A happy and fugitive anniversary – 131 years of listening to recordings of “The Lost Chord”.

One of the most successful songs ever written was showcased as one of the very very first bits of music ever recorded.  Indeed, today is the single most significant anniversary of the fact that a performance of music can be recorded.

You can hear it here…

This cylinder was sent by Edison to be played at a press conference in London on August 14, 1888.

A few months later, another cylinder was sent back to Edison, by way of reply.

On this cylinder you can hear a bit of an after dinner speech by Arthur Sullivan where he accuses a previous speaker of being drunk and thanks Thomas Edison for this wonderful invention, though he can’t help feeling anxious about the amount of “hideous” and “bad” music that is likely to be preserved for posterity as a result of it.

Sullivan’s famous tune, which I’ve heard performed in drafty church halls for as long as my recollection stretches,  was written in 1877 in response to the experience of keeping a death-watch for his sick brother.  The verses were written 19 years before that in 1858 by Adelaide Anne Proctor, one of the most popular poets of her age.  She died young, admired by Queen Victoria, and patronised (in every sense) by Charles Dickens.
Here are the lyrics.  Here is the poem.

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one  chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel’s psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexèd meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death’s bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav’n
I shall hear that grand Amen.

There’s a paradox attached to taking a poem about a musical moment that cannot be retrieved (at least within this sublunary sphere), and then turning into a musical moment that can be endlessly reproduced in the form of sheet music.  There’s an even more delicious paradox about the fact that “The Lost Chord” is the first significant melody ever to be distributed as an actual sound recording.  A fleeting unretrievable musical epiphany – preserved on a wax cylinder for all eternity.

Can we actually hear the chord?  Is the chord that is supposed to be lost actually embedded in the melody?  The best candidates are in the repetition of the line “sound of a great Amen”.   Yet when the song is sung with compete integrity, the insufficiency of this line and the chords within it, manage to still communicate themselves.  We can’t hear that chord, and neither the singer nor the organist will ever find it again.

A great singer will sing this great song and make you feel that something is lacking in it – that “Art” is not a self-sufficient realm.

This is not in itself a wholly original idea.  Wordsworth and Shelley were equally convinced that no expression of an idea worth having can possibly be satisfying – that the supreme realisation of any elevating sentiment or rousing suggestion is always just over the next horizon.

Walter Benjamin said something else about mechanical reproduction and the arts, something that might have benefited from citing the fact that the first musical artifact to be nailed down was a song about the inability to nail down transcendence.