The Quest for Cahill - Work in Progress
I spent a particulary busy Christmas break researching the Indian and Far Eastern concert tour 1919-1921 of the pianist Edward Cahill accompanied by the tenor George Brooke and writing that chapter of his extraordinary life. The Queensland floods may necessarily postpone my trip to Australia for that section of the book until later in the year. The deadline I have been given may need to be extended as I rearrange matters. At all events here is an extract from the completed Chapter 3 of the new book. First a few initial reflections on Liszt.
I hope to go to Weimar again this year to see the Liszt house (which will have been fully restored by now) and investigate more fully his years spent teaching in that extraordinary and beautiful small town. This remarkable place had an incalculable effect on the now cruelly and tragically abandoned ideals of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought in Europe. Both Goethe and Schiller lived and wrote there and visiting their respective houses (particularly Goethe's on the immortal Frauenplan) is a true spiritual experience of a high order. Thomas Mann of course set his moving Lotte in Weimar in this enchanted place and one can still visit and stay at the Hotel Elephant where much of the intense nostalgia for the shadows of Goethe's past love fall. Now restored in Art Deco splendour.
La Campanella can be downloaded free at:
http://www.box.net/shared/59e773yxjq
To begin the year of Liszt I suggest you could not do better than listen to the superb performance of the Liszt transcription of the Paganini study La Campanella recorded by Edward Cahill in 1935. You will realise on hearing this individualistic interpretation that Cahill lies on the cusp of the the great nineteenth century pianistic tradition of de Pachmann, Friedman, Lehvinne, Godowsky and Rosenthal. Please consult the numerous posts on Edward Cahill in this blog to fill in the gaps if you are interested further in this astonishing life story and have not already done so.
La Campanella can be downloaded free at:
Hyperion offer the brilliant edition of the complete piano works of Liszt (99 CDs) performed by that magnificent interpreter of Liszt, the Australian pianist and composer Leslie Howard (who will be performing at the 66th. Duszniki Zdroj Piano Festival in Poland this year to my delight). It is the largest recording project ever undertaken by any recording artist (including pop artists). In 2000 he was awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal and Citation by the Hungarian Government, a rare honour for a non-Hungarian. He had previously received from the Hungarian government the Ferenc Liszt Medal of Honour and he has also been awarded France's Grand Prix du Disque six times for his Liszt recordings. The BBC Music Magazine wrote: "Howard is, by general consensus, the finest living exponent of Liszt. He has a formidable intellectual grasp of the music. His vastly superior performances continue to carry the day".
The finest older recording of the complete Liszt Etudes d'Execution Transcendante to my mind is that by the astounding virtuoso and wildly temperamental Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Cziffra (1921-1994). My recording is on the Angel label monophonic vinyl B-3591-2. Yes I am great aficionado of vinyl recordings and have a great number. There is now a difficult to obtain EMI Classics 'Great Artists of the Century' series CD featuring Cziffra in this same recording.
Of more modern recordings of the etudes, one of the greatest is that of Janina Fialkowska - for me a truly great virtuoso in the old nineteenth centry school of great sensibility allied with fabulous technique. Opening Day Recordings CD ODR 9322
To my mind the most electrifying, possessed and sulphuric performance of the B minor Sonata ever with more than a whiff of Hell-fire is the immortal 1932 performance by Vladimir Horowitz. Mine is another Angel mono vinyl recording GR-2041 (COLH-72). It comes together with Funerailles and various small virtuosic Schumann pieces of which Horowitz was so fond. Available now on Naxos Historical CD 8.110606
Of the modern recordings of the B-Minor Sonata, possibly the Krystian Zimerman is the most oustanding. Magnificent in every way. It is coupled with Funerailles and three of the rarely performed, impressionistic and visionary late pieces: Nuages gris, La notte and La Lugubre gondola II. Digital Stereo DGG CD 431 780-2
I can recommend two recordings of the two Piano Concertos S.124 and S. 125
The first is a quite magnificent remastering of the 1961 recording by Sviatoslav Richter and the London Symphony Orchestra under Kiril Kondrashin. This electrifying performance is driven by demons. The sound is opulent and astounding - stunning - if you have equipment that does full justice to this 1995 remastered reissue of a remarkable interpretation. It is also inexpensive. The concertos are coupled with a towering performance of the B Minor Sonata. Philips Solo CD 446 200-2
The other recording of the concertos is replete with fiery Hungarian sensibility, poetry and the astounding virtuosity of a Lisztian master pianist. A 1971/1972 recording remastered in 1987. Gyorgy Cziffra with the Orchestra de Paris conducted by his son Gyorgy Cziffra Jr. Surely a unique pairing of musician father and son . The interpretation is incredibly cohesive for this very reason. It is coupled with a wild performance of the Totentanz Paraphrase on Dies Irae which made my hair stand up on end as well as the Hungarian Fantasy S. 123. EMI Classics CD 7243 5 74736 2 0
Of more modern recordings of the etudes, one of the greatest is that of Janina Fialkowska - for me a truly great virtuoso in the old nineteenth centry school of great sensibility allied with fabulous technique. Opening Day Recordings CD ODR 9322
To my mind the most electrifying, possessed and sulphuric performance of the B minor Sonata ever with more than a whiff of Hell-fire is the immortal 1932 performance by Vladimir Horowitz. Mine is another Angel mono vinyl recording GR-2041 (COLH-72). It comes together with Funerailles and various small virtuosic Schumann pieces of which Horowitz was so fond. Available now on Naxos Historical CD 8.110606
Of the modern recordings of the B-Minor Sonata, possibly the Krystian Zimerman is the most oustanding. Magnificent in every way. It is coupled with Funerailles and three of the rarely performed, impressionistic and visionary late pieces: Nuages gris, La notte and La Lugubre gondola II. Digital Stereo DGG CD 431 780-2
I can recommend two recordings of the two Piano Concertos S.124 and S. 125
The first is a quite magnificent remastering of the 1961 recording by Sviatoslav Richter and the London Symphony Orchestra under Kiril Kondrashin. This electrifying performance is driven by demons. The sound is opulent and astounding - stunning - if you have equipment that does full justice to this 1995 remastered reissue of a remarkable interpretation. It is also inexpensive. The concertos are coupled with a towering performance of the B Minor Sonata. Philips Solo CD 446 200-2
The other recording of the concertos is replete with fiery Hungarian sensibility, poetry and the astounding virtuosity of a Lisztian master pianist. A 1971/1972 recording remastered in 1987. Gyorgy Cziffra with the Orchestra de Paris conducted by his son Gyorgy Cziffra Jr. Surely a unique pairing of musician father and son . The interpretation is incredibly cohesive for this very reason. It is coupled with a wild performance of the Totentanz Paraphrase on Dies Irae which made my hair stand up on end as well as the Hungarian Fantasy S. 123. EMI Classics CD 7243 5 74736 2 0
The Pocket
Paderewski
Scenes from the remarkable Life and Times
of
the Australian concert pianist Edward Cahill
of
the Australian concert pianist Edward Cahill
Chapter 3 Of Maharajas and Kings (extract)
It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt
They showed me secret paths
They brought before my sight
Many a star on the horizon of my heart.
