The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Lost for seventeen centuries, caught up in a war, and used as a pedestal for a plant pot, this is the world’s oldest surviving song.
The Seikilos Epitaph is the oldest surviving song to be completely written down, text and music. It has made it through almost two-thousand years by the skin of its teeth.
A Scottish widow’s lullaby for her fatherless child inspired his music, but Brahms’s message struck closer to home.
Johannes Brahms never came to Britain, apparently because he was so idolised here that the modest composer found every excuse to avoid it. Nonetheless his ‘Three Intermezzi’ Op. 117 were inspired by a Scottish folksong, and are a reflection on his complex relationship with Clara Schumann and her children, whom he supported financially and emotionally after Clara’s husband (and Brahms’s friend) Robert was taken from them.
A Dubliner with a roving eye and a gift for melody, John Field challenged Europe’s pianists to demand more of themselves.
John Field (1782-1837) was an Irish composer admired by both Chopin and Liszt, who may be considered the ‘father’ of the great piano tradition of Russia. His legendary and enviable silken touch at the piano changed the way the instrument was played all over Europe.
An everyday act of charity triggered off a series of extraordinary events.
Alfred the Great ruled Wessex (roughly, southern and western England) from 871 to 899, but he had to reclaim it from Danish invaders first. The King had only a handful of loyal men to rely on, and was hiding out on a hill amid the Somerset levels, at that time a marshy lake.
John Lambton goes fishing on a Sunday, and lets loose all kinds of trouble.
This tale from County Durham is one of the best-known local legends. A ‘worm’ is an Old English word for a dragon, in this case something strangling and slimy rather than fire-breathing. The hero (if that is the right word) is John Lambton, a much-travelled Knight of Rhodes whose father died in 1431 and left him the Lambton estates.