The New Cecilia from Death's Jest-Book by Brian Holmes

Two Grotesque Songs from Death's Jest-Book Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1846) attended Oxford and showed early promise as a writer. But he abandoned writing and left for Europe to study medicine. He was obsessed with the idea of discovering the secret of life and death. (This was, after all, the era when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein.) If he ever discovered the secret of life, he failed to reveal it before or after he committed suicide. His preoccupations are evident in his play Death's Jest-Book, a work which he never completed. The play is filled with many lyrics. The New Cecilia tells how the wife of Saint Gingo is granted the miraculous power of farting hymns.

VI. The New Cecilia

Whoever has heard of St. Gingo
Must know that the gipsy
He married was tipsy
Each day of her life with old Stingo.

And after the death of St. Gingo
The wonders he did do
Th'incredulous widow
Denied with unladylike lingo.

"For St. Gingo, a fig and a feather-end!
He no more can work wonder
Than a clyster-pipe thunder
Or I sing a psalm with my nether-end."

As she said it, her breakfast beginning on
A tankard of home-brewed inviting ale,
Lo! the part she was sitting and sinning on
Struck up the old hundredth like a nightingale.

The creature seraphic and spherical,
Her firmament, kept up its clerical
Thanksgivings, until she did aged die.
Cooing and praising and chirping alert in
Her petticoats, swung like a curtain
Let down at the end of a tragedy.

Therefore, ladies, repent and be sedulous
In praising your lords, lest, ah! well a day!
Such judgement befall the incredulous
And your latter-ends melt into melody.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• SFCCO
• classical
• symphony
• orchestra
• new
• music
• contrabassoon
• modern
• chamber
• composer
• composition
• fart
• opera
• Brian
• Holmes

[jazzobassoon]

good contra congrats