The friend who brought the hypnotic compact disc of night in gales singing has now added to the pleasure by posting a lovely book, Whistling in the Dark: In Pursuit of the Nightingale, by the excellent Richard Mabey. One of the most fascinating stories he tells is the long saga of the cellist Beatrice Harrison and her efforts to have the Nightingale's song broadcast from her garden in Surrey.
She was, Mabey tells us, the most famous British cellist by a long margin. Delius dedicated his Cello Sonata to her; she was Elgar's favourite soloist. Anyway, in the spring of 1923 practising in her garden Rimsky Korsakov's Chant Hindou, a bird began to sing along with her. She was astonished, says Mabey, and began to trill up and down the scales.
The bird, she reported, followed her notes "in third and always perfectly in tune with the cello". The gardener identified, the bird as a nightingale and congratulated her on bringing the bird back to the place, Foyle Riding, after many years.
Later, in the middle of her broadcasting debut (Elgar's Cello Concerto) she thought of bringing the nightingales singing in her wood to all the BBC listeners. She approached Lord Reith, director general of the BBC. There was a long tussle but finally he realised he had something of a coup on his hands: the very first outside live broadcast, Mabey calls it. He approved. Two vanloads of equipment arrived at Foyle Riding, and masses of engineers.
The plan was to wait until the bird started to sing and then break into the Saturday night dance music programme by the Savoy Hotel Orpheans. Beatrice took up position; it was a clear warm night, Saturday, May 19th, 1924. She played Danny Boy, parts of the Elgar Concerto and snatches of Dvorak. "Donkeys brayed, engineers tripped over in the dark, rabbits gnawed the vital cable, but no nightingale sang."
Then, just after 10.45, twenty minutes before the station was due off the air, the bird began a historic duet. "Although the bird doesn't literally follow or copy the music, there is no doubt that it is responding to the phrases coming from Beatrice's cello, like a loosely improvised cadenza over a bass ground." The broadcast was a sensation, Mabey tells us. It was heard in Italy, Paris, Barcelona and Hungary. Also in Scandinavia and Scotland where the bird had never been heard.
Within a few months, Beatrice received 50,000 letters of appreciation. On May 13th, 1933, she held a Nightingale Festival at her house to raise money for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. And the nightingales became an annual broadcast and went on sporadically until 1942. It's a slim book, but nightingales could fill a huge tome. Published by Sinclair Stevenson 1993. £9.99. Oh, to have nightingales in this country.