The Beatles' Here, There and Everywhere. This cover was used when the song was released as a single in Portugal.

Here, There and Everywhere is one of the songs on The Beatles’ Revolver, and is the album’s brightest affirmation. Paul McCartney is the song’s sole writer (despite the Lennon/McCartney credit), and it is suffused with his inveterate sentimentality. But it is sentimental in the best possible way, balancing finely ordered poetic thought with an intoxication that suggests the writer is ‘drunk with love’ (as Jonathan Gould puts it in Can’t Buy Me Love).

Even John Lennon, The Beatles’ most cynical band member and the first to pull up McCartney on his sentimental tendencies, called Here, There and Everywhere ‘One of my favourite songs of the Beatles’ (Playboy interviews, 1980).

In purely compositional terms, the song stands as a beautiful example of music and lyric working together to reinforce meaning. McCartney sets the song in three closely related keys, analogous to the ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ of the song’s title: G major (the first half of the verse), E minor (the second half of the verse) and G minor (the bridge).

Harmonic shifts like these are unusually sophisticated for popular music, but if this were not ingenious enough, the modulations are made to work at precisely the right moments. Ned Rorem describes the first modulation in The Music of the Beatles, New York Review of Books, 1968 (quoted in The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles by Dominic Pedler, pg 80):

‘Here, There and Everywhere’ would seem at mid-hearing to be no more than a charming slow ballad but once concluded it has grown immediately memorable. Why? Because of the minute harmonic shift on the words ‘wave of her hand’, as surprising and yet as satisfyingly right as that in a Monteverdi madrigal…

That harmonic shift is the sudden appearance of an F# minor chord after four bars that are solidly in G major. This is followed by a move to B7, which takes us to E minor, the relative minor of G major.

That a surprise modulation occurs on the line ‘changing my life with a wave of her hand’ makes that change all the more real to the listener. It provides a vividness to the detail that is reminiscent of a similar line from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: ‘But look—he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.’

Likewise, the most significant moment in the song is handled with consummate skill – the opening out into ‘everywhere’ that makes this song a statement of all-embracing love. Look at how the song builds to this moment so beautifully. ’Here’ is introduced on the dominant (D7) in the intro (‘To lead a better life, I need my love to be here‘) and is then immediately appropriated by the tonic G major at the start of the verse (‘Here, making each day of the year’). It’s as if the singer has pulled his lover closer to him and the song immediately becomes more intimate.

‘There’ has been through the same journey, first showing up on the dominant (D7) at the end of the verse (‘nobody can deny that there’s something there‘), and is likewise immediately appropriated into the tonic (G major) for the start of the second verse (‘There, running my hands through her hair’).

For the ‘everywhere’ section, the song shifts even more abruptly, leaping from D7 to F7 (‘I want her…’), a completely alien chord to the predominant G major tonality. It then moves to a remote Bb major (‘…everywhere’) before settling on G minor (‘…and if she’s beside me I know I need never care…’). How much more satisfying then is the final appropriation of ‘everywhere’ in its turn, back in the main key of the song, G major – ‘But to love her is to need her everywhere…‘

The last verse brings together all three states (‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘everywhere’) for the first time in the tonic G major. It is one of the most sublime endings in all popular music – ‘I need her here, there and everywhere’ – as the melody reaches a high ‘g’ on ‘…where’ and the final plagal cadence sounds a distinct ‘Amen’.

Here, There and Everywhere can be heard on Revolver by The Beatles (Amazon affiliate link).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8X4eoNfm5E

Eleanor Rigby statue, Liverpool, by Tommy Steele, 1982.

Eleanor Rigby is perhaps the Beatles’ most shocking song. Not simply because of the sound of it, which was an abrupt departure for its time, but because of its theme. It is hard to think of a more desolate statement in any work of art, let alone popular music.

This song marked a sudden break with the optimism that was a hallmark of The Beatles’ earlier work, and in its place presented an almost unbearably dark cynicism. Two lonely people, living in a church community, cannot find a way to connect and end up living their entire lives alone and apart. Their destiny is not that they will end up together, but that one buries the other, a grim irony that would be humorous if it weren’t tragic (the poet Ezra Pound is said to have ‘smiled lightly’ when he first heard the song).

But the song suggests even greater despair. We learn that Eleanor dies in church, which ought to be a comfort, and ‘was buried along with her name.’ Even Hodge, in Thomas Hardy’s war poem Drummer Hodge, leaves his name behind. In Eleanor Rigby’s death we see the death of hope itself. As Ian MacDonald says in Revolution in the Head:

MacKenzie’s sermon won’t be heard – not that he cares very much about his parishioners – because religious faith has perished along with communal spirit (‘No one was saved’).

The novelist AS Byatt remarked that it has ‘the minimalist perfection of a Beckett story’, pointing out that had Eleanor Rigby’s face been kept in a jar by the mirror, it would suggest the less disturbing idea of make-up, but behind the door, inside her house, it suggests she ‘is faceless, is nothing’ (from a talk on BBC Radio 3, 1993, quoted by Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head).

The song avoids sentimentality by keeping a distance from its subject throughout. The action is presented like a film script –  ‘Look at him working…’ – and uses various tenses to imply shifts in perspective: Eleanor Rigby ‘died in the church’ (past tense) while in the same scene Father MacKenzie is ‘wiping the dirt from his hands’ (present tense).

