Previous posts for October 2nd are here: Sting (2019), Leroy Shield (2020), and Don McLean (2021)
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Gunnar Wennerberg (2 October 1817 – 24 August 1901) was a Swedish poet, composer and politician. (The statue referenced below is located a few blocks from where I am writing this.)
The Wenneberg Statue in Minnehaha Park
His poems, to which their musical accompaniment is almost essential, have not ceased, in half a century, to be universally pleasing to Swedish ears; outside Sweden it would be difficult to make their peculiarly local charm intelligible. -- Wikipedia, citing 11th ed. of Encyclopedia Britannica
The songs of Wenneberg have charms
Beguiling to the Swedish ear,
But why the potent call to arms
Which Wenneberg exerted here?
I don’t know why some suffragettes
Inspired by his muse’s spark,
Decided it was he who gets
A statute in our local park,
But there they are (the photo shows
Their rally and their signs)
Unswerving with the power that flows
From Scandinavian shrines.
♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪
Kenneth Leighton (2 October 1929 – 24 August 1988) was a British composer and pianist.
Paradox
While Leighton wrote a good deal of church music, and has occasionally
been categorised too reductively as a church-music composer, he was not a
church-goer or member of any congregation, nor even conventionally
religious. -- Wikipedia
When Kenneth Leighton’s sacred work inspires
The urge to sing in certain parish choirs,
We sympathize when anyone inquires,
“Were anthems so avowedly prestigious,
And organ works whose impact is prodigious,
Composed by someone not at all religious?”
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