WATERLOO

22/4/10, Royal Festival Hall

3 hrs including interval (the film itself was 134 mins). Carl Davis and the Philharmonia accompanying Karl Grune's 1928 epic version of the great battle. A German response to Abel Gance's Napoleon, though not a patch on it: nowhere near as ambitious or as absorbing or as long (though the battle itself seemed interminable and pretty well incomprehensible, the participants largely indistinguishable except for the "Armee Anglaise" in natty little kilts and the Garde Francaise all in white, which Natasha said made them look as if they were in nightgowns).

Carl Davis's music mostly borrowed from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and from his Wellington's Victory (highly popular in B's own day, despised now, absolutely appropriate in this context). Plus Weber's Invitation to the Waltz for the treacherous Polish countess and a wonderful Berlioz arrangement of the Marseillaise for the scene in which Napoleon's army, sent to arrest him, threaten to shoot him, only to come over to him en masse when he stands before them, unarmed, on a strategically placed hilltop, an says "Surely you would not shoot your Emperor?". And a fine Viennese waltz (which sounded late rather than early 19th century) for the scene at Metternich's Ball in Vienna during which Napoleon escapes from Elba.

It was played with great gusto by the Philharmonia who, according to the sheet handed to us as we entered the hall, were 85 strong, though I thought I counted well over 90. (The reason for the sheet? To credit the sponsors: "Principal Cello's Chair Endowed in perpetuity in memory of Amaryllis Fleming (1925-1999) by the Amaryllis Fleming Foundation and Fleming Family and Partners Ltd"; "Principal E flat Clarinet's Chair Endowed by Mercedes and Michael Hoffman" and so on).

The film was complete bunkum as history: hard to know where to start in listing the errors. It had Wellington not Castlereagh leading the British delegation at the Congress of Vienna (he surely was in Paris at the time); it had Wellington and Blucher meeting in Belgium: "You take Ligny, I'll take La Belle Alliance, and each will come to the other's aid if pressed..." which was not exactly what happened; there was no mention of Quatre Bras; Blucher and Napoleon both rode into battle cowboy-style at the head of their troops; the English were shown falling back all the time at Waterloo and likely to turn tail and flee until news came of the Prussians' arrival, whereas they stayed pretty much where they were throughout (not that there was much danger of Wellington actually winning until Blucher got there); the landscape in which the battle was fought was Mittel European pine forest, not rolling agricultural Belgium, etc etc.

All this went beyond the justifiable simplifications required to dramatise events and turned the film into a wishful rewriting of history: "It was the Prussians wot won it". Interesting that, ten years after the end of the First World War, popular German audiences should have been offered such a romantic notion of war (all patriotism and courage and La Gloire and no-one getting their limbs blown off), in which the French were pretty dastardly (their spy at the Congress of Vienna was a servant who lifted the fireback in the meeting room to load on more wood while eavesdropping on proceedings), the British stoical but inadequate and the principal manifestation of German military prowess an ageing eccentric who had resigned his commission more than once, twinkled and the ladies and twirled his moustaches despite his great age, was soft-hearted, loved his men and was loved by them in return, and refused to let the medic cut his boot off when he injured his leg because boots were in such short supply back at the depot and it would be a waste.

It was Blucher's film. He was played by an actor called Otto Gebuhr with tremendous relish and much mugging, often with intentional comedy (at our first glimpse of him we saw only his rump as he bent over to examine a horse he was buying from a dealer who looked shifty and Jewish).

We also liked Gniesenau (who looked a bit like Mussolini) and the young chap who played the love interest Reutlinger, Oskar Marion, who looked like Errol Flynn or John Barrymore. I'd forgotten how much silent film acting relied on actors' facial impressions in close up: some of them were marvellous.