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (101)
The Canadian impresario Frederick Shipman billed her as ‘The Perfect Woman’ with ‘Measurements that Almost Surpass Belief’ likening her to the Venus de Milo and Diana, detailing close comparisons in height, chest, hips, thigh, calf and wrists. This was alluring Annette Kellermann, Australian pioneer of the one piece bathing suit, professional mermaid, champion swimmer and film star. Frederick, survivor of shipwreck and earthquake, was a man not to be taken lightly. After all he arranged worldwide tours for ‘difficult’ opera prima donnas like Nellie Melba. For the Cahill-Brooke Concert Party his ambition was immense. He conceived the longest musical concert tour of the Far East and India ever attempted by Europeans. Over two years they would tour India, Java, the Philippine Islands, Borneo, Siam (Thailand), Sumatra, Kashmir, Burma, China, Manchuria and Japan.
It had been a year since the Cahill family were devastated by the untimely death of Eddie’s brother James, a volunteer Private in the First Australian Imperial Force. He had died heartbreakingly close to the Armistice on 17th November 1918 from pneumonic influenza in the Quarantine Station in Sydney, an early victim of the world pandemic that was to claim perhaps a hundred million lives. He was eighteen. The concert tour would perhaps relieve Cahill of his grief and rejuvenate his winning personality, his normally sunny temperament. It would be their first voyage abroad.
They sailed to Calcutta (Kolkata) from Darwin in late October 1919 aboard the Burns Philp SS Montoro, a comfortable passenger vessel of a few thousand tons that plied between India, Java and Singapore. This was the ship that in 1927 took the young, penurious Errol Flynn to volcanic Rabaul in New Guinea in a search for gold. On board Flynn had used his customary machismo charm to arrange an appointment as a cadet patrol officer.
Their first taste of the exoticism of the East came unexpectedly in Darwin itself after an exhausting train journey of days across the deserted red heart of the continent. In 1919 Darwin was an unprepossessing town prone to periodic destruction by cyclones. The community had developed with a significant Chinese population during the gold rush of the 1880s when they constructed the railway to Pine Creek. Subsequently Darwin had slumped commercially and was now rather isolated but remained a significant port. Shops boasted wide verandah roofs supported on slender columns that stood in lines like sentries offering shade to the unemployed Chinese, Europeans and Japanese who lolled in the stifling heat. Indigenous Australians were kept in isolated compounds and women scarcely ever seen in this predominantly masculine society. Bullock carts and camel trains passed lethargically along the wide streets and the occasional bean seed planter in white sola topi and tropical suit would emerge onto a wooden balcony to survey the somnolent scene. The evening before they sailed Cahill and Brooke gave a concert using an ancient troubled piano in a dilapidated ‘concert hall’. They ambled to the venue through the humid, slightly cooler evening, along wooden walkways lit by colourful Chinese lanterns redolent with a mixture of exotic herbs and dung. Certainly a fascinating adventure had begun travelling in countries profoundly unknown to them.
The Oriental ship’s crew ran furiously about the deck carrying laundry as the low foreshore of Darwin receded in the smoky haze from the ship’s funnel. The voyage was smooth and uneventful, the gentle thrum of the engines reassuring, the movement of air on deck refreshing during the velvet tropical nights. Flying fish glittered on brief trajectories above the sea, dolphins raced alongside as the red-tailed tropic birds, mewing and diving, riding the currents of air above the deck trailing streamers of vermillion light. Approaching island points of call, natives furiously paddling alongside in canoes would leap out and clamber up any dangling rope or ladder to sell bone trinkets, fish hooks or wooden carvings. The ennui of days at sea were relieved with endless games of deck quoits arranged by the Australian officers. Dressing for dinner was de rigueur and on one fancy dress evening the passengers were required to appear as the title of a book. Eddie dressed as the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski while George acted as his ‘secretary’ following him about with a pen and paper as if taking notes for his biography.
In the Bay of Bengal some hundred miles from Kolkata Port, a highly skilled and immaculately dressed Pilot boarded the ship with his assistant. He would guide the Montoro through the swift and treacherous currents of the Hooghly River past the ruins of a Portuguese Fort to the berth at Diamond Harbour. Kipling described it as ‘the most dangerous river on earth’ with channels swollen and constantly changing with ‘the fat silt of the fields’. Cahill and Brooke were taken by car from here to the Grand Hotel. They would perform their first recital of the tour at the dazzlingly white imperial Calcutta Club.
