Echoes of Time with Tanpınar in London and Bursa

In this lyrical essay, Emre Aracı traces the footsteps of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar through London and Bursa, weaving past and present into a tapestry of sound and memory. Beginning with Tanpınar’s rapturous account of a 1953 Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Aracı uncovers the identity of the conductor Tanpınar once likened to a demi-god—Sir Malcolm Sargent—and situates this musical epiphany within the broader cultural pageantry of post-coronation London. From the blue plaque outside Albert Hall Mansions to the coronation of King Charles III, from Tanpınar’s reverie in Hyde Park to the fountains of Bursa, this piece becomes a meditation on time, music, and the poetic persistence of memory across generations.

“I attended a few concerts here. Heard a marvellous programme of Mozart and Ravel. The conductor—whose name I never managed to learn—was something of a demi-god. When they played Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, I nearly lost my mind. It was in these concerts, more than anything else, that I grew fond of England […] The English manner of listening to music is quite extraordinary. It borders on worship. The applause is tremendous and can last a full five minutes”, (Zeynep Kerman, Tanpınar’ın Mektupları, Dergâh Yayınları, 2014, pp. 259–260).

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

These lines flowed from the pen of the Turkish novelist, poet and essayist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962). He expressed his rapture over that particular concert in a letter addressed to Sabahattin Eyüboğlu from London, dated 4 August 1953. And rightly so—for he had only just arrived in London ten days prior, having travelled from Paris. It was his first ever visit to England. He took up lodgings at a hotel in Bayswater, not far from Hyde Park. The swans in the park left a singular impression upon him. On the morning of 7 August, he rose early and made his way to Hyde Park to watch the swans take flight. The next day, he recorded the following in his diary: “No dream could have been so beautiful. These snow-white creatures approaching one like a herald of glad tidings […] Hyde Park was supremely lovely. The mist gave one the feeling of peering out upon the world from within a pearl. I realise how deeply I need nature. Is it not strange that, just as I was preparing to leave, I found myself suddenly in love with London?”, (İnci Enginün and Zeynep Kerman, Günlüklerin Işığında Tanpınar’la Başbaşa, Dergâh Yayınları, 2007, pp. 86–87).

Like all sensitive souls, Tanpınar felt deeply the healing and ennobling power of music and nature upon the human spirit. Reading these lines of his in Hyde Park, brought to us through the scholarship of İnci Enginün and Zeynep Kerman, fills one with a particular thrill. And with that same sense of elation, I find myself wondering where, in August 1953, Tanpınar heard Daphnis et Chloé in London—and under which conductor, whom he described as “something of a demi-god”.

Thankfully, the digital newspaper archives of the British Library do not leave one long in suspense. Among the Proms concerts of that year, the programme at the Royal Albert Hall on the evening of 4 August 1953 immediately catches the eye: a performance of Mozart and Ravel by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sir Malcolm Sargent. The final work on the programme was none other than the Second Suite from Daphnis et Chloé. It would seem, then, that scarcely had Tanpınar arrived in the city than he seized the opportunity to attend one of London’s famous Promenade Concerts. The evening had opened with the Marriage of Figaro Overture, followed by Mozart’s Serenade in C minor, K. 388, and his Piano Concerto in A major, No. 23. After the interval, the audience was treated to the Prague Symphony in D major, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, and, at last, the radiant Second Suite from Daphnis et Chloé. Given that Sargent was at the very height of his career at this time, serving as chief conductor of both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Proms themselves, it is little wonder that Tanpınar should have perceived him as a figure verging on the divine.

The Royal Albert hall during the Proms season, (photo © Emre Aracı)

(Photo © Tim Riley)

A blue commemorative plaque marks the building beside the Royal Albert Hall where this “demi-god” of a conductor once lived for many years. Affixed to the façade of Albert Hall Mansions, the plaque is one of the many ceramic memorials found throughout London, honouring distinguished figures who have lived in or passed through the city—most of them placed by English Heritage. I feel certain that such tributes to the great spirits of the past must have caught the eye of a mind as attuned as Tanpınar’s. For those who, like him, might wish to explore London by way of these plaques, I would warmly recommend Lived in London by Emily Cole (Yale University Press, 2009). From now on, whenever I attend a Prom at the Royal Albert Hall and catch sight of Sargent’s plaque, it will also bring Tanpınar to mind.

