Felix Mendelssohn liked boats. Or, rather, he liked the places that boats could take him to. When, in August 1829, he made his famous journey over the waves to the isle of Staffa off the west coast of Scotland, he could scarcely contain his excitement. Jotting the opening theme of what would become his Hebrides Overture, or Fingal’s Cave overture on a postcard to sister Fanny, he wrote:
‘In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there.’ Whether he enjoyed the journey there is another matter. Implying that the composer spent much of the time looking green and leaning over the side of the ship, his travelling companion Karl Klingemann reflected that Mendelssohn ‘is on better terms with the sea as a musician than as an individual with a stomach’.
‘I overcame it all and arrived safely, without vomiting, on shore’
Joseph Haydn, on the other hand, was evidently made of sterner stuff. Stoutly remaining on deck throughout the stormy finale of his crossing of the English Channel on New Year’s Day 1791, he found himself blown by gale-force winds and watching, in his own words, ‘the monstrous high waves rushing at us’. Yes, he admitted in a letter to his friend Maria Genzinger, he was a little frightened, ‘but I overcame it all and arrived safely, without vomiting, on shore’.
Haydn’s tempestuous maritime experience would have given him plenty to draw on when, seven years later, he depicted the sea in the ‘Rolling in foaming billows’ bass aria in The Creation (1798) – as, nearly half-a-century after that, did a similar voyage for Richard Wagner, whose fraught journey from Riga to London sowed the seeds for his early opera The Flying Dutchman.
Fleeing his creditors with wife Minna but without a passport, the German composer probably hoped that the eight-day journey on board the Thetis would provide a quick-and-easy escape from the mess his life was in. Eight days, however, soon became three storm-tossed weeks, including an enforced period at anchor off the coast of Norway – a fate also suffered by Daland the sea captain in Wagner’s 1843 opera.
‘Debussy drank in the storm’
Contrary type that he was, Claude Debussy actively welcomed a rough sea ride off the Brittany coast while ideas for his maritime orchestral masterpiece La mer were forming in his mind in the early 20th century. Though accounts vary, local historian Dr Petit de la Villéon describes how, as dark clouds gathered, the composer chose not to travel the short distance from Cancale to St Lunaire by car – as his sensible friends did – but instead board a bisquine (an oyster boat) for the journey. Debussy, says Petit, ‘saw and drank in the storm; around him the sea bellowed, the wind whistled around the mast and howled in the rigging… He listened.’
Depictions of maritime storms crop up fairly regularly in music, but sounds associated with boats – of all shapes and sizes – go well beyond howling winds and crashing waves. For instance, in his symphonic tone poem The Isle of the Dead, inspired by a painting by Arnold Böcklin, Sergei Rachmaninov’s lopsided 5/8 time signature conjures up an image of the rower’s oars going in (three beats) and out (two beats) of the water as he ferries the deceased to their destiny.
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Elsewhere, in Maurice Ravel’s ‘Une barque sur l’océan’ for solo piano, a boat of similar size bobs gently up and down on the waves. Both are a world away from the urgency of Malcolm Arnold’s 1966 march for brass band The Padstow Lifeboat, the subject of which is heard heading out on a mission to the sound of signals from the lighthouse.
Edward Elgar, meanwhile, had a much larger vessel in mind in Variation XIII of his Enigma Variations where, courtesy of the timpani and lower strings, we hear the throb of an engine as an ocean liner heads slowly out to sea (accompanied by a quote from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in the clarinet). Thoughts of holidays afloat also pervade the central movement of Camille Saint-Saëns’s ‘Egyptian’ Piano Concerto No. 5 (1896), whose soundscape is one of crickets, frogs and the song of Nubian boatmen as a dahabeah (a passenger boat) sails peacefully along the Nile.
Simply messing about in boats
Boatmen’s songs in general have, as one might expect, provided a rich source of inspiration for composers. Sea shanties, in particular, were among the folk music collected in the early 20th century by Percy Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose take on them can be heard in, respectively, their Two Sea Shanties and Sea Songs. Arnold would follow suit in 1943 with his Three Shanties for wind quintet, and let’s not forget – try as we might – the Last Night of the Proms regular that is Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs.
Heading riverwards, meanwhile, there’s the sturdy ‘Yo, heave ho!’ of the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ which, collected and published by Mily Balakirev in 1866, subsequently found its way into works by the likes of Alexander Glazunov (the symphonic poem Stenka Razin; 1885), Manuel de Falla (Canto de los remeros del Volga for solo piano; 1922) and Vítězslav Novák (May Symphony; 1943). Altogether less strenuous is the barcarolle, the song of the Venetian gondoliers, represented perhaps most sublimely in Clara Schumann’s 1848 song ‘Gondoliera’ and, sharing the same title, the opening movement of Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli for piano.
Carl Nielsen evokes the sea’s ‘terrible depth’
Human voices are not the only ones regularly heard by boat passengers, as Carl Nielsen twigged in his orchestral overture An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands of 1927. ‘I begin by describing the sea, as you feel it during the crossing,’ he explained. ‘It is quiet, but I think that it is precisely when the sea is calm that you most strongly sense its terrible depth… its depth and endlessness at the same time.
Nielsen goes on: ‘During the voyage, we suddenly hear a bird cry that makes us think that we are near land.’ That raucous cry is represented by a high-pitched clarinet, joined soon after by the flute.