Kolkata, known as the ‘City of Palaces’ and ‘second city of the Empire’ had been the colorful and exotic capital of the British Raj for a hundred and forty years. New Delhi supplanted the city in 1911 as the British Indian Empire could be more conveniently be administered from there. The club had been founded in 1907 by Lord Minto who as Viceroy of India followed the distinguished path carved out by his predecessor Lord Curzon. This was the high noon of the British Empire in India. Minto, a keen hunter (his shooting party bagged 4,919 inedible sand grouse in two days in 1906), once commented in a burst of imperial pride ‘The Raj will not disappear in India as long as the British race remains what it is…’. Of course the ‘race’ did not remain what it was, national characteristics being a febrile quality. Somewhat inconsistently he established the Calcutta Club to subvert discrimination on the basis of race. He presciently felt ‘that we [the British] are mere sojourners in the land, only camping and on the march.’ The first president of the club was thre fabulously wealthy H H The Maharajah of Cooch Behar.
On arrival all they knew of the city was the mysterious and dangerous myth of Empire, the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta. The details (almost forgotten today) were known by every schoolboy and colonial subject at that time – perhaps the only fact they knew about India. They admired Dalhousie Square, the classically columned administrative centre of the city (the present Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bag) and the former headquarters of the East India Company. They visited the monument in the north-west corner erected by Lord Curzon in 1902 to those men who died in the prison known as the 'Black Hole’ after incarceration by the twenty-three year old Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah. He had felt threatened, even insulted, by the refusal of representatives of the East India Company to cease strengthening the fortifications that protected their trade in Calcutta.
In June 1756 the Nawab’s superior forces attacked and easily overran Calcutta's old Fort William. The captured defenders (including one ‘young and handsome’ woman) were placed on the night of June 20 in an overcrowded, poorly ventilated dark cell in the suffocating heat. The number who died vary in different accounts from 53 to some 146 souls. They licked their own sweat and drank their own urine to survive. It was not an heroic story of resistance. The prisoners were brutalized by their animal instincts in a desperate struggle for water and air, trampling to death the weakest in their midst. Almost exactly a year later on 23 June 1757 the East India Company’s forces under the leadership of Robert Clive had defeated the Nawab and reasserted British control over the city at the seminal Battle of Plassey. The Nawab was executed.
This engagement dates the establishment of the British Empire in India. However there existed considerable contemporary indifference in Britain. The rapacious trading Company and its practices were not particularly favorably viewed in London at the time. The great eighteenth century English statesman Edmund Burke defended the paramount importance of respecting Indian cultural norms and institutions in the advance of trade, Empire as a paternalistic expression of patrician virtue. The Nawab’s rebellion against the East India Company and the ‘Black Hole’ incident was elevated to a founding myth of Empire by the Victorians as a triumph of duty and mental discipline over adversity and 'oriental cruelty'. Today in modern India the Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah is considered a hero and the story a vilification of Empire. The pendulum of historical revisionism again swings in its arc.
Long after this fraught episode both our wandering artists were 'enraptured’ by the former capital and its extensive parks as they strolled through the haze-filled European Quarter along wide avenues of classical Palladian architecture. The Maidan and its promenade was an eloquent reminder of London. They passed the monumental classical arch and massive Roman columns forming the entrance to Government House. The arch was crowned with a British lion, its paw possessively resting on a globe in a statement of the invincibility of the Empire. Bullock carts, tongas , men wearing the dhoti with loose shirts carried umbrellas against the fierce sun.
Cracks in the edifice of Britain's domination had already begun to widen inexorably. The storm clouds of Indian nationalism were gathering. The Cahill-Brooke Concert Party had arrived to entertain troops and administrators in a country balanced on the cusp of profound change. Ghandi had transformed the India National Congress party into a powerful force demanding home rule. He had implemented his philosophy of civil disobedience (satyagraha). Disillusion with the efficiency of British Government had grown as the economy of India was weakened by inflation and the collapse of exports. Millions had died in the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. During the Great War there had been terrible sacrifices of the fiercely loyal British Indian Army soldiers in the hell and humiliating capitulation of the five month long Siege of Kut in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq).
The spell of faultless Anglo-Saxon organization had been broken by incompetent British generals at Kut. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, in discussions concerning the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the idea abolishing of the caliphate in Constantinople emerged as an unexpectedly major issue in India. Anxious Indian Muslims made up a quarter of the population of the subcontinent and recognized the Sultan as their spiritual leader throughout the world. Petitions and deputations were sent to Lloyd George in Paris. Ghandi, although a Hindu, ranged up behind the movement to retain the caliphate in an opportune gesture of religious reconciliation.
In April the massacre at Amritsar of hundreds of men women and children by troops commanded by an unnerved, unstable and vain British general had caused irreparable damage to British moral authority. In all it was a delicate time for a concert party to be touring India but colonial fellow feeling was evident in Eddie’s letters home and his diary of the tour. Identification with ‘the oppressed’ was a quality that would remain in his personality throughout his career, surfacing throughout the Second World War and again in retirement during the apartheid period in South Africa. One imagines that Chopin’s politically fervent music would have spoken directly to those administrators in India sensitive enough to foresee the threats to stability and the struggle that would ensue.
More immediate impressions for them were the occasional motor cars crossing the Howrah Bridge blowing their horns and scattering men carrying baskets of fruit precariously on their heads. The red brick of Chowringhee was a hurly-burly of shops, hotels and offices. They explored the poorer areas and dusty odiferous markets, the air beguiled with spices and rich roasting coffee. Cramped shops in narrow streets were festooned with colored cloth and ornate signs in Bengali. They saw the shops of clattering cobblers, the glitter of the brass smiths, engaging barbers shaving customers seated on the hard packed earth and ‘coolies’ naked to the waist carrying heaps of goods wildly tied with rope breasting the endless tide of men.