Albert Hall Mansions (Photo © Emre Aracı)

Flat No. 9 at Albert Hall Mansions—with its red-brick frontage and striking Victorian architecture—was designed by Richard Norman Shaw and built between 1880 and 1887. Sargent moved into the flat in 1947 and lived there until his death in 1967. Incidentally, during those years, he had a most distinguished neighbour: Prince Osman Selahaddin Osmanoğlu, a great-great-grandson of Sultan Murad V of the Ottoman Empire, who was born in Alexandria and whom I had the pleasure of receiving at The Grand in Folkestone only a few weeks ago. He, too, resided at Albert Hall Mansions for a time. Thus, Tanpınar’s letters have, quite unexpectedly, become for me the opening links in a long and evocative chain of memory.

When Tanpınar arrived in London in the summer of 1953, he must surely have found the city in a jubilant, almost festival-like mood. Just two months earlier, on 2 June, the twenty-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth II had been crowned in a magnificent ceremony at Westminster Abbey. The city was still decked in flags, vibrant streamers and royal emblems as the coronation festivities continued. Only a week prior to the concert Tanpınar attended, Sargent had conducted the second Prom of that season at the Royal Albert Hall—a “Coronation” programme featuring works by Purcell, Handel and Walton. Among them was Handel’s majestic Zadok the Priest, composed for the coronation of King George II in 1727, a piece that never fails to give the listener a sense of being lifted from the ground. From that moment on, this Anthem would become a fixed tradition, sung at every British coronation. Not only was Sargent present at the coronation service in Westminster Abbey on 2 June, but he also conducted the soundtrack for the official film of the ceremony, which was shown in cinemas across the country in the weeks that followed.

Exactly seventy years later, as I wandered the streets of London with Tanpınar as my invisible companion, the city was once again preparing for a royal coronation. This time, it was for King Charles III and Queen Camilla, whose impending ceremony at Westminster Abbey lent the capital an air of rare historic pageantry. Though adapted, inevitably, to the twenty-first century, this profoundly rooted and resplendent ritual—unchanged in essence since 1066—carried with it the inescapable feeling that one was witnessing history not as a distant observer, but as a quiet participant.

Along The Mall—that ceremonious avenue stretching from Buckingham Palace and lined now with the flags of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—a certain majesty reasserted itself. With the Royal Standard fluttering above the palace, the crowds, having arrived days in advance, camped along the roadside with a quiet sense of anticipation. Advancing slowly amid them, drawn as though on a fixed axis towards the very heart of the spectacle, one could not help but feel that the dreary trivialities of our own age—so indifferent to tradition—had, for the moment, been left far behind. Military regiments, arrayed in dazzlingly varied uniforms, had been drilling for days. And on 6 May, the coronation ceremony itself—set within the historic walls of Westminster Abbey, familiar to most only through paintings and historical imaginings—unfolded with such visual splendour that even the traditional London rain could not dispel the fairytale atmosphere. Televised across the nation, it was at once a moment of pomp and of poetry.

Buckingham Palace in the Coronation Week, May 2023 (Photo © Emre Aracı)

Yet for me, what crowned the occasion most memorably was not the golden sceptre or the orb, but the music—meticulously chosen by the King himself and entrusted to musicians of the highest calibre. The likes of Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Antonio Pappano presided over a ceremonial repertoire performed with festive brilliance and flawless artistry. So personal was the King’s attention to the musical dimension that, months before the event, he had invited Gardiner to Windsor Castle for an intimate dinner devoted to discussing the programme in detail.

