Russian and Italian themes at the Bath Festival

his group, as well as such others as the young Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Debussy, were quickly drawn into Diaghilev's exciting schemes and productions which were to combine ballet with opera.
The Russian impressario's aforementioned protege, Igor Stravinsky, became a close friend of both Ravel and Debussy. At his dynamic inspiration, the two Frenchmen agreed to produce a ballet score on the theme of Daphnis and Chloe. It was to become one of the greatest scores of this century.
Ravel hated the war in which he fought bravely and never really recovered • from his beloved mother's death in 1917. He never married and hid his lonely grief under a mischievous sense of humour and power of self-mockery. He became an anti-establishment figure and refused the Legion of Honour in 1920.
But he accepted an honorary music degree from Oxford University after his best known work, Bolero, had made him famous. Seripus Oxford fellows did not know what to make of his typical self-mocking remark, "I have written just one masterpiece, and that is the Bolero. Unfortunately, it is devoid of music."
Hardly true since melody fairly dripped from Ravel's every pore. All the more tragic was the severe damage to his brain caused when a taxi in which he was passenger crashed into another car. This was in 1932. He never wrote another composition and suffered dreadfully for the rest of his days.
How cruel a fate that the man who had once said "basically the only love affair I have ever had was with music" was unable to release the music he could hear in his head for the last five years of his life.
A sometime book reviewer for the Catholic Herald, Mrs Pierre (Evelyn) Le Chene was very much in the limelight for a few sensational hours last week. She sat in the courtroom and stared into the eyes of Klaus Barbie whom she holds responsible for the cruel torture of her husband.
He was an English soldier with the unlikely name of Pierre Le Chene, tortured by the Gestapo in Lyons and then sent to Mautthausen concentration camp. His still attractive widoW wanted to be joined to the case as a private plaintiff. Her application was refused on the grounds that her husband had been considered the victim of a "war crime" rather than a "crime against humanity."
Mrs Le Chene described on television how her husband had undergone the three "normal" modes of torture metered out by the Gestapo: first the tearing off of finger and toe nails; then cigarette burns all over the body; and finally the "cold water cure."
He never broke under his ordeal and revealed none of the names of his associates. His widow has been proud of him ever since and feels that the fact that his brave name has been mentioned in the presence of the alleged "butcher" into whose inscrutable eyes she stared was at least" some sort of victory for justice and that, now, the name of Pierre Le Chene will never be forgotten.
WHETHER or not the defence of "acting on superior orders" will be raised at the Barbie trial remains to be seen. That same principle was invoked on many occasions, on both sides, during the war. The motives and results were by no means invariably evil however, on occasion, unfortunate.
One of the occasions when the principle was invoked was the bombing of the famous Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino in January, 1944. The initial attack on the monastery was carried out by General Mark Clark, commanding the US Fifty Army.
It was beaten back with heavy casualties by the Germans waiting in the hills for the Americans. The ensuing campaign — ultimately aiming for Rome — was to be a long, bloody and bitter one. But the intervening bombing of Monte Cassino was carried out against the personal wishes and instincts of Clark who yielded to command pressure.
Ironically enough, the defending German troops, some 40,000 of them in all, were led by a no less philosophical soldier, General Frido von Senger and Etterlin. He was a tough, professional soldier of 53 at the time, but also a Rhodes scholar, a devout Catholic and lay member of the Benedictine Order.
Senger believed it was a soldier's duty to fight as well as possible even in a doomed and disgraced cause. "According to the creed of Thomas Aquinas," he once wrote, "no man can be blamed for the crimes of others insofar as he has no influence over them. However, the power is not in the hands of the generals, but of Hitler and the German people who have voted him into power . . ."
As we now know the actual bombing raid on Monte Cassino (February 15, 1944) took place in the wake of a series of military miscalculations. The raids were staged at the wrong time and on the wrong day. The troops involved were not ready to begin their assault, and when the attack belatedly got under way, it failed. The bombing that was supposed to shorten the Allied march on Rome probably lengthened it. All the bombing accomplished was to reduce St Benedict's monastery, the museum of civilisation's relics in the Dark Ages, to smoking rubble."
MONTE CASSINO was rebuilt after the war and reconsecrated in 1964. But this was far from being the first rebirth of the famous monastic site to which Benedict had first come in the year 529. He found there a temple to Apollo whose statue he destroyed, overturning the pagan altar and constructing a Christian one in its place.
1700 feet above the town of Cassino, Benedict built his ultimate monastery. It was here that he wrote his Rule. But before he died, the saint told a disciple that God had warned him that "this entire monastery shall fall into the hands of the barbarians."
And so it did. In 568 the invading Lombards sacked and destroyed the first Monte Cassino. The monks, forewarned, fled to Rome, bringing with them only the manuscript of the Rule, their cups for measuring bread and wine, and their motto that what had been struck down would rise again. But this did not actually happen until 718.
Then, in 1349, a different sort of enemy struck. An earthquake cracked open the walls of the "new" monastery. Its great towers came tumbling to the ground. Rebuilding had to start again, and the Baroque palace that eventually rose on the hill was far removed from the humble establishment originally created by St Benedict.
Buried all around today's monastery are the dead of many nations. Those who fought each other in life are united in death. They have found at the cost of precious blood that Pax for which St Benedict longed when
he himself died at Monte Cassino.
IT was sad to read of the death earlier this month of Miss Joan de Trafford. She had lived a full life and had an abiding interest in Church history.
Her greatest ambition was to live to see the canonisation of Rafael, Cardinal Merry del Val, secretary of state to Pope Pius X. She promoted his cause with skill and enthusiasm, but never could have had any realistic hopes of success.
Merry del Val was a towering and illustrious figure indeed, feared and admired, but also disliked, by many. Among the latter were the Irish colony in Rome during and after the first World War. They felt that the powerful Cardinal was unjustly unfavourable to the nationalist cause, though all ecclesiastics were theoretically neutral on the subject.
Their "neutrality", however, had its limits. In Ireland itself, the Bishops insisted on the excommunication of many of the original IRA members including de Valera. Opposition to the Treaty was found to be intolerable in the eyes of the Church.
As far as Rome backed the move, the influence of Merry del Val on the Pope (Benedict XV) was thought to be of some significance. But accounts differ as to where ultimate decisions lay at this confused and tendentious period.
Merry del Val is not, moreover, a great favourite of Anglicans. He was secretary to the commission which, at the invitation of Cardinal Vaughan, examined Anglican orders in 1896. He is generally credited with "ghosting" the major part of Leo XIII's Bull, Apostolicae Curae, condemning such orders as "null and void."
Many Catholic theologians today feel the Bull was issued on incomplete and faulty evidence. The debate continues.