Even at this early stage in their careers, a great talent for programming by the pianist and tenor became evident. Edward believed the simple truth that audiences wish to be entertained. He believed women to be far more sympathetic to music than their men folk – an opinion shared incidentally by Artur Rubinstein. This would certainly have been the case in colonial India where men were judged on their preference for ‘hard bodily exercise’, their ability to ride, hunt game, show skill at pig-sticking, shoot and talk sublimely of tigers. Many were tough men able to tolerate acute sensual deprivation in the searing heat and suffocating humidity of the plains. ‘Galloping after pig’ was a dangerous sport over rough terrain. The cornered prey could turn and charge, open up the belly of a horse or one’s unprotected calf with its tusks. The jungle wallahs preferred ‘knocking about in stained brown raiment’ and waking up for breakfast in virgin undergrowth. Playing classical music on the piano in white tie would be considered far too effete an activity for ‘real men’. However among the Collectors and Civilians of the Imperial bureaucracy there were a minority of cultured Oxford men, even intellectuals, who read Plato, Horace and Homer. Some studied and made significant and selfless contributions to knowledge of Indian languages and ethnography. In remote outstations District Officers read Kipling’s stories with the greatest pleasure. Most contributed significantly to advancing the infrastructure, ruling by a mixture of discipline, military might and moral force. Such men and their wives were sprinkled about the appreciative audience.
In their programs the Cahill-Brooke concert party achieved a remarkable balance within a variety of musical genres. They created far more socially involving programmes of ‘classical’ music than is common today where the presence of ‘the sacred’ in music is in the ascendant and the monastic silence of the cloister prevails in the conceret hall. This attitude of 'sharing' rather than 'presenting' music from afar would be the source of their continuing popularity. With their infectious personalities they wished to embrace the audience and entertain them, not be pitted against it or bludgeon it to death.
A Schumann Novelette or the Chopin Grande Waltz Brillante might jostle with the popular and stirring Maori song Waiata Poi; a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody may follow a Negro spiritual; serious Schubert Lieder or Puccini operatic arias might hold hands with charming salon piano pieces by the largely forgotten composers such as Cecile Chaminade, Amilcare Zanella or Benjamin Godard. The Calcutta concerts at the club were tremendously successful (discounting the wayward tuning of the piano) with many encores enthusiastically demanded. Oftentimes the British administrators and their wives were chronically bored and a concert was a brief solace and reminder of the domestic comforts of home, an imaginative flight, a respite from their often onerous duty and present nationalist threats. It would be a pattern that would be repeated throughout their extensive tour of India. The colonial audiences loved them.
* * * * *
The red tongue of the Hindu Goddess Kali sprang down vertically from her mouth, the black female figure with a flailing arms was surrounded by fire, her wild eyes skewered the heart as she stood on the indigo corpse of the Hindu deity Siva. The image wore a necklace of skulls. The street containing this mural was dark and narrow, littered with refuse and reeking of ordure, dissolution, death and decay. Yet the bazaars teemed with effervescent life and vibrant colour. Beggars and boys in grotesque masks sprang from dim corners without warning. Bright stalls sold a riot of mortuary paraphernalia. Barbers shaved and tonsured mourners in the streets (sin resides in the hair). Pilgrims wearing perfumed garlands of flowers prayed at tiny wayside shrines under the vast roots of ancient trees, some labored by carrying staffs and heavy baggage. They passed in crowded knots, seeming to flow like the tide towards the banks of the Ganges, tributaries of the great river itself. Ascetic holy men (sadhus) covered in ash with long, dusty, hennaed hair, wearing fierce expressions on their painted faces, needed some courage to walk past. Haughty high caste brahmins gazed unfocused into a superior world.
The Cahill-Brooke Company had reached Kashi (Benares or modern Varanasi) the spiritual capital of India, a city associated with death and its transcendence. They had travelled by train on the East Indian Railway from Kolkata, some 870 kilometers. It was one of the earliest railway lines to be completed in India in December 1862. This ancient site has produced great writers, thinkers, philosophers and remarkable school of music, a city famous for its woven cloths and ornate silks. The great authority on the city Richard Lannoy refers to it as ‘a state of mind’. The Maharajah of Benares would be their host.
Edward had an insatiable curiosity about life and loved exploring new cities. He was carried along by the tide of thousands of pilgrims, unresisting along the narrow lanes towards the source of the pungent haze that lay over the city. He clambered down myriad steps through dizzying levels of complexity, passing ornately carved pinnacles of blackened temples, terraces, the bastions of palaces, arcaded blocks, cracked platforms, crumbling walls of brick, pyramids, domes, patios and hanging gardens withering, desiccated on filigreed cast-iron balconies. Large grey monkeys skipped about. He felt trapped in a piece of consummate theatre as the heat inexorably increased.
Suddenly the Ganges, the colour of old gold, lay under an endless sky. Beneath the terraces at the water’s edge a panalopy of woven leaf parasols sheltered bathers from the sun. The colours of draped cloth – yellow, mauve, saffron and green - radiated the festive atmosphere of a floral display. There was a solemnity, even nobility, in the draped figures of women carrying polished brass pots or leading their children, ascending and descending the steps of the palaces to the sacred waters. The entire river bank was thronged with bathers and the river itself dotted with boatmen disposing of the remains of bodies or ashes. An occasional corpse or dead animal floated past. The water was clearly polluted yet the pilgrims drank of it to purify themselves believing it to be miraculous. Despite all the decay he was reminded of Arcadian classical paintings by Poussin or Claude, Carthage in ruins. These were the Burning Ghats of Kashi, the most exalted of them being the Ghat of Manikarnika. If the body is immolated here the soul goes directly to heaven or may be reborn in a richer earthly reincarnation.
