Saint-Saëns in 1876; and (inset) in the National Guard in an 1870 cartoon
followed. The text by physician and poet Henri Cazalis evokes skeletons caught up in a lascivious nocturnal graveyard revel in which a countess couples with a cart-driver. ‘Long live death and equality!’ is the politically cynical pay-off line. The Carnival of the Animals provided the day’s climax in the form of a brilliantly conceived entertainment. This rightly popular ‘zoological fantasy’ was interleaved with an intriguing array of songs on related subjects by composers ranging from Offenbach and Poulenc to Wolf, Mahler and Richard Strauss. (I much enjoyed Strauss’s inspired jest at the expense of hated Berlin music publisher Bote & Bock, Messenger & Goat.) The glory of these Lieder people is that they know their vast and endlessly inspiring repertory inside out. The original Carnival of the Animals has no text; the jokes are all in the music. That said, Saint-Saëns would surely have relished the verses Ogden Nash wrote for that famous 1949 Andre Kostelanetz recording, featuring Noël Coward as narrator. Saint-Saëns himself was a dab hand at private cabaret. One turn was Gounod’s Jewel Song sung falsetto, with a progressively sharpening pitch after the manner of a much-fêted soprano of the day. Another was pretending to be a corpse (pink tights were donned), which the novelist Turgenev, a fixture in singer Pauline Viardot’s home and salon, would then ‘dissect’. All very private, of course. As was The Carnival of the Animals, which Saint-Saëns refused to have published in his lifetime lest the hated Germans use it as ammunition in their continuing propaganda war against ‘the feckless French’. 70 The Oldie January 2022
The Oxford event was a triumph, both for the programme-makers and for a group of musicians – singers Elizabeth Watts and Felix Kemp, accompanist Jâms Coleman and a dazzle of solo instrumentalists from the recently formed Echor Chamber Orchestra – that would have lit up even Mme Viardot’s salon. It was also something of a televisual success, such was the quality of the filming for the festival’s online audience in the austerely beautiful Cowley Fathers’ church on Oxford’s Iffley Road. I have an aversion to watching live music online, but this Saint-Saëns day, available to ticket-holders to view throughout the following month, was both a joy and an education. And cheap at the price.
GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON PUT ON YOUR DANCING SHOES Now that FOMO has been replaced by HOGO (acronyms glossed below*), the country’s top conveners are having to work harder to get invitees to show up IRL – in real life. We social creatures are therefore both at an advantage and at a disadvantage when it comes to the post-pandemic season. On the plus side, we will be invited to things simply because we have well-earned reputations as party animals, trusted to pitch up even for book launches at Daunt. I maintain I won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2008 against stiff competition from Alastair Campbell simply because the organisers knew I would turn up to collect and he wouldn’t. I did, and accepted the plaster foot from the actor Dominic West with the words, ‘If you ever want bad sex, Dom, you know where to come’. Ah! The glory days when you could make a joke or proposition someone in public without being nuked by the Twitterati!
The minus side is that if we are to risk hosting parties, we have to go the extra mile. If we are asking our friends to make the ultimate sacrifice, ie peel off their loungewear, and click out of the Deliveroo app and Sky Planner, it had better well be worth it. As a festive sharpener, therefore, I devote the rest of this column to revealing the sure-fire floor-fillers that have served me well in every decade of my loving, living and party-giving existence. Satisfaction guaranteed. Thank me later. When I was a teenager, the top dance songs were Le Freak by Chic, which we all bopped to in our dorms at Bryanston, copying the arm movements of Vicky, the only girl in our year who could dance, and Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang. In my twenties, it was Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine by James Brown, the defining track for my generation at Oxford (the one Ivo always says ‘destroyed the country’ by becoming the hacks who created Brexit). In my thirties, it was Firestarter by the Prodigy, as I had three small children and it’s a track to make people of every age bounce off the walls. In my forties, Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines – the first song I asked my Alexa to play when I had some media galacticos to dinner, and they all leapt to their feet. I also danced to Blurred Lines with Michael Gove – at Cheltenham Literature Festival, since you ask – and he is quite the mover, as recent footage has revealed. In my fifties, back to the oldies. The Stones’ Brown Sugar. Let’s Dance by David Bowie. If all the above don’t get the party started – your money back. Happy Christmas, dancing queens! *FOMO: fear of missing out. HOGO: hassle of going out (something this rock critic has never experienced)
James Brown says it loud. He died on Christmas Day, 2006
