The 1930s
With Sian Thomas and Nicholas Farrell reading poetry and prose from the 1930s by Louis MacNeice, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Steinbeck, George Orwell and WH Auden, interspersed with music by Britten, Barber, Robeson, Bartok and Noel Coward.
The 1930s
Sian Thomas (reader)
Nicholas Farrell (reader)
Producer's Note
'Everywhere change, everywhere revolution. In Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Spain the whole of civilisation, of society was changing' wrote Virginia Woolf wrote describing the 1930s. This week's Words and Music takes a journey through the decade which ended with the outbreak of World War Two. The programme begins with Louis MacNeice's beautiful lyric poem 'Snow'. 'World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural' he said, in a poem which explored the feelings of isolation, menace, scepticism and uncertainty in the 1930s.
War is a constant presence during the decade. Earlier, the Spanish Civil War -which began in July 1936 - inspired many composers and writers. Many intellectuals of the Left rallied to the Republican cause including George Orwell who wrote his account of his experience as a militiaman in 'Homage to Catalonia'. Stephen Spender too spent time in Spain where he was haunted by what he saw in the field. In 1939 he wrote a poem about the death of a soldier,' A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map', which he presented to the composer Samuel Barber who wrote a choral setting for the poem. The events of the war cast a dark shadow too on Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto in D Minor which was written for the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa.
The work of the male poets of the 1930s - W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, T.S. Eliot - is still well known and widely read but, in the programme, you'll also hear the less well known female poets of the decade, Sylvia Townsend Warner and E.J. Scovell. Scovell's poem 'Flowers' can be heard alongside Delius' 'Violin Sonata No 3' which the composer completed in 1930.
The American experience of the 1930s is represented by a reading from John Steinbeck's epic 1939 novel 'The Grapes of Wrath' set in the American Depression and following the journey of the Joad family as they travel from the Mid-West to California in a desperate search of work.
The programme ends with W.H. Auden's 'September 1, 1939', written in the first days of the Second World War, a poem which he later disowned and refused to have reprinted. When he finally allowed the poem to appear in the Penguin 'Poets of the Thirties' it was on the condition that the editor made it clear that Auden regarded it as 'trash' which he 'was ashamed to have written'. Between the writing of the poem and today few have agreed with the poet's view.
Fiona McLean (Producer)
