Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique. He was expecting a political decapitation. Political metaphors tend to the violent: toast, under a bus, the high jump.
Berlioz didn’t use échafaud, ‘scaffold’, in the title of his movement, but supplice, ‘torment’. But J.M. Neale, the author of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, wrote a less successful ballad on the martyrdom of Archbishop Laud that included these lines: ‘So steadfastly the scaffold-steps/ That good Archbishop trod/ As one that journeyed to his Home/ And hasten’d to his God.’
Scaffold has a different connotation from scaffolding, with its loud voices, transistors and non-woke workmen. Their apparatus is venerable, there being an item in the accounts of Durham Abbey for 1347-48 for 15d for putting up scaffolding. The Middle Ages were good at it, using wood (as inside the spire at Salisbury).
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