Bit of Stanford
(well, it is Sunday afternoon…)
Beati Quorum Via (1905)
The Blue Bird
(I can’t quite separate this in my mind from the stupendously strange 1976 film based on the Maeterlinck story, but as far as I know it’s nothing to do with Maeterlinck – the text, by Mary Coleridge, is this:
The lake lay blue below the hill,
O’er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue,
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.
Who needs Malevich, eh?)
November 16th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
The Maeterlinck play was set as an opera by Albert Wolff and also, I believe, as a ballet – or at least two of the Fossils dance the parts of Mytyl and Tyltyl in Noel Streatfeild’s ‘Ballet Shoes’. Several of the Maeterlinck plays were written for marionettes (which is perhaps a good thing, as it would be very embarrassing for humans to have to utter some of the lines on stage…). All heavily symbolist, and, to modern ears, mostly naff. But then he did write Pelly & Melly, and won a Nobel Prize…