November is a time of extraordinary religious fervor in Benares. The wooden biers with shrouded bodies roped to them (white for men and red for women) are immersed in the Ganges and then allowed to dry for a time. A pyre of selected woods is built upon a platform. The body is reverently placed upon it and lit with a flaming torch after incantations and circling the body. Waves of heat and smoke rise to the visitors’ viewing towers carrying the unsettling sound and smell of flames devouring flesh. The family hover in close intimacy to this primal spiritual scene yet no tears flow. They are transfixed by the reduction of the body to its component parts - to ash, to dust and finally to a few bones whose significance is ‘read’ by the enlightened. Funeral Priests, believed to be the embodiment of malevolent souls, move through the haze like phantoms, striking the corpses with batons, assisting the dissolution of the mortal remains, their consumption by fire. When all was dissolved the skull was cracked with a bamboo pole to release the soul.
Edward watched this compelling scene with fascination born of innocence filtered through the symbolic euphemisms of his own staunch Roman Catholic faith. His inexperienced aesthetic nature was stunned by the sight. Here was the stark obverse of the colonial coin. His native Irish wit and humour saw little ground for inspiration in the exoticism of these scenes. In Benares the dead or nearly dead seem to outnumber the living. Corpses are brought from all over India, even internationally, to be burnt at Kashi. Hindu pilgrims come in their millions to this sacred place simply to bathe, live out their remaining months or years, brought here even on their deathbeds. Companies with catchy names such as Heaven Express or Last Rites Mail specialize in such funereal transport and unpleasantly reminded him of the business aspect of the industry of death.
Edward and George were to perform at the magnificent eighteenth century Ramnagar Fort before H.H. Maharajadhiraja Sri Sir Prabhu Narayan Singh Sahib Bahadur and his guests. He had been created Maharajah of Benares of the new Princely State by the British in 1911 in recognition of his support during the Indian Mutiny and had been granted a personal salute of 15 guns not long before their arrival. This imposing and exotic red sandstone confection of Hindu and Islamic architecture is situated some fourteen kilometers from Varanasi on the opposite bank of the river. Monumental walls and bastions reminiscent of crusader castles line the river front. Airy open formal courtyards, fountains and carved arcades adorn the interior spaces. Within the palace they performed in the opulent Durbar Hall of the palace lined with precious marbles, a sandalwood throne, brocades of silver and gold, inlaid ivory furniture, crystal chandeliers and tiger skins which together created a sumptuous vision that Edward never forgot. This was the first time Chopin and much Western music had ever been performed in this part of India. After their own programme an Hindustani late night raga particular to Benares was performed.
The Maharajah lavished gifts of diamond encrusted cigarette cases upon them and placed his magnificent Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost at their disposal. It made its stately yet theatrical progress past bullock carts whose occupants tumbled out onto the road, the animals plunging into nearby ditches. It wafted past sacred cows and elephants, supplicants before the wayside altars, screaming children and colourfully turbaned pilgrims. Dogs fearlessly charged the car head on emerging unscathed from beneath barking wildly in the choking dust. They discovered that early motoring in India was a dramatic activity and a great deal more lay before them. One of the British guests, a Deputy Collector, told them a motoring story where an elderly Indian woman walking in the middle of the road was run over and killed by a speeding car carrying the Nizam Mahbub Ali Pasha of Hyderabad. His Highness being severley troubled by the event sent a generous gift to the family. The Deputy Collector noticed that from then on whenever the Nizam went driving the road suddenly became full of the elderly poor placed there by impecunious relatives.
It had been a year since the Cahill family were devastated by the untimely death of Eddie’s brother James, a volunteer Private in the First Australian Imperial Force. He had died heartbreakingly close to the Armistice on 17th November 1918 from pneumonic influenza in the Quarantine Station in Sydney, an early victim of the world pandemic that was to claim perhaps a hundred million lives. He was eighteen. The concert tour would perhaps relieve Cahill of his grief and rejuvenate his winning personality, his normally sunny temperament. It would be their first voyage abroad.
They sailed to Calcutta (Kolkata) from Darwin in late October 1919 aboard the Burns Philp SS Montoro, a comfortable passenger vessel of a few thousand tons that plied between India, Java and Singapore. This was the ship that in 1927 took the young, penurious Errol Flynn to volcanic Rabaul in New Guinea in a search for gold. On board Flynn had used his customary machismo charm to arrange an appointment as a cadet patrol officer.
Their first taste of the exoticism of the East came unexpectedly in Darwin itself after an exhausting train journey of days across the deserted red heart of the continent. In 1919 Darwin was an unprepossessing town prone to periodic destruction by cyclones. The community had developed with a significant Chinese population during the gold rush of the 1880s when they constructed the railway to Pine Creek. Subsequently Darwin had slumped commercially and was now rather isolated but remained a significant port. Shops boasted wide verandah roofs supported on slender columns that stood in lines like sentries offering shade to the unemployed Chinese, Europeans and Japanese who lolled in the stifling heat. Indigenous Australians were kept in isolated compounds and women scarcely ever seen in this predominantly masculine society. Bullock carts and camel trains passed lethargically along the wide streets and the occasional bean seed planter in white sola topi and tropical suit would emerge onto a wooden balcony to survey the somnolent scene. The evening before they sailed Cahill and Brooke gave a concert using an ancient troubled piano in a dilapidated ‘concert hall’. They ambled to the venue through the humid, slightly cooler evening, along wooden walkways lit by colourful Chinese lanterns redolent with a mixture of exotic herbs and dung. Certainly a fascinating adventure had begun travelling in countries profoundly unknown to them.