There were also some fine visual touches, including a crane shot of the battle (didn't think they had those in in 1928). The French army was often shot from unusual angles, including a dramatic top-shot looking down on their serried ranks marching towards the bottom of the screen; frequent shots of soldiers or their commanders silhouetted against the skyline; an interesting shot of Napolon's army following him between two trees in the foreground, down a short hill into dead ground and then re-emerging to cross a wide open space before vanishing into trees. (The British and the Prussians, by contrast, were shot much more conventionally.) There were some nice special effects as well, like a diagonal split screen showing Napoleon's soldiers flocking to him in the top half, a polka at Metternich's Ball in the bottom half; or a fan-shaped multiscreen topshot of delegates to the Congresss scattering in their coaches and with bag and baggage after news arrived of Napoleon's escape from Elba.

There was an entertaining sub-plot involving the young officer, his fiancee, the Polish countess, a stolen despatch etc etc involving honour and betrayal and other juicy things.

The film came with bilingual French and German intertitles and modern English subtitles which I found I didn't need (my French being adequate to the job).

THE DISCOVERY OF SPAIN

17/8/09, Royal Academy


The National Galleries of Scotland old master blockbuster. Goya, El Greco, Velasquez, Zurbaran as represented in British collections, plus any number of British artists from the 18th century onwards and their responses to Spain.

A rag-bag, but a stimulating one. Goya's etchings of the horrors of war next to his portrait of the Duke of Wellington (and the preliminary sketch, in which the poor old duke looks absolutely shattered). Two version of the Maid of Saragossa (she fired the gun at the siege when her gunner husband was killed): in Goya's she is faceless, in silhouette, emblematic of defiant Spain; in David Wilkie's she is beautiful, fiery, the picture overwhelmed with unnecessary detail. Like many of the Brits' paintings of Spain it was, if not sentimental, then deeply self-indulgent.

The Brits loved Spain, painting endless bullfights and gypsies and funerals and exotic costumes and bustling streets. There was a striking big unfinished picture of boys playing at bullfighting by John Phillip. (There was a self-portrait in one picture, Phillip in Victorian suit and hat and fine moustache, sketching some gypsies: he was one of those painters whose preliminary sketches are so much more convincing than his finished oils.)

David Roberts was head and shoulders the finest British artist of the 19th century to visit Spain. The exhibition contained three crackers: his watercolour of the interior of Seville's cathedral, breathtakingly detailed and atmospheric; an oil of the Giralda in Seville; and an oil of a huge double staircase in Burgos cathedral, disappearing into the gloom, which S said looked positively three-dimensional.

There were several Zurbarans: an altar piece which could have been by anybody; and four examples from a set of 12 paintings of Joseph and his sons, lifesize, now (for some reason) in the collection of the Lord Bishop of Durham. The figures are all dressed in some exotic hybrid Mediterranean/Cossack/Arab garb, richly decorated with extraordinary detail and with all sorts of frills and furbelows: figures from a timeless fantasy world.

The El Grecos were wonderful, especially the woman in a fur wrap whose image is on the exhibition poster. Can this really be the same painter who produced the Tears of St Peter on the wall next to it (hands clasped, head tilted, looking up to heaven)? Or those great religious pictures full of reds and blues and whites and sharp folds, angular figures, which are so extraordinary in Toledo, a 20th century artist working 500 years ahead of his time?

Then there was a room full of British copies of Velasquez (presumably to make up for only having two minor examples of the real thing, plus one copy and one work by a pupil, in the exhibition). Least said about most of these the better with the excpetion of Millais's Souvenir of Velasquez, a picture of a girl reminiscent of V's Meninas, with a profusion of blonde hair, a very rich dress, bright pinky-red sleeves and unbelievably thick paint.

Lots of pictures of the Alhambra, including decoration from a mid-Victorian pattern-book by someone called Owen Jones (never heard of him, but very influential, apparently) derived from the Alhambra's decorations. David Muirhead Bone pictures of Granada in the 1920s and 30s especially detailed and colourful.

In the 19th and 20th centuries the Brits came for the bullfights etc (see above) but also discovered the Spanish light. There was a whole room full of the most glorious colour. Someone called Arthur Melville in particular produced watercolours full of deep saturated colour, especially the blue of water.

Finally, a rather disappointing room devoted to British artists and the Civil War, with some Picassos, some Edward Burras (overblown) and a Wyndham Lewis.