Eerst gepubliceerd in Rail Magazine
Antonín Dvořák gave us a series of classical masterworks – the New World Symphony, American String Quartet, his Cello Concerto and the opera Rusalka.
Music was one of the Czech composer’s passions. Railways was the other.
As a child, he watched the construction of the new line to Prague, which passed right in front of his family house in the village of Nelahozeves.
As an adult resident in the capital, his daily morning walk took him past the tracks that led towards the city’s Franz Josef station.
Later, while living in New York, he found that the sight of a heavy locomotive drawing its stock through the heart of Manhattan proved an effective antidote to homesickness. Dvořák once told a friend that he would happily have “given all my symphonies in return for inventing the locomotive”.
The Parisian composer Arthur Honegger was equally captivated, describing railway engines as “living creatures … which I love as others love women or horses”.
In 1923, he turned their sound into a piece of music for symphony orchestra with his work Pacific 231, so named as the French count axles rather than wheels when describing locomotive size.
According to Honegger, the work reflects “the tranquil breathing of the engine in repose, the effort of starting, the progressive gathering of speed, and finally a train of 300 tons hurling itself through the night at 120mph”.
Benjamin Britten was also stirred by the idea of a train pressing forward through the darkness, when he scored the 1936 film The Night Mail, which tells the story of the Travelling Post Office that ran between London Euston and Aberdeen, via Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Britten’s music only appears in the final few minutes of the picture, accompanied by W H Auden’s celebrated poem that starts “This is the Night Mail crossing the Border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order”.
Britten used brass, wind and percussion to echo the sound of a train clanking over jointed track, whistling as it passes through sleepy villages, straining as it ascends Highland gradients.
But it’s not just highly powered expresses that attract the interest of composers.
Heitor Villa-Lobos painted the light railways that ran between remote rural communities in Brazil, in The Little Train of the Caipira.
Hans Christian Lumbye marked the opening of the new line to Roskilde in his Copenhagen Steam Railway Gallop.
In the 1980s, Steve Reich recalled the childhood journeys he had made during the war between New York and Los Angeles.
He realised that, as a young Jewish boy, had he been living in Europe at that time his journey might have been very different – carried onboard a rake of freight wagons crammed full of terrified prisoners being transported to a Nazi death camp.
He turned these thoughts into one of his most important works: Different Trains, which placed a string quartet alongside taped testimony from speakers including Holocaust survivors and a retired Pullman porter.
In her fascinating book Railways & Music, Julia Winterson lists dozens of further examples of ‘train music’.
Between them, the Strauss family wrote at least ten railway works. Berlioz created a cantata to celebrate the opening of the Paris-Lille-Brussels line. Later, Michael Nyman provided music to mark the launch of French high-speed TGV services. Vivian Ellis’s Coronation Scot became an English light music classic. And most of us can quote a good few lines from Flanders and Swann’s The Slow Train.
Why are composers and railways such a happy match?
Like a train ride, a piece of music is a journey, with a clear beginning and a clear finish, and stops, starts and variable periods of speed and sloth in between.
Neat numbering is key, with headcodes fulfilling the same role as the Köchel and BWV numbers that catalogue the works of Mozart and Bach.
And trains are musical objects, their rhythmic pattens easily evoked by the percussion session, their horns and whistles taken by brass and woodwind, the sweeping vistas seen from a viaduct or coastal run safe in the hands of the string section.
Sometimes, even the station announcements can have a musicality to them – witness Michaël Boumendil’s SNCF chimes, an immediate and compelling earworm.
Is it any surprise that the composers I know choose the train as their favoured means of transport? Write down lists of railway enthusiasts and classical musicians, pop them into a Venn diagram, and I would take a bet the overlay will be substantial.
Petroc Trelawny broadcasted from LNER’s Highland Chieftain on September 27, as part of BBC Radio 3’s Train Tracks. His Cornwall – A Journey Through Western Lands (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) is out now, and his Classical Music Puzzle Book (Ivy Press) was released on October 9.
