Georg Friedrich Handel has been described as "the man who set the Bible to music". In the context of meteorology, a similar remark might be made about Jule Charney, a well-known pioneer in modern techniques of numerical weather prediction.
The music of the weather was a favourite theme of his.
"We might say that the atmosphere is a musical instrument," wrote Charney, "on which one can play many tunes. The high notes are sound waves, low notes are long inertial waves, and nature as a musician is more of a Beethoven than of the Chopin type. She much prefers the low notes, and only occasionally plays arpeggios in the treble, and then only with a light hand.
"The ocean and the continents are the elephants in Saint-Saens's animal suite, marching in a slow cumbrous rhythm, one step every day or so. And, of course, there are overtones - sound waves, billow clouds and inertial oscillations."
Charney's metaphor was inspired. No doubt, many of the great composers have depicted weather in their work. I was reminded of it by yesterday's Weather Eye, which dealt with Friday's thunderstorms in Strasbourg. There are few composers who have not attempted to bring these phenomena to musical life.
Hector Berlioz, for example, threatens a thunderstorm by ominous rolls on the timpani in the third movement of his Symphonie Fantastique only to have the storm recede again, but there is no mistaking its arrival in his opera, The Trojans.
There is a storm, too, in Rossini's William Tell Overture, just after the better known "lone ranger" bit. The gamut of thunderstorm emotion is run by Richard Wagner in the third act of Die Walkure, and Johann Strauss jrn, of course, wrote the Thunder and Lightning Polka.
In the "Spring" section of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, although the overall theme of the passage is one of joy at the receding grip of winter, the untrustworthy nature of the season is illustrated by a brief thundershower. Later in the work, a more violent thunderstorm breaks out to disrupt temporarily the humid adagio of summer.
And finally, Franz-Josef Haydn, in what one might describe as a "diurnal suite", wrote three short symphonies called Le Matin, Le Midi and Le Soir. The opening of the first symphony portrays the dawn, while the second is suggestive of the harsh bright sunshine of midday; but the third, Le Soir, concludes with a vigorous movement unambiguously labelled La Tempesta.