This article was originally published as ‘“Bright flower breaks from charnel bough”: The arts of peace and the 1953 Coronation’, in The Finzi Journal (March, 2014), 90-118.

As it is not available online, I am hosting a copy here on my site.

The article will also consider some of the reasons for the works’ subsequent lack of success, including the commissioning purpose, the publication history and the contemporary and later reception. I will argue that the failures and ambivalences are both the result of the artists’ attitude to a prestigious but occasional commission, and the result of the difficult legacies of the Second World War, of austerity Britain and of the first Elizabethan age. In ‘Canzonet’, by the poet Louis MacNeice and composer Alan Rawsthorne, the difficult legacy is turned into an opportunity for a serious and complex negotiation between celebrating the ‘bright flower’ of a young queen born in the spring time, and simultaneously insisting on the dark background, the ‘charnel bough’.

Firth, 2014, p.91

Photo by David Brooke Martin on Unsplash

The 2022 Moorhouse Symposium brought together international and Melbourne-based to discuss the impacts of the 500 years of Martin Luther’s September Testament, 1522 on 13 August, 2022.

I presented material based on research I completed towards a 2018 article (Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth. “Martin Luther’s” Mighty Fortress”.” Lutheran Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2018): 125-145. https://doi.org/10.1353/lut.2018.0029), with some new material. This article became a chapter in our forthcoming book Martin Luther and the Arts, due out in December 2022 from Brill of Leiden.

The entire symposium was recorded. You can watch the whole afternoon, or skip to 1hr35 for my talk. Immediately after my presentation, Andreas Loewe presents from another article that also became a chapter in our Luther book.

Words written drawing from, and inspired by, my new translations of some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters and poems from prison, in the shape of the traditional evensong canticles, the Magnificat and the Nuns Dimittis, were set to music by regular collaborator Michael Leighton Jones, and performed by the Trinity College Chapel Choir, directed by Christopher Watson.

The work was initially produced in time for the 75th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death, in the last weeks of the Second World War. However, 2020 had other plans. It was exciting to hear the work performed in the presence of the composer and librettist on 7 August 2022.

The service was recorded, and you can watch the event below (or skip to the 20 minute mark for the first canticle, a reading and then the second canticle).