Fifteen years earlier, an altogether more terrifying effect had been employed by the Danish composer in his 1912 wind band piece Paraphrase On ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ to indicate that, on one particular voyage, land would never come into sight at all. Midway through a muted version of the eponymous hymn tune – thought to have been played by the salon orchestra upon the Titanic – an enormous, shattering crash tells us that the ship has struck an iceberg.
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A British composer’s perilous sea crossing
Benjamin Britten may have feared that he, similarly, might not reach his destination when, in 1942, he crossed the Atlantic in the other direction on the cargo ship MS Axel Johnson, a journey made perilous by being a potential target for German U-boats. Being stuck on board did, at least, allow a lot of time for composing, resulting in his choral works A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia.
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His partner Peter Pears, meanwhile, complained of the stuffiness and boredom on the ship, and one wonders if Britten had this in mind when masterfully conjuring up the claustrophobia of life on HMS Indomitable, the 18th-century 74-gun warship that is the setting for his opera Billy Budd.
Britten loved water – as shown in his 1934 Holiday Diary for piano, with movements called ‘Early Morning Bathe’ and ‘Sailing’ – so it’s of no surprise that boats, or allusions to them, make regular appearances in his operas. Though Peter Grimes (1945) is set on land, at the heart of the tale is speculation over what may or may not have happened on board the title character’s fishing boat which, at the very end, we learn has probably been lost at sea.
Elsewhere, we get an Ark in Noye’s Fludde (1957) and passengers being ferried across 1964’s Curlew River, while in Britten’s last opera Death in Venice (1973), he bows out by briefly setting the action on two different modes of waterborne transport: a passenger ferry and a gondola.
By and large, operas set on boats don’t tend to end well
Wagner likewise made more than one return visit to the water after The Flying Dutchman. The eponymous hero of Lohengrin (1848) makes his entrance on a boat pulled by a swan, while Tristan and Isolde (1861) begins on board Tristan’s ship on a crossing from Ireland to Cornwall… and ends with him back home, mortally wounded and waiting for Isolde’s boat to appear on the horizon.
By and large, in fact, operas set on boats don’t tend to end well. Take, for instance, John Adams’s 1991 The Death of Klinghoffer – there’s a clue in the title – which takes place on board the hi-jacked cruise liner Achille Lauro; or, downsizing a bit, Il Tabarro (The Cloak), where a Parisian working barge is the backdrop for arguably Giacomo Puccini’s grittiest, most downbeat work.
And an even smaller craft keeps afloat the protagonists of Hans Werner Henze’s 1971 oratorio The Raft of the Medusa, depicting the blood-stained wreck of a French frigate that inspired the famous 1819 painting of the same title by Théodore Géricault. But at least we have those Victorian purveyors of jollity Gilbert and Sullivan to raise a smile on the deck of HMS Pinafore – and, of course, celebrate boatmen of very different hues in The Pirates of Penzance and The Gondoliers.
Puccini loved to hare around the lake in his state-of-the-art speedboat
When not portraying boats on the stave, the likes of Britten, Rachmaninov and Puccini also enjoyed playing about in them, and in the Italian’s case this involved spending a fair proportion of his considerable income. Puccini’s first navigable purchase was a state-of-the-art speedboat called Ricochet, spotted by the composer in a shop window in New York and then transported home so he could hare around Lake Massaciuccoli and impress the locals.
A series of steam yachts, all named Cio-Cio San after the heroine of Madam Butterfly, followed. Rachmaninov also splashed the cash on a craft – though less lavishly so – when in the 1930s he bought a motorboat with which to take himself on trips from his villa on Lake Lucerne. However, for the British composer Hubert Parry, whose Songs of Farewell include ‘Never weather-beaten sail’, the joy of boats lay not in on-board motors but in harnessing the power of the wind. The proud owner of a yawl called The Latois and a ketch called The Wanderer, Parry was elected a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1908.
‘He was sentenced to hard labour in the galleys’
The association between composers and boats is not always a happy one, though. Take the French-Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert, whose glittering career in the court of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V came to an abrupt halt in 1540 when, found guilty of sexual impropriety, he was sentenced to hard labour in the galleys. It is not clear how long Gombert’s sentence was, and it seems he did at least continue to compose to an extent while carrying it out, but he was never the same thereafter.
Even more terminal was the fate of Thomas Linley Jnr, the ‘English Mozart’, who tragically drowned in a boating accident on a lake in Lincolnshire at the age of just 22 in 1778. Ditto the Spaniard Enrique Granados, who lost his own life when trying to save his wife from drowning after their passenger ferry, the SS Sussex, had been torpedoed by a German U-boat in the English Channel during World War I.
Even in peaceful times and without dangers lurking beneath the surface, the unpredictability of the wind and waves can make travelling on water a perilous occupation, as vividly set out in one of the more recent works depicting life on the ocean: Sally Beamish’s 2012 Seavaigers for harp, violin and orchestra. With a title that means ‘Seafarers’, the piece’s three movements take us in turn through a ‘Storm’, a ‘Lament’ in memory those lost at sea, and ‘Haven’, in which a sense of exhilaration is felt as the ship steers us towards the safety of home.
Aaaand… relax. For all the wonderful sights and sounds and the many thrills and spills of being on a boat, sometimes disembarking onto dry land can be the best feeling of all.