Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may have been able to hold his own against fellow literary Hall of Famers like Whitman, Poe, and Thoreau, but Pedro Martinez and the Boston Red Sox in the World Series were clearly too much for him in the competition for Bowdoin students' Wednesday evening this week.
I believe I may have been the only student in attendance for a musical event based on the life of the Class of 1825 alum held at the chapel at 7:30 that evening. However, the concert by Boston-based flute and harp duo 2, along with a talk by Longfellow biographer Charles C. Calhoun, managed to gather at least 50 community elders seeking a higher cultural experience than sports on television. Besides, the game would last until 11:00 or so.
Mindful of the goings on outside of the chapel, flautist Peter H. Bloom mentioned the Sox after 2's first piece, and announced at 8:30, the scheduled game time, that he had heard there was a rain delay (there wasn't).
Bloom and his companion, harpist Mary Jane Rupert, opened the event with Rossini's "Andante with Variations." Many of the night's pieces were played with variations in accordance with the style of Longfellow's time.
Calhoun, who worked at Bowdoin in the late 80s and wrote A Small College in Maine: Two Hundred Years of Bowdoin College, spoke after the first two musical selections and before the intermission for 10 or 15 minutes. Calhoun's new book, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, is the first new biography of the poet in 40 years. It is available at the Bowdoin Bookstore. Calhoun signed books in the library after the concert.
"[Longfellow] was not only a man of letters, but a man of music," Calhoun said during his talk. "His life was full of music." Indeed, as Calhoun noted, when the Portland native came to Bowdoin in the 1820s, he brought with him his flute. According to Bloom's program notes, amateur flute playing was "a passion among American gentlemen during the ante-bellum era."
Longfellow lived in a time before records and CDs, so he could only hear music live. He was a charter member of the Harvard Musical Association along with influential critics John Sullivan Dwight and Henry Gassett. 2 selected several of their songs for the evening from Gassett's personal sheet music collection.
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the music coming from Bloom's flute and Rupert's magnificent harp, which stood about seven feet high with elaborate carvings. The two instruments complemented each other extremely well. Hummingbird flights of song were created by the flute's soft, breathy notes and the delicate arpeggios of the harp.
The selection included Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven, and the French National Air by Hortense Eugénie Cécile Beauharnais. The concert ended with "'Tis the Last Rose of Summer," a popular Irish song of the 19th Century. This last song, for me, conjured romantic pastoral images of...the Shire. Which either means that I've seen Lord of the Rings too many times or that Howard Shore owes a significant debt to Gaelic music for that section of his score. Probably both.
Appropriately set in the beautiful sanctuary of the restored chapel, this hour and a half of beautiful, light music was a relaxing moment in an intense week. I set out into the night to rejoin my classmates in front of their TV sets. You know the Bard of New England would have been a Sox fan, of course.