🎆 🎆 🎆 fireworks for 11/11, the double-lucky day the Great War was over (my parents, now long gone, were only 4 at the time and didn’t remember it; I was just short of my 6th birthday when V-J Day, recognizing the end of World War II, came along; celebrating it on the streets of West Lawn PA is my first clear memory of events in the larger world)
Hard to appreciate now what a gigantic rupture the Great War (beginning in 1914) was; the horrors of its modern warfare came along with those of the Russian Revolution (beginning in 1917) and the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and (as Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory) fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility, wiping out much of what had gone before.
Then, as I wrote in my 11/11/22 posting “Carousing for St. Martin”:
It’s Armistice Day [commemorating the 11/11/1918 armistice ending World War I] (in the US, Veterans Day), solemnly following on the solemn anniversary of Kristallnacht, but it’s also (as Hana Filip just reminded me) the feast day of St. Martin of Tours: St. Martin’s Day, which has its serious saintly side — St. Martin and the beggar in rags — but is, as well, a day of wild revelling, initiating the winter season. An occasion that, ultimately, inspired a piece of music that is just sheer noisy unbridled fun: the Wine Chorus from Haydn’s The Seasons (aka “Juhe! Der Wein ist da!” from Die Jahreszseiten).
But now about 11/11:
Double days. One for each month, from 1/1 through 12/12; three of these — 3/3, 4/4, 7/7 — have nothing on my calendar, so I’ve used the names of the chemical elements with atomic numbers 33, 44, and 77 as placeholders. In any case, I welcome suggestions for replacements for those, and additions to the rest.
1/1 New Year’s Day
2/2 Groundhog Day; Candlemas
3/3 (arsenic)
4/4 (ruthenium)
5/5 Cinco de Mayo
6/6 D-Day 1944
7/7 (iridium)
8/8 Nixon Resignation Day 1974
9/9 Negation Day (nein nein)
10/10 Giuseppe Verdi’s birthday 1813
11/11 Armistice Day 1918 / Veterans Day; St. Martin’s Day
12/12 Frank Sinatra’s birthday 1915
November 11, 2024 at 5:21 pm |
Remembering that you and I are almost exactly the same age. The first public event is just a little earlier, FDR’s death on April 12th, 1945. And VE Day, with Boris Artsybasheff’s TIME magazine cover with a huge bloody X painted over Hitler’s face. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and finally VJ Day.
Remembering VJ Day. The news came late in the afternoon to Abilene TX, where my father had left us the previous September to go command the 242d General Hospital east of Paris, soon to receive casualties from the Battle of the Bulge. I remember that people just got out and wandered around in the streets in a daze, happily greeting each other, until it got dark. An EXTRA! edition of the newspaper had the word PEACE in huge type – I’d just begun to learn to read, and I remember reading that one word.
My parents were twelve years old on Armistice Day, but they never said much about it. My grandfather Richmond, in the Oregon National Guard, wanted to go, but he was too old and had some medical problems.
Just today I learned that my grandfather Southwick, born 1875, was in the Montana National Guard from 1910 to December 1913, but was discharged then for “non-attendance”.
November 15, 2024 at 6:25 am |
“the Wine Chorus from Haydn’s The Seasons (aka “Juhe! Der Wein ist da!” from Die Jahreszseiten)”
top-tier music recommendation, thank you!
November 15, 2024 at 7:25 am |
I recommend the entire oratorio, a thing of great joy. I was introduced to it, and to the marvelous Missa in tempore bello, in a Princeton course on Mozart and Haydn, when I was but 20. But if I go on recommending Mozart and Haydn, we’ll be here all day (just on Haydn: he composed 104 symphonies, of which the final dozen (the “London symphonies”) are all wonderful).