soon reattached and the voyage proceeded. The two vessels reached Gibraltar on October 7, where they put in for a day or two, and then proceeded into the Atlantic and up the Iberian coast into the Bay of Biscay. There, the notoriously stormy bay lived up to its reputation, for on October 15, the vessels were beset by gale- and then hurricane-force winds. The Cleopatra’s ballast shifted, tilting the vessel onto its side, but when its captain tried to launch a lifeboat, the boat smashed to bits. The crew of the Olga lowered their own boat, but it suffered the same fate, resulting in the loss of six men. Subsequently the captain of the Olga, fearing that the two vessels would collide, cast off the cable.

The *Cleopatra* at Westminster Bridge, *Illustrated London News*, Feb. 16, 1878

Incredibly enough, however, the Cleopatra survived the night, after which the crew of the Olga managed to re-attach a line and use it to transfer an unmanned lifeboat to the Cleopatra—an act that allowed the vessel’s desperate crew to reach the Olga safely. However, the Cleopatra then disappeared and was presumed lost.

And yet (a phrase that seems particularly suited to these endeavors) … the Cleopatra hadn’t sunk. It was sighted several days later by the steamer Fitzmaurice, whose captain attached a cable and subsequently filed a claim for salvage. After the matter was adjudicated, the tugboat Anglia was commissioned to tow the cylinder to England and up the Thames, where the obelisk was finally erected, with suitable fanfare, on the Victoria Embankment. The day was September 12, 1878—nearly a year after its fraught voyage had begun and nearly six years since the Dixon brothers had first laid eyes on it!

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Giorgios Samartzis Paints Corfu

Samartzis, *Corfu Windmill and Fortress*, 1919

Grove Koger

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself on the island of Corfu in the spring of 2025, you can enjoy an exhibition at the Corfu Gallery of the works of Corfiote artist Giorgios Samartzis, who was born on the island in 1868, four years after it and the other Ionian Islands were ceded by Great Britain to Greece.

Samartzis studied under Vikentios Boccachiambi and the better-known Angelos Giallinas, and went on to attend the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples. He returned to Greece in 1889, apparently planning to live in Athens, but his family’s financial difficulties forced him to return to Corfu two years later. There he taught in the island’s schools and worked as director of the Art School of Corfu.

Besides the scenes I’ve included in today’s post, Samartzis painted a number of portraits and religious works, most of which strike me as less interesting. He seems to have begun his career as a conventional academic artist, but, over time, adopted aspects of the revolutionary artistic trends that would eventually replace academicism, including impressionism, pointillism, and even cubism. The work I’ve reproduced at the top of today’s post, Corfu Windmill and Fortress, is a particularly good example of Samartzis’s talent in full flower. (That’s the historic Anemomylos Windmill, built by the Venetians, just to the left of the taller fortress.)

Information about Samartzis online is scant, but the secretary of the Hellenic-Cyprus Association of Art Authenticators/Appraisers, Nektarianna Saliverou, has recently published a study titled The Corfu Painter George S. Samartzis (1868-1925).

The exhibition draws upon works in the permanent collection of the Corfu Gallery, Ioannou Theotoki 77, and runs from March 5 to May 20, 2025. The gallery’s hours are 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Monday through Friday.

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