King Charles III is, by all accounts, a monarch with a deep love for classical music. It was therefore entirely in keeping with his tastes that, for the occasion of his coronation, he commissioned twelve new works from an array of composers—including, notably, Andrew Lloyd Webber—to be premiered during the ceremony itself. The so-called “Coronation Orchestra,” conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, was drawn from the ranks of ensembles under the King’s patronage: the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia, and the English Chamber Orchestra among them. While time alone will reveal which, if any, of these newly minted compositions will endure, one thing was already abundantly clear: the music of Byrd, Gibbons, Handel, Elgar and Parry—like the diamonds that adorned the historic crowns placed upon the heads of Charles and Camilla—shone with unmistakable brilliance amid the solemnity of the occasion. Much like the architectural harmony that can still be found in London’s streets, where grand historic buildings rise with dignity among their more modern neighbours, so too did the music strike a noble balance between old and new.

There were also moments of surprise. A gospel choir added a vibrant note of inclusivity, while the presence of Byzantine chant—reminiscent of the liturgies heard in the churches of Istanbul—brought an unexpected, almost mystical colour to the ceremony. It is not unusual for great musicians to play a prominent role in coronations. 

Coronation of Queen Victoria, (Sir George Hayter, 1838)

When Queen Victoria was crowned at the age of nineteen in Westminster Abbey, her Director of Music was Sir George Smart, a man who had known both Beethoven and Weber personally. He would later serve as the musical director of the Great Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1851. It was in that very building, in 1867, that Sultan Abdülaziz attended a performance of Luigi Arditi’s Inno Turco, a cantata in Turkish sung by a vast English choir of 1,600 voices assembled in his honour. I have written the story of this remarkable work many times in the pages of Andante (see: July 2022, Issue No. 189), and after conducting its world premiere recording in Prague, we included it on our album Istanbul to London, released by Kalan Music in Turkey and Brilliant Classics subsequently. In 2006, I sent a copy of the CD to the then Prince of Wales. To my great surprise, I received a most gracious reply, conveyed through one of his aides at Clarence House. And so, as the choir of Westminster Abbey sang Handel’s Anthem that morning, my thoughts wandered to that glorious Crystal Palace concert of old—a pageant of sound befitting an empire, echoing across time.

Pushkin at Bakhchisarai by Grigory Chertnetsov

I recall reading in The Strad that King Charles III—an amateur cellist—once spoke in a radio interview of how his love for classical music began at the tender age of seven, when he attended a matinée performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. I later discovered that the performance in question, which took place on 20 October 1956, was Boris Asafyev’s The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. The eponymous fountain had been commissioned in 1763 by the Crimean Khan, Giray, in memory of his young and tragically lost wife. This same fountain left a lasting impression on Alexander Pushkin when he visited the palace in 1820, inspiring his poem of the same name. 

Upon seeing Grigory Chertnetsov’s 1837 painting of Pushkin beside the Fountain of Bakhchisarai, my thoughts turned unbidden to Bursa—a city I had wandered through, reading Tanpınar’s Beş Şehir [Five Cities] before my departure for London. Once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Bursa lingered in my mind with its historic mosques, tombs, and fountains. In Tanpınar’s own words: “Little by little, as I rest, the landscape and all that surrounds me recede. I am left alone with the sound of water and the motion of fresh roses swaying in rhythm with the little fountain. I sense that this sound of water constructs, above the visible city, another city—unseen. Far more fluid, more dream-like, and yet just as present, with an architecture that embraces all. In rainbow hues, it repeats all of life more purely, more luminously. Perhaps that is time in its truest, most absolute sense, and I now dwell within its abstract realm”, (Beş Şehir, Dergâh Yayınları, pp. 127–128).

To be able to gaze upon the world, as Tanpınar once did, through the soft veil of a misted morning—or to dwell, even briefly, within that pure, lucid, and abstract dimension where true time resides—may well be what matters most in life.

On the evening of 13 April 2022, as I listened to the Bursa State Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the brilliant young conductor Cemi’i Can Deliorman performing my symphony In Search of Lost Sounds, it was precisely these words of Tanpınar’s that came to mind. The sentiments and reflections that shaped this work—sharing its name with my Andante column—have been forming in these pages for the past two decades. As I draw this article, for our 200th issue, to a close, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to those who have made this publication possible, and above all, to you, our esteemed readers, whose presence and inspiration continue to lend meaning to our work...

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Tanpınar’la Londra ve Bursa’da Zamanın Sesleri’ in the June 2023 issue (No. 200) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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