Here Comes Treble: The Bells Of London
The fourth movement of Joseph Haydn's final symphony conjures up for Isabel Bradley the vivid details of an early-morning London street scene.
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The fourth movement of Joseph Haydn’s last symphony, number one hundred and four, echoes the pealing of the bells of London’s churches.
During a rehearsal of this work, I was transported in memory to an hour spent ambling through a deserted Covent Garden.
Easter Sunday was cold, overcast, and grey; the small, sad skies of London were very low overhead. I caught the Underground early – the Piccadilly Line to Covent Garden. There were no crowds; just a few people silently stepped out of the enormous lift to walk the short distance from the station to Covent Garden.
The old market and Opera House were as quiet as the dawn scene in My Fair Lady, when the first stall-holders were just beginning to set out their wares. Dark, soft day-light; distant Cockney voices calling cheerily; a hammer pounding a nail in the distance.
There were no flowers, no fruit and vegetables; but the hush and the promise of busy-ness to come seemed the same as it must have for the last three or four hundred years.
Ambling down one of the strangely empty side-streets, I found myself completely alone.
In the distance, crossing the road, I saw a jogger, oblivious to all but the perpetual motion of his feet and the music pumping through his ear-phones from the Discman clipped to his shorts.
A lone car whooshed by, quiet on gleaming wet cobble-stones.
Suddenly, the air awoke to a joyous pealing, paean upon paean, triumphant, deep, and clear, from the bells of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, echoing off the National Gallery, thrown out to the waiting City, an announcement of glory, on and on as if it would never end, descending chords calling endlessly to the faithful to come and worship.
A few late arrivals filed quietly into the church through the huge, dilapidated doors.
As the doors closed, the bells fell silent; I was alone, staring out across a Trafalgar Square where not one other person moved.
It was a privilege, an honour, to experience those moments of surreal beauty in a city usually so vibrant and crowded.
Perhaps Papa Haydn, too, stood listening, wrapt, in the stillness of an early Sunday morning, to the bells of a younger, but no less vibrant, London. Perhaps, later that day, he sat down with quill in hand to write the final movement of what was to be his last symphony, re-creating for posterity the glory of that triumphant pealing….
Until next week, “here comes Treble!”
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