“You will be grieved and shocked to hear that Emma died this morning shortly after nine o’clock. Her illness has been quite a slight one, and she was downstairs at tea on Monday evening. I was with her, fortunately, when she breathed her last. I am too distressed to write more.”

As 1912’s days grew ever colder, the days ever darker, Thomas Hardy lost yet another hour of light which would not return as the seasons made for warmer climbs. Although the author was the first to admit “it would be affectation to dent… the differences between us,” the sudden loss of his estranged wife in November 1912 had a profound affect upon both Hardy’s personage and in turn his work. “One forgets all the recent years and differences, and the mind goes back to the early times when each was much to the other — in her case and mine intensely much.” And thus began the drafting of some of the most beautiful verse to emerge from that eminent pen. And all due to the silence of a voice he had once ignored.

In the midst of the stream of letters sent out upon mourning stationary, Hardy set to work. His 18 poem sequence Poems of 1912-13, a progression of guilt-ridden elegies, finally entered print in the volume Satires of Circumstance (1914). Partway through these calls to loves of the past, there lies a milestone of modern elegiac poetry: ‘The Voice’.

Whereas his earlier ‘Neutral Tones’ (1867) abhors the dead lips of a living lover, one feels Hardy would give anything to give the phantom voice tormenting him an earthly body. But, like Aeneas’s attempts to embrace the vision of Creusa thrice, no matter where Hardy places the “thin ghost” of the voice echoing down the years, it remains but an echo that potentially will sound out and be heard no more.

The domesticity and intimacy of the collection evokes loss on the most personal of levels. But what differs with ‘The Voice’ is its unrelenting sound that beats from past idealised memories to the bald bleakness of Hardy’s present. Despite the oozing disintegration of the personas’ surroundings and motor faculties, the voice continues to bounce off what little remains. At points, the persona resolves that its existence on the temporal plains cannot be – “Can it be you that I hear?”

But in becoming a Poe-like disinterested gust of wind, as used in his ‘The Raven’, the voice of the dead succeeds in bounding around endlessly in mental space. As the stanzas decrease in size, Hardy proves that even the smallest space can provide a suitable memorial and epitaph. Hardy achieves in miniature what Tennyson does in over a hundred poems of ‘In Memoriam’. He forms an elegy that beautifully echoes like ringing crystal. It is both simultaneously connected to one moment whilst transcending all temporal boundaries. Although the reader cannot hear Emma’s voice, her “voice” serves as an elegiac milestone to her memory and the determination of her husband to allow her, and his guilt, to speak on.

In 1959, the year of her death, Eleanora Fagan, better known as Billie Holiday and later “Lady Day”, performed in New York for the final time. Years of alcoholism and drug use had whittled her powerful voice down to a fragile rasp. Even her spoken voice sounded close to breaking point as she introduced ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone’. Holiday was dead a few short months later. However, her distinctive voice and the much mythologised tragedy of her life continue to haunt the music world. What is it about Billie Holiday that has extended her popularity far beyond the realm of jazz and blues fans, and kept her a household name a full century after her birth?

The facts of Holiday’s early life, roughly outlined in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, have been thrown into doubt by a new biography published this year, John Szwed’s Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth. Holiday’s ghost-written memoir famously begins, “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.” Szwed’s meticulously researched and fascinating account begins with some abrupt fact-checking, “When Billie was born her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen. They never married and had never lived together in a little house with a picket fence on Durham Street in Baltimore.” In fact, questions of veracity haunted Lady Sings the Blues from its publication in 1956. When asked by journalists to verify some of the book’s claims, Holiday retorted that she had never read it.

Certainly, Holiday was a keen creator of her own mythology. She was only too aware that part of her appeal lay in the audience’s belief that the raw emotion of her voice betrayed harsh personal experience. Factual discrepancies aside, it remains true that Billie Holiday’s brief life was a difficult one, marked by the triple obstacles of poverty, racism and sexism. Her childhood and early teens were darkened with the trauma of neglect, attempted rape, prostitution and periods of incarceration. Yet to reduce Holiday’s talent to the sadness of her life is to do her an injustice. As Miles Davis – an avowed fan of Holiday along with virtually all jazz musicians of his generation – once observed, “I didn’t wake up this morning sad and start playing the blues, there’s more to it than that.” Holiday was and remains more than a tragic victim; her mastery of the blues was the result of experience and raw talent.