Positioned as the second song on Revolver, Eleanor Rigby casts a shadow over the whole album. We already have a hint of death in the opening track Taxman (‘my advice for those who die…’), but here we have an all-encompassing despair. As Jonathan Gould says in his book Can’t Buy Me Love:

The questions the song poses aren’t rhetorical; they’re unanswerable. They’re the sort of questions people ask when they don’t know what else to say, and by raising them as he does, Paul calls attention to the inadequacy of his own response.

Nevertheless, we can see the rest of the Revolver album as an attempt to present an answer to the issues raised in the song Eleanor Rigby. Whether it’s a turning away from old age and a return to childhood, in Yellow Submarine and the ‘When I was a boy, everything was right,’ section of She Said She Said; or the escape into the unconscious of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’; or the drugs pedalled by ‘Doctor Robert’; or the urgent embrace of sexual love in Love You To (‘Love me while you can, before I’m a dead old man’); or the attempt to reach a more spiritual, omnipotent love in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, which starts with the line ‘To lead a better life…’.

Meanwhile other songs on the album serve to remind us of Eleanor Rigby’s bleak message: the desperate emptiness presented by the death of love in For No One, and the difficulty of communication that prevents attachment in I Want To Tell You. It is not until the album’s extraordinary climax, Tomorrow Never Knows, that we finally get an answer, one that transcends the failure of the Christian Church in Eleanor Rigby by re-asserting a progressive belief in universal love.

Eleanor Rigby can be heard on Revolver by The Beatles (Amazon affiliate link).

More posts on the Beatles at Culture Club:

• Analysis: Here, There and Everywhere by The Beatles
• The Beatles’ Revolver and the Universal
• The Beatles’ Yesterday and the Nature of Belief
• Happy Birthday Sgt. Pepper

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcIZdG4xsGg

November – December 2009

This month we don’t have a theme as such. Instead we each chose a work as a virtual ‘Christmas present’ to the rest of the group. So there’s nothing underlying the choices except that each one of us would like to share our chosen work with the others (my gift was Revolver by the Beatles, although I also championed David Copperfield, one of my favourite novels of all time).

Here’s the list:

• David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (novel)
• Selected Poems, edited by Jonathan Bate – John Clare (poems)
• Revolver – The Beatles (album)
• The Decalogue – Krzysztof Kieślowski (movie)
• The Fall of the Rebel Angels – Pieter Bruegel the Elder (painting)

Both of John Webster’s great plays, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, are shrouded in ambiguity, from the motives of the characters to the morality at the heart of the plays. One of Webster’s great achievements is that this ambiguity is expressed powerfully through the poetry. This speech by the Duchess of Malfi’s murderer uses the image of a ‘mist’ to express the overall ambiguity of the play:

Of what is’t fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping:
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.

Similar imagery occurs again in Act V, scene V, when Bosola is asked how Antonio was killed, and his reply seems to be a self-referential remark about the play itself:

In a mist: I know not how –
Such a mistake as I have often seen
In a play.

The play’s ambiguity presents problems of interpretation. Many critics agree with the sentiment expressed by David Cecil in his essay ‘Poets and Story-Tellers’ (1949) (published in Webster: The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, Casebook, Edited by RV Holdsworth).

Webster envisages evil in its most extreme form: and he presents it – so far as this life is concerned – as far more powerful than good. His theology is Calvanistic. The world as seen by him is, of its nature incurably corrupt. To be involved in it is to be inescapably involved in evil: all its apparent beauties are a snare and a delusion.

This is persuasive and there is enough evidence in the play to support this argument. But I don’t think it’s the correct interpretation of Webster’s  intentions.

I prefer Irving Ribner’s assessment from his essay ‘Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order’ (1962) (again published in the Casebook collection). He sees Webster’s ambiguity as ‘an agaonized search for moral order in the uncertain and chaotic world of Jacobean scepticism by a dramatist who can no longer accept without question the postulates of order and degree so dear to the Elizabethans.’

In Ribner’s view, there is a moral balance to the play. On the one side are the ‘destroyers of life’, Ferdinand, the Cardinal and (while he serves them) Bosola. But while these forces dominate much of the action and atmosphere of the play, ‘this world is not the total picture’:

Into it comes the Duchess of Malfi who stands for the values of life, and Webster’s final statement is that life may have nobility in spite of all. The Duchess, not her brothers, stands for ordinary humanity, love and the continuity of life through children.

For Ribner, the unifying element is Bosola, the great ambiguity at the heart of the play. The different roles he assumes serve both evil and good, and ‘can be reconciled to one another only in terms of the play’s thematic design’.

In one key scene Bosola provides a kind of pivot for the imagery representing both good and evil: in Act IV, scene 1, the Duchess curses the stars, defying nature. Bosola replies cynically that her curses are in vain:

Look you, the stars shine still.

But this cynicism is also, through the traditional poetic association of shining stars, an affirmation, as Ribner explains:

While the stars shine there is certainty, for we cannot doubt the reality of the universe and of an illuminating beauty which persists in spite of all.
From the essay Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order by Irving Ribner.

This crucial line is echoed later when in Act IV the Duchess faces her end and proclaims ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’. Here Ribner sees the central point of the play, where it asserts the final triumph of life over death:

The body may be subject to death and decay, but in these words the Duchess affirms the permanence of the spirit which is the really vital part of man. The line in its simple syntax echoes Bosola’s ‘the stars shine still’ and equates the permanence of the human spirit with that of nature.