The Oriental ship’s crew ran furiously about the deck carrying laundry as the low foreshore of Darwin receded in the smoky haze from the ship’s funnel. The voyage was smooth and uneventful, the gentle thrum of the engines reassuring, the movement of air on deck refreshing during the velvet tropical nights. Flying fish glittered on brief trajectories above the sea, dolphins raced alongside as the red-tailed tropic birds, mewing and diving, riding the currents of air above the deck trailing streamers of vermillion light. Approaching island points of call, natives furiously paddling alongside in canoes would leap out and clamber up any dangling rope or ladder to sell bone trinkets, fish hooks or wooden carvings. The ennui of days at sea were relieved with endless games of deck quoits arranged by the Australian officers. Dressing for dinner was de rigueur and on one fancy dress evening the passengers were required to appear as the title of a book. Eddie dressed as the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski while George acted as his ‘secretary’ following him about with a pen and paper as if taking notes for his biography.
In the Bay of Bengal some hundred miles from Kolkata Port, a highly skilled and immaculately dressed Pilot boarded the ship with his assistant. He would guide the Montoro through the swift and treacherous currents of the Hooghly River past the ruins of a Portuguese Fort to the berth at Diamond Harbour. Kipling described it as ‘the most dangerous river on earth’ with channels swollen and constantly changing with ‘the fat silt of the fields’. Cahill and Brooke were taken by car from here to the Grand Hotel. They would perform their first recital of the tour at the dazzlingly white imperial Calcutta Club.
Kolkata, known as the ‘City of Palaces’ and ‘second city of the Empire’ had been the colorful and exotic capital of the British Raj for a hundred and forty years. New Delhi supplanted the city in 1911 as the British Indian Empire could be more conveniently be administered from there. The club had been founded in 1907 by Lord Minto who as Viceroy of India followed the distinguished path carved out by his predecessor Lord Curzon. This was the high noon of the British Empire in India. Minto, a keen hunter (his shooting party bagged 4,919 inedible sand grouse in two days in 1906), once commented in a burst of imperial pride ‘The Raj will not disappear in India as long as the British race remains what it is…’. Of course the ‘race’ did not remain what it was, national characteristics being a febrile quality. Somewhat inconsistently he established the Calcutta Club to subvert discrimination on the basis of race. He presciently felt ‘that we [the British] are mere sojourners in the land, only camping and on the march.’ The first president of the club was thre fabulously wealthy H H The Maharajah of Cooch Behar.
On arrival all they knew of the city was the mysterious and dangerous myth of Empire, the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta. The details (almost forgotten today) were known by every schoolboy and colonial subject at that time – perhaps the only fact they knew about India. They admired Dalhousie Square, the classically columned administrative centre of the city (the present Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bag) and the former headquarters of the East India Company. They visited the monument in the north-west corner erected by Lord Curzon in 1902 to those men who died in the prison known as the 'Black Hole’ after incarceration by the twenty-three year old Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah. He had felt threatened, even insulted, by the refusal of representatives of the East India Company to cease strengthening the fortifications that protected their trade in Calcutta.
In June 1756 the Nawab’s superior forces attacked and easily overran Calcutta's old Fort William. The captured defenders (including one ‘young and handsome’ woman) were placed on the night of June 20 in an overcrowded, poorly ventilated dark cell in the suffocating heat. The number who died vary in different accounts from 53 to some 146 souls. They licked their own sweat and drank their own urine to survive. It was not an heroic story of resistance. The prisoners were brutalized by their animal instincts in a desperate struggle for water and air, trampling to death the weakest in their midst. Almost exactly a year later on 23 June 1757 the East India Company’s forces under the leadership of Robert Clive had defeated the Nawab and reasserted British control over the city at the seminal Battle of Plassey. The Nawab was executed.
This engagement dates the establishment of the British Empire in India. However there existed considerable contemporary indifference in Britain. The rapacious trading Company and its practices were not particularly favorably viewed in London at the time. The great eighteenth century English statesman Edmund Burke defended the paramount importance of respecting Indian cultural norms and institutions in the advance of trade, Empire as a paternalistic expression of patrician virtue. The Nawab’s rebellion against the East India Company and the ‘Black Hole’ incident was elevated to a founding myth of Empire by the Victorians as a triumph of duty and mental discipline over adversity and 'oriental cruelty'. Today in modern India the Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah is considered a hero and the story a vilification of Empire. The pendulum of historical revisionism again swings in its arc.
Long after this fraught episode both our wandering artists were 'enraptured’ by the former capital and its extensive parks as they strolled through the haze-filled European Quarter along wide avenues of classical Palladian architecture. The Maidan and its promenade was an eloquent reminder of London. They passed the monumental classical arch and massive Roman columns forming the entrance to Government House. The arch was crowned with a British lion, its paw possessively resting on a globe in a statement of the invincibility of the Empire. Bullock carts, tongas , men wearing the dhoti with loose shirts carried umbrellas against the fierce sun.
Cracks in the edifice of Britain's domination had already begun to widen inexorably. The storm clouds of Indian nationalism were gathering. The Cahill-Brooke Concert Party had arrived to entertain troops and administrators in a country balanced on the cusp of profound change. Ghandi had transformed the India National Congress party into a powerful force demanding home rule. He had implemented his philosophy of civil disobedience (satyagraha). Disillusion with the efficiency of British Government had grown as the economy of India was weakened by inflation and the collapse of exports. Millions had died in the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. During the Great War there had been terrible sacrifices of the fiercely loyal British Indian Army soldiers in the hell and humiliating capitulation of the five month long Siege of Kut in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq).