Holiday began performing in small clubs and bars in downtown New York in her late teens. Lacking any kind of musical training, she worked off an intuitive grasp of cadence and narrative. What she lacked in range, she made up for in tone; few other voices could imbue the notes of ‘No More’ with such a bittersweet concoction of relief and regret, or convey the mingled weariness and tentative hope of ‘Pennies from Heaven’. The originality of her phrasing and her tendency to linger slightly behind the beat often revealed an edge of sadness to apparently simple melodies. A song like ‘All of Me’ has a cheerful melodic swing when sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan; only Billie Holiday’s slower, tougher rendition can draw out the profound sense of loss in its lyrics. Along with Frank Sinatra, the popularisation of the microphone allowed Holiday to cultivate an understated, intimate quality to her live performances; unlike her hero, Bessie Smith, she did not have to belt just to be heard. Her sinewy strength and melodic vulnerability became a beacon for depressionera audiences, and later the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Among the songs for which Holiday is best known is the protest song, ‘Strange Fruit’, a powerful account of racist violence inspired by the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher living in New York came across Laurence Beitler’s iconic photograph of the lynching and was moved to compose a poem which he named, ‘Bitter Fruit’. Holiday was introduced to the song in 1939 and began incorporating it into her set at the Café Society in Greenwich Village, at that time one of the few racially integrated venues in New York. Even among a comparatively friendly crowd, presenting such a raw and honest account of racist brutality was a courageous act. After her first performance of ‘Strange Fruit’, Holiday recalled in her autobiography, “There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.” For the musicians, activists and would-be activists who encountered Holiday’s sparse and potent rendition, ‘Strange Fruit’ was more than a song; it was a battle cry. Jazz critic Leonard Feather called it “the first unmated cry against racism”, while Angela Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, observed that ‘Strange Fruit’ put the elements of protest and resistance back at the centre of contemporary black musical culture.”

56 years after Holiday’s death, fans and critics are still grappling with her legacy. Szwed’s book, less a biography of Holiday than, as he puts it, “a meditation on her art”, moves the centre of discussion away from the details of her life and places a welcome emphasis on her craft as a musician and her legacy. He makes the case for Holiday to be considered “as a literary figure, along with Zora Neale Hurston”, a rare public voice of the private lives of AfricanAmerican women in pre-Civil Rights Era America. Echoes of Holiday’s unique sound can be heard in everyone from Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan, to Erykah Badu, Norah Jones and Amy Winehouse. But Szwed wisely locates her legacy not within the limits of the music world. Her influence stretches into the work of writers such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange and Audre Lorde. Listening to her music today, Billie Holiday’s idiosyncratic and inimitable voice bears the mark of a true storyteller, one whose bittersweet narratives continue to connect her to new generations of music fans.

Although Baz Luhrmann’s audacious take on Shakespeare’s classic love story has been generally lauded by critics and cinema-goers alike, the film’s dazzling visual aesthetic combined with its nineties psychedelic soundtrack has been much maligned by those who see the finished product as nothing more than a self-conscious, obnoxious, and hyperactive mess. Critics, who include the legendary Roger Ebert, turn instead to Zefferelli’s 1967 version as the archetype for Shakespearean film adaptation.

In truth, Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet – dated, sanitised and awash with tights and doublets – doesn’t come remotely close to capturing the spirit of original Shakespearean performance where the plays were executed at frenetic speed with modernday settings and costumes. Luhrmann’s sun-bleached Verona Beach backdrop, fireworks glittering in the portentous air, feels so much more alive and so much more visceral, whilst his unrelenting, enthralling cinematographic flourishes only serve to bring into starker contrast moments of kinetic respite.

In their first meeting, Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) looks upon Juliet (Claire Danes), her minimalistic angel-winged white ensemble heralding an innocence soon to be lost, and all the glitz which the film throws up becomes mere filler in the face of their profound and painful love, “Did my heart love ‘til now? Forswear its sight. For I never saw true beauty ‘til this night.” Each of their trysts is ephemeral, always curtailed, but for in the final scene when they lie together upon a funeral dais lit by a thousand lambent candles. We feel relieved that they are finally never to be separated; that Baz Luhrmann evokes this feeling shows that he has succeeded.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

To be honest, since The Sound of Music, it has been a quiet 50 years on the films-about-Austria front. The Woman in Gold redresses this: it is about a country and its methods of coming to terms with, or evading, its history. The characters, however, are firmly at the film’s centre. The film is based on the life of Maria Altman, a Holocaust survivor and the last descendant of a wealthy Vienna family.