A comparative essay by Thomas Shess, PillaratoPost.org--Poet Bertol Brecht and composer George Gershwin both turn the train into a modernist musical instrument. Not merely transportation, but rhythm, exile, machinery, urban pressure, and arrival.
Brecht’s “Of Poor B.B.” was, according to Luke Dunne in The London Magazine, composed on April 26, 1922, when the twenty-four-year-old Brecht took the night train from Berlin to Munich. Dunne calls it “a poem of placelessness, a poem of transit written in transit.” That matters because the poem is not just about cities. It is about being carried into them, through them, and perhaps away from them.
The rail references are not all “train” references in the obvious locomotive-smoke sense. They are embedded in the poem’s structure and weather:
First: the poem begins with forced migration. Brecht’s speaker is carried from the “black forests” into the city before birth. That is almost a train image without naming the train: the human being as freight, passenger, unborn cargo. Dunne reads the poem as Brecht’s movement between forest and asphalt city, and as a modern subject who did not choose the journey.
Second: the poem’s form has the knock of transit. Dunne notes the “recurrent four-stress rhythms” and suggests the train’s engine or wheels may have served as a counter-rhythm, a kind of mechanical metronome, even while Brecht later distrusted machine noise as hostile to old poetic meter.
Third: the city passages are full of people behaving like machinery. Dunne points out that Brecht’s city dwellers are “more machinic than the machines with which they are surrounded.” That is where the train enters as modern environment: not picturesque travel, but the age of schedules, platforms, metal, crowding, fatigue, and anonymous motion.
Fourth: sleep, whiskey, tobacco, and worry feel like night-train sensations. The speaker drinks, smokes, and “worriedly” goes to sleep, after which the poem moves into apocalypse. Dunne suggests this may read like a “day in the life” ending in dream, which fits the sleeper-car condition: not quite awake, not quite home, the mind rattling ahead of the body.
That brings us neatly to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Gershwin did not merely sound like a train by accident. He said the piece’s conception came on an intercity train ride between New York to Boston, amid the “steely rhythms” and “rattle-ty-bang” of the journey, according to Isaac Goldberg a Gershwin biographer.
The Library of Congress preserves that account, and the original 1924 recording by Gershwin and Paul Whiteman’s orchestra is in the National Recording Registry. The similarity is this: Brecht makes the train intellectual; Gershwin makes it audible.
Brecht gives us the passenger’s consciousness: estrangement, city fatigue, motion, no rootedness.
Gershwin gives us the depot, the rails, the brass, the brakes, the crowd, the American city arriving in a rush. The famous clarinet opening is not literally a whistle, but it behaves like one: a sly mechanical-human cry, part siren, part laugh, part announcement that the twentieth century has entered the room.
And yes, in parts of “Rhapsody in Blue” you can hear the train pulling in: the forward shove, the chugging syncopations, the sudden swelling brass, the piano as urban nervous system.
One guide even labels a section the “Train Theme,” with its chugging rhythm and brassy energy.
Other major train-inspired works worth pairing with them:
--Arthur Honegger, “Pacific 231” Probably the great locomotive piece in classical modernism. Honegger does not write a pretty train ride. He writes acceleration, pistons, weight, pressure, steel becoming music. It is the train as machine-god.
--Heitor Villa-Lobos, “The Little Train of the Caipira” from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2 Here the train is warmer, Brazilian, rural, rhythmic. It starts like a little engine gathering itself, then becomes landscape in motion. Interlude describes the movement as a depiction of a train trip through early twentieth-century Brazil.
--Steve Reich, “Different Trains” A later masterpiece, and darker. Reich compares the American trains of his childhood with the European trains carrying Jews to death camps. The train becomes memory, history, and moral terror.
--Duke Ellington, “Daybreak Express” and "A-Train", a jazz train in full morning motion. Less depot, more velocity. Ellington makes the orchestra behave like rail steel, whistle, steam, and sunrise.
--Benjamin Britten, “Night Mail” Written for the famous documentary with W.H. Auden’s verse. The train here is public service, Britain, mail sacks, rhythm, class, landscape, and national machinery.
Brecht’s train produces the modern mind.
Gershwin’s train produces the modern sound.
Honegger’s train produces the modern machine.
Villa-Lobos’s train produces landscape.
Reich’s train produces memory and dread.
Because of copyrights posting Brecht's poem is not allowed but an English translation can be found on the Internet by searching www.Babelmatrix.org
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