The spell of faultless Anglo-Saxon organization had been broken by incompetent British generals at Kut. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, in discussions concerning the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the idea abolishing of the caliphate in Constantinople emerged as an unexpectedly major issue in India. Anxious Indian Muslims made up a quarter of the population of the subcontinent and recognized the Sultan as their spiritual leader throughout the world. Petitions and deputations were sent to Lloyd George in Paris. Ghandi, although a Hindu, ranged up behind the movement to retain the caliphate in an opportune gesture of religious reconciliation.
In April the massacre at Amritsar of hundreds of men women and children by troops commanded by an unnerved, unstable and vain British general had caused irreparable damage to British moral authority. In all it was a delicate time for a concert party to be touring India but colonial fellow feeling was evident in Eddie’s letters home and his diary of the tour. Identification with ‘the oppressed’ was a quality that would remain in his personality throughout his career, surfacing throughout the Second World War and again in retirement during the apartheid period in South Africa. One imagines that Chopin’s politically fervent music would have spoken directly to those administrators in India sensitive enough to foresee the threats to stability and the struggle that would ensue.
More immediate impressions for them were the occasional motor cars crossing the Howrah Bridge blowing their horns and scattering men carrying baskets of fruit precariously on their heads. The red brick of Chowringhee was a hurly-burly of shops, hotels and offices. They explored the poorer areas and dusty odiferous markets, the air beguiled with spices and rich roasting coffee. Cramped shops in narrow streets were festooned with colored cloth and ornate signs in Bengali. They saw the shops of clattering cobblers, the glitter of the brass smiths, engaging barbers shaving customers seated on the hard packed earth and ‘coolies’ naked to the waist carrying heaps of goods wildly tied with rope breasting the endless tide of men.
Even at this early stage in their careers, a great talent for programming by the pianist and tenor became evident. Edward believed the simple truth that audiences wish to be entertained. He believed women to be far more sympathetic to music than their men folk – an opinion shared incidentally by Artur Rubinstein. This would certainly have been the case in colonial India where men were judged on their preference for ‘hard bodily exercise’, their ability to ride, hunt game, show skill at pig-sticking, shoot and talk sublimely of tigers. Many were tough men able to tolerate acute sensual deprivation in the searing heat and suffocating humidity of the plains. ‘Galloping after pig’ was a dangerous sport over rough terrain. The cornered prey could turn and charge, open up the belly of a horse or one’s unprotected calf with its tusks. The jungle wallahs preferred ‘knocking about in stained brown raiment’ and waking up for breakfast in virgin undergrowth. Playing classical music on the piano in white tie would be considered far too effete an activity for ‘real men’. However among the Collectors and Civilians of the Imperial bureaucracy there were a minority of cultured Oxford men, even intellectuals, who read Plato, Horace and Homer. Some studied and made significant and selfless contributions to knowledge of Indian languages and ethnography. In remote outstations District Officers read Kipling’s stories with the greatest pleasure. Most contributed significantly to advancing the infrastructure, ruling by a mixture of discipline, military might and moral force. Such men and their wives were sprinkled about the appreciative audience.
In their programs the Cahill-Brooke concert party achieved a remarkable balance within a variety of musical genres. They created far more socially involving programmes of ‘classical’ music than is common today where the presence of ‘the sacred’ in music is in the ascendant and the monastic silence of the cloister prevails in the conceret hall. This attitude of 'sharing' rather than 'presenting' music from afar would be the source of their continuing popularity. With their infectious personalities they wished to embrace the audience and entertain them, not be pitted against it or bludgeon it to death.
A Schumann Novelette or the Chopin Grande Waltz Brillante might jostle with the popular and stirring Maori song Waiata Poi; a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody may follow a Negro spiritual; serious Schubert Lieder or Puccini operatic arias might hold hands with charming salon piano pieces by the largely forgotten composers such as Cecile Chaminade, Amilcare Zanella or Benjamin Godard. The Calcutta concerts at the club were tremendously successful (discounting the wayward tuning of the piano) with many encores enthusiastically demanded. Oftentimes the British administrators and their wives were chronically bored and a concert was a brief solace and reminder of the domestic comforts of home, an imaginative flight, a respite from their often onerous duty and present nationalist threats. It would be a pattern that would be repeated throughout their extensive tour of India. The colonial audiences loved them.
* * * * *
The red tongue of the Hindu Goddess Kali sprang down vertically from her mouth, the black female figure with a flailing arms was surrounded by fire, her wild eyes skewered the heart as she stood on the indigo corpse of the Hindu deity Siva. The image wore a necklace of skulls. The street containing this mural was dark and narrow, littered with refuse and reeking of ordure, dissolution, death and decay. Yet the bazaars teemed with effervescent life and vibrant colour. Beggars and boys in grotesque masks sprang from dim corners without warning. Bright stalls sold a riot of mortuary paraphernalia. Barbers shaved and tonsured mourners in the streets (sin resides in the hair). Pilgrims wearing perfumed garlands of flowers prayed at tiny wayside shrines under the vast roots of ancient trees, some labored by carrying staffs and heavy baggage. They passed in crowded knots, seeming to flow like the tide towards the banks of the Ganges, tributaries of the great river itself. Ascetic holy men (sadhus) covered in ash with long, dusty, hennaed hair, wearing fierce expressions on their painted faces, needed some courage to walk past. Haughty high caste brahmins gazed unfocused into a superior world.
The Cahill-Brooke Company had reached Kashi (Benares or modern Varanasi) the spiritual capital of India, a city associated with death and its transcendence. They had travelled by train on the East Indian Railway from Kolkata, some 870 kilometers. It was one of the earliest railway lines to be completed in India in December 1862. This ancient site has produced great writers, thinkers, philosophers and remarkable school of music, a city famous for its woven cloths and ornate silks. The great authority on the city Richard Lannoy refers to it as ‘a state of mind’. The Maharajah of Benares would be their host.
