The Prophesy of Merlin from "King Arthur and Me - The Opera"

"Druids have the roots and springs of Britain at their fingertips.  They can soar like eagles through all the light and dark places of the heavens. They can know the stars, read the future, even change shape. And this is The Myrddin, the Oak Druid, the greatest of them all. He and Britain are one. Let him help you."  from "Jennifer's Gwenhwyfar" a playscript about some school students and their drama teacher putting on a play abut King Arthur which comes alive in their lives which will be published to accompany the Opera on May 1st on  https://www.blogger.com/blog/pages/1688276452031645275

The old Welsh tune is a treat to sing and you can feel why the armed forces still use it to inspire themselves in tight places. It dates from the Wars of the Roses and the 1461-1468 siege of Harlech Castle which the usual lyrics describe but I know it from a later 60s in my Somerset primary school - where the folk boom found its way onto the curriculum - and from the film 'Zulu.'

The background collage of football crowds represent the warring tribes of Britain (then as now) over which High King Vortigern presided. We don't know his name - Vortigern is just his title - so I've called him King Breck (= breached, broken). The Romans had left and taken with them the political idea of 'Britain' (Britannia) which before Rome only the Druids (and briefly Boudicca as an anti-Roman alliance) had ever conceived. 

The Oak Druid Merlin's vision of a strong and united Britain requires a stronger, wiser, larger and less self-centred ruler than Breck.  Uther gets closer but his son Arthur achieves it. 

That's all in the future. Behind this dialogue between Merlin and Breck, the noisily divided crowd is not really won over and will only be quieted on the next track "Arthur Britain's Making".

Breck’s small eye revolving his treasure -
Little Britain and all it contains -
From Merlin he steals a vision
His tiny mind hardly sustains:

"Your castle, King Breck, keeps collapsing 
Because built on the underground lair
Of two warring dragons, the red split
In the white's jaws of victory there.

"The red dragon stands for Britannia, 
The white for the English-to-be 
And your red worm is turning - and driving
The white dragon into the sea."

"But the red dragon's head is young Uther!"
Says King Breck, "And it ought to be mine!"
"My Breck's Isle exists on division,
I’m the crack in Great Britain's behind."

Merlin magically helmets young Uther,
Who cleaves to his dead captain's wife.
She believes he's her lost war-dead husband 
In the hottest night of her life

And bears him a son, an Arth/Ursus,
A high noon in our deepest night sky,
The May-Winter King of a Lost Land
That Was Never, but Is, and Can't Die.

Let a nation divided/
In battle be joined,
Raven and Eagle 
Conceiving the dove ||
As the Little is lost in the Greater Britain
Let Arth/Ursus cleave with heart unfailing
Till dividers learn with quailing

Hate is conquered by Love.credits

A Dream Too Real To Live (First Take)

"Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!"
I begged Bedwyr - and twice more -
"Throw back, grown black, Excalibur
That I might live forever
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of my heart's bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home, and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream
That Artos, once man Arthur,
(Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long-fought malice Mordered)
Is God, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look!

A Christ sword to Word your sky!"

From our forthcoming Matter of Britain set "The Lost Land," this interpretation of the famous moment in the Arthur legends when the Mordred-conquering but broken king of Logres commands Bedivere (originally Bedwyr, first friend) to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur ('lightning blade') back into the Lake form whence it came, takes a number of things for granted which alas one cannot. First, that the Arthur legend is not the property of the English (as often believed) but of an older Celtic Britain which fought them for what became known as "Logres" the Lost Land - (modern Welsh Lloegr, England) - hence our use of a haunting Welsh tune. Second, the (to me) attractive Celtic 'otherworldliness' of the lyric is due - as in the verses of our "Morgan le Fay" - to my alternating use of two of the most common medieval Welsh meters (Morgan uses the other two) known collectively as cynghanedd (literally 'harmony')

The required intense focus on word-sounds and patterns here and in its sibling piece Morgan cast a spell over my composition which allowed magical thoughts to form. This in turn affected the choice of tune and the overall performance.

The Winter King (We're Only Making Plans For Nigel)

pic by Kevin Fackrell

Far away and long ago, the land was divided and leaderless. Barbarians invaded from north, east and south. A May king – a dragon head - was needed to unite the people and drive out the invaders. Such a king could prove himself by drawing out a wondrous sword from a weathered rock. Many years passed and many strong men failed. At last, a boy succeeded. His name was Nigel.

Nigel built a great fastness called Camelottery and trained a band of mounted warriors, called the 52 Brexiteers, employing the White Knight Sir Bors as his faithless deputy. And all we know who wears the jodhpurs in that marriage. Together, they drove out the invaders and the land grew in peace and plenty. Nigel married Gwenhwyfar, white phantom, first lady of these islands, the most beautiful woman in the world. And the people loved him.

But the traitor 48 and the witch Sturgeon tore the land apart again. It was no ordinary armed rebellion. There was a fell Celtic magic at its root. Aided as always by the wizard Murdoch, and bouyed up the far white Trump of Freedom, Nigel overcame even this but was mortally wounded and escorted from the field in the 120th minute by three blind maidens just before the penalty shoot out. 

Nigel's last request was that the brand of Britain, which gave him great power, be cast back into the faery lake from which it came. He was last seen being shipped out by the maidens beyond the red dragon sunset of Breck's Isle to the lunatic isle of Elba, where he will live on as a Maimed King and return to slave us in our darkest hour.  This one.