George Calderon: A complete new work surfaces

Garry Humphreys, author of a forthcoming book on Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), and I have now received from the archives of the Royal College of Music a link to the score of Somervell’s music for George’s ballet libretto The Blue Cloth (which means the music is now in the public domain), as well as digital copies of the typescript-manuscript version of the libretto from which Somervell worked.

Now that I have read The Blue Cloth, I can say that a number of my suppositions in the earlier post were wrong. Its title page bears the typed address ‘Heathland Lodge’, which we know was where the Calderons lived until late 1912, but that address is crossed out and ‘Well Walk’ handwritten in. Consequently, the typescript of The Blue Cloth must have been created before the Calderons moved to 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, but George worked with Somervell on the ballet after they moved. The typescript The Red Cloth, which was previously the only known copy of the libretto, bears only the typewritten address ‘Heathland Lodge’, so it must predate the version that George and Arthur Somervell worked from, namely The Blue Cloth.

This might suggest that The Blue Cloth is the ‘definitive’ text of the ballet’s libretto, but that too would be wrong! It is, in fact, simply something entirely different. The Blue Cloth is a many-times expanded version of The Red Cloth, divided into numbered acting/dancing passages with gesture-by-gesture descriptions by George and a timeline down the right-hand margin in minutes. In other words, it is the working copy for Arthur Somervell to compose his score from and this is borne out by Somervell’s jottings of bars on the typescript as in the image that follows.

Page 6 of the libretto The Blue Cloth

Moreover, we can say that The Blue Cloth is George’s working copy of the libretto too, as nearly every page (and particularly the ending) contains cuts and changes in his hand. Thus it is hardly the definitive libretto text, more a work of stagecraft-in-progress for his collaboration with Somervell. Despite the fact that The Blue Cloth postdates The Red Cloth, it isn’t a finished work for publication. The latter, ironically enough, is the almost clean typescript The Red Cloth, with George’s careful illustrations. Being earlier (1911-12), The Red Cloth must be the version he worked on with Michel Fokine and which, we know from later events (see George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, p. 434), was going into the book of George’s ballet libretti for which Fokine offered to write the preface.

To sum up, The Red Cloth (1911-12) is the slim libretto of the work, almost its barest ‘treatment’ as a ‘Comedy without words’ (its subtitle), and The Blue Cloth (1912-14), subtitled ‘A wordless Comedy’, is the full production libretto. One could say that The Red Cloth is the Ballets Russes libretto, as they were the company that it was intended for under their choreographer Fokine, and The Blue Cloth is the Moscow Arts libretto, as both Somervell and Kittie attest that the Moscow Arts was going to stage it in October 1914. I was therefore quite wrong to suggest the title was changed from ‘Blue’ to ‘Red’ because red in Russian traditionally meant ‘beautiful’; more likely it was changed from ‘Red’ to ‘Blue’ because in the Russia of 1914 red was the colour of subversion. On the front page of Somervell’s copy of the libretto, Red is crossed out of the title The Red Cloth and replaced by Blue, but to complicate matters a square label proclaims the title as ABU-NÂSI, the name of the ‘young donkey’ who plays a vital part in the plot, and ABU-NÂSI is the only title given on page 1 of the typescript of The Blue Cloth. Perhaps George’s use of an Arab word is further evidence that the ballet is a parody of Scheherazade.

Even though The Blue Cloth is a greatly expanded and sometimes radically changed version of The Red Cloth, one cannot say it is a ‘completely new work’ by George Calderon. But taken together with Somervell’s score signed and dated ‘October 1914’, it certainly qualifies as a ‘complete new work’ by George because it is so different from the text of The Red Cloth and thanks to Somervell was finished and ready to be staged.

The last page of Arthur Somervell’s score for The Blue Cloth

Plot of The Red Cloth. Setting: the harem of a Cairo sheikh in the early nineteenth century. The Sheikh (40) comes down to breakfast and is conducted to a divan by his wife Hanesha (20), who makes a fuss of him. He eats a ragout that makes him feel queasy, but still goes off to work. Hanesha and her Odalisques make merry. They take a red cloth from a coffer and wave it from a window. Hanesha’s lover Shemseddîn sees the signal and appears. Jubilation and merrymaking. Suddenly they hear the Sheikh returning with stomach gripes. Shemseddîn departs. The women tend the Sheikh, leave him sleeping, and go off to market. Enter a servant to tidy the room. He takes the red cloth, which has been serving as a table cloth, and shakes it out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears, the Sheikh rouses, chases Shemseddîn round the room, bundles him into the coffer, locks it, and goes off to seek justice from the Pasha. The women return, hear Shemseddîn’s knocking, release him, fetch the pet donkey Abu-Nâsi, talk into his ear, put him in the box, and relock it. They hear the Sheikh returning with the Pasha and executioners, and run into the garden with all their wares from the market. The Sheikh describes dramatically how he fought with Shemseddîn. The women return as if from market and Hanesha is flung before the Pasha. The Sheikh opens the coffer imprisoning his wife’s lover, to reveal it is only a donkey. ‘Everyone is astonished and then indignant with the Sheikh’, but the Odalisques explain the Sheikh’s ‘hallucination’ by ‘indigestion’, he ‘laughs heartily at his own mistake’, and the red cloth is spread on the table for celebratory food.

Plot of The Blue Cloth. The setting is still the Sheikh’s harem, but the period is later: his wife smokes cigarettes. She is called Zillah. The set is different and the blue cloth ‘hangs over gallery balustrade up R’. The Sheikh’s entry is more portentous and Zillah ‘blandishes him’. Preparation of the ragout takes up much more stage business, during which the donkey ‘wanders on’. The women are directed to act ‘Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Honour and glory to Abu-Nâsi! His bells jingle. They surround him and talk to him’ and there is even more business with him. When the Sheikh has left, feeling queasy, the women take the blue cloth from the balustrade and wave it out of the window. When Shemseddîn appears, Zillah kisses the blue cloth, spreads it on the table, and the women have a party. The Sheikh returns. After much ado and a lullaby, he falls asleep and the women go off to market. The servant shakes the blue cloth out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears.There is much more business for him this time as he plays up to ‘Zillah’ on the divan, who is actually the Sheikh. It ends the same way: the Sheikh imprisons Shemseddîn in the coffer, goes to fetch the Pasha, the women release Shemseddîn and replace him with Abu-Nâsi. They rush off with their ‘marketings’ before the Sheikh appears with the Pasha. On their reappearance ‘from market’, there is more business before the coffer is opened, the blue cloth is spread on the table for a feast of fruit, and all ends in ‘General Dance’.

One must admire Arthur Somervell for finishing the music despite never seeing George again after 4 August 1914. Mind you, he wrote in his memoirs that the action was ‘quick and very amusing’, so he must have enjoyed it (according to George’s timeline, the ballet should have lasted about 30 minutes). Somervell completed it by the middle of October 1914. At that time George was on his way to a hospital at Dunkirk to be treated for a benign enlarged prostate. He was wounded at Ypres on 29 October 1914 and returned to London on 1 November. It’s surprising that, so far as we know, he never contacted Somervell again, but we know that George’s commitment to the Front overrode so much else.

When war was declared, Martin Shaw had finished the music for George’s and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor but the project had to be dropped because something based on a German fairytale was no longer performable in Britain. Somervell’s commitment to George and the future of The Blue Cloth is moving: if he hadn’t kept George’s libretto and completed his own music after the outbreak of war, we would never have known The Blue Cloth existed. Let us hope that the music will be given its first performance soon, and one day the ballet.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.