Edmands' smooth rocks of the Gulfside Trail. (From: www.legacysailing.com)
In August 2014, I hiked the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. I noticed an interesting phenomenon a mile or two west of Madison Spring Hut on the Gulfside Trail. The rocks on the trail seemed perfectly placed to form a flat surface, as if forming an alpine highway. Compared to most of the other alpine trails on the trip, this piece of trail was easy to walk! It was like an alpine sidewalk. I asked a croo member at the hut what the explanation for this was. Who would have spent the immense amount of time and labor to place all those rocks just so?! I was told that J. Rayner Edmands, a famous trail builder of the early 20th century had laid out the Gulfside Trail.
In the latest issue of the Appalachian Mountain Club's journal, Appalachia, I encountered more information about Edmands and his beautiful trails. Edmands had a trail-building rival in the Whites: Warren Hart, the Appalachian Mountain Club's Councillor of Trails. From 1909 to 1911, Hart blazed most of the trails now existent in the Great Gulf, a five thousand acre wilderness area enclosed by Mounts Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. Hart and Edmands had widely divergent trail building philosophies. For entertainment's sake, I'll let Hart describe these philosophies. He wrote a newspaper article in a 1909 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript.
"Unlike most of the paths in the White Mountains, these [Great Gulf] trails have not been cut to avoid obstacles, or to smooth them away as much as possible, they were not designed for the pastime of curious women; and they have not been made like to the superfluous boulevards of piled stone work that a perverted energy has built here and there upon the mountains..." (Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2015, 94-95)
"When he was twenty-three, [Hector] Berlioz was overwhelmed by the works of Shakespeare and also fell madly in love with a Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, to whom he wrote such wild, impassioned letters that she considered him a lunatic and refused to see him. To depict his 'endless and unquenchable passion,' Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony) in 1830, which startled Parisians by its sensationally autobiographical program, its amazingly novel orchestration, and its vivid depiction of the weird and diabolical.
In 1830, too, Berlioz won the Prix de Rome (the Rome Prize), subsidizing two years' study in Rome; when he returned to Paris, he finally met and married Harriet Smithson--after she had attended a performance of the Fantastic Symphony and realized that it depicted her. (They separated, however, after only a few years.)" (241-242)
So, what exactly was in the Fantastic Symphony that won Berlioz the girl of his dreams? Here are some quotes from the program notes he wrote for his audience:
"A young musician of extraordinary sensibility and abundant imagination, in the depths of despair because of hopeless love, has poisoned himself with opium. The drug is too feeble to kill him but plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by weird visions. His sensations, emotions, and memories, as they pass through his affected mind, are transformed into musical images and ideas. The beloved one herself becomes to him a melody, a recurrent theme (idee fixee) which haunts him continually...
[Notes for the Fourth Movement, March to the Scaffold] He dreams that he has murdered his beloved, that he was been condemned to death and is being led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march that is now somber and fierce, now brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled sounds of heavy steps give way without transition to the noisiest outbursts. At the end the idee fixee returns for a moment, like a last thought of love interrupted by the death blow...
[Notes for the Fifth Movement, Dream of a Witches' Sabbath] He sees himself at a witches' sabbath in the midst of a hideous crowd of ghouls, sorcerers, and monsters of every description, united for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, shrieks of laughter, distant cries, which other cries seems to answer. The melody of the loved one is heard, but it has lost its character of nobleness and timidity; it is no more than a dance tune, ignoble, trivial, and grotesque. It is she who comes to the sabbath!... A howl of joy greets her arrival... She participates in the diabolical orgy... The funeral knell, burlesque of the Dies irae. Witches' dance. The dance and the Dies irae combined." (243-246) --Roger Kamien, Music: An Appreciation
I hope all you lovesick young men are out there reading! If you really want the girl, write in a song in which you imagine murdering her and, after your trial and execution, discovering that she is a witch! Now that's a prescription for love. Hey, it worked for Berlioz.
An illustration of a primitive, medieval organ from Medieval Life and People
by Carol Belanger Grafton.
"After about 1100... instruments were used increasingly in church. The organ was most prominent. At first, it was a primitive instrument; the keys were operated by heavy blows with the fists. It was so loud that it could be heard for miles around." (62) --Roger Kamien, Music: An Appreciation