Edward had an insatiable curiosity about life and loved exploring new cities. He was carried along by the tide of thousands of pilgrims, unresisting along the narrow lanes towards the source of the pungent haze that lay over the city. He clambered down myriad steps through dizzying levels of complexity, passing ornately carved pinnacles of blackened temples, terraces, the bastions of palaces, arcaded blocks, cracked platforms, crumbling walls of brick, pyramids, domes, patios and hanging gardens withering, desiccated on filigreed cast-iron balconies. Large grey monkeys skipped about. He felt trapped in a piece of consummate theatre as the heat inexorably increased.
Suddenly the Ganges, the colour of old gold, lay under an endless sky. Beneath the terraces at the water’s edge a panalopy of woven leaf parasols sheltered bathers from the sun. The colours of draped cloth – yellow, mauve, saffron and green - radiated the festive atmosphere of a floral display. There was a solemnity, even nobility, in the draped figures of women carrying polished brass pots or leading their children, ascending and descending the steps of the palaces to the sacred waters. The entire river bank was thronged with bathers and the river itself dotted with boatmen disposing of the remains of bodies or ashes. An occasional corpse or dead animal floated past. The water was clearly polluted yet the pilgrims drank of it to purify themselves believing it to be miraculous. Despite all the decay he was reminded of Arcadian classical paintings by Poussin or Claude, Carthage in ruins. These were the Burning Ghats of Kashi, the most exalted of them being the Ghat of Manikarnika. If the body is immolated here the soul goes directly to heaven or may be reborn in a richer earthly reincarnation.
November is a time of extraordinary religious fervor in Benares. The wooden biers with shrouded bodies roped to them (white for men and red for women) are immersed in the Ganges and then allowed to dry for a time. A pyre of selected woods is built upon a platform. The body is reverently placed upon it and lit with a flaming torch after incantations and circling the body. Waves of heat and smoke rise to the visitors’ viewing towers carrying the unsettling sound and smell of flames devouring flesh. The family hover in close intimacy to this primal spiritual scene yet no tears flow. They are transfixed by the reduction of the body to its component parts - to ash, to dust and finally to a few bones whose significance is ‘read’ by the enlightened. Funeral Priests, believed to be the embodiment of malevolent souls, move through the haze like phantoms, striking the corpses with batons, assisting the dissolution of the mortal remains, their consumption by fire. When all was dissolved the skull was cracked with a bamboo pole to release the soul.
Edward watched this compelling scene with fascination born of innocence filtered through the symbolic euphemisms of his own staunch Roman Catholic faith. His inexperienced aesthetic nature was stunned by the sight. Here was the stark obverse of the colonial coin. His native Irish wit and humour saw little ground for inspiration in the exoticism of these scenes. In Benares the dead or nearly dead seem to outnumber the living. Corpses are brought from all over India, even internationally, to be burnt at Kashi. Hindu pilgrims come in their millions to this sacred place simply to bathe, live out their remaining months or years, brought here even on their deathbeds. Companies with catchy names such as Heaven Express or Last Rites Mail specialize in such funereal transport and unpleasantly reminded him of the business aspect of the industry of death.
Edward and George were to perform at the magnificent eighteenth century Ramnagar Fort before H.H. Maharajadhiraja Sri Sir Prabhu Narayan Singh Sahib Bahadur and his guests. He had been created Maharajah of Benares of the new Princely State by the British in 1911 in recognition of his support during the Indian Mutiny and had been granted a personal salute of 15 guns not long before their arrival. This imposing and exotic red sandstone confection of Hindu and Islamic architecture is situated some fourteen kilometers from Varanasi on the opposite bank of the river. Monumental walls and bastions reminiscent of crusader castles line the river front. Airy open formal courtyards, fountains and carved arcades adorn the interior spaces. Within the palace they performed in the opulent Durbar Hall of the palace lined with precious marbles, a sandalwood throne, brocades of silver and gold, inlaid ivory furniture, crystal chandeliers and tiger skins which together created a sumptuous vision that Edward never forgot. This was the first time Chopin and much Western music had ever been performed in this part of India. After their own programme an Hindustani late night raga particular to Benares was performed.
The Maharajah lavished gifts of diamond encrusted cigarette cases upon them and placed his magnificent Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost at their disposal. It made its stately yet theatrical progress past bullock carts whose occupants tumbled out onto the road, the animals plunging into nearby ditches. It wafted past sacred cows and elephants, supplicants before the wayside altars, screaming children and colourfully turbaned pilgrims. Dogs fearlessly charged the car head on emerging unscathed from beneath barking wildly in the choking dust. They discovered that early motoring in India was a dramatic activity and a great deal more lay before them. One of the British guests, a Deputy Collector, told them a motoring story where an elderly Indian woman walking in the middle of the road was run over and killed by a speeding car carrying the Nizam Mahbub Ali Pasha of Hyderabad. His Highness being severley troubled by the event sent a generous gift to the family. The Deputy Collector noticed that from then on whenever the Nizam went driving the road suddenly became full of the elderly poor placed there by impecunious relatives.
[1] In ‘The Unqualified Pilot’ from Rudyard Kipling ‘Land and Sea Tales’ (London 1923)
[2] Pre-eminent Viceroy of India January 1899 – November 1905
[3] A light, two-wheeled conveyance, usually drawn by ponies
[4] Traditional men’s garment. A rectangular piece of long cloth wrapped around the waist and legs and knotted
[5] A ghat is a defined length of river frontage between some 30-200 yards long. Most are in the form of terraces of steps leading down to the River Ganges. The ‘Burning Ghats’ are those where corpses are cremated.
[6] Mark Twain Following the Equator : A Journey Round the World (Hartford, Connecticut 1897) p. 348
[7] Ibid., p. 353-56
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