Program Notes (November 23, 2008 @ 3pm)
Songs and Vocal Chamber Music by Benjamin Britten
Notes by Allison Voth
The British Isles boast a long line of great poets, writers and playwrights who helped inspire generations of revered song writers, including John Dowland, William Byrd, Gerald Finzi, Ivor Gurney and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Amid this distinguished lineage of song writers, Britten shines particularly brightly; he lifted text setting to a level never before heard. His dramatic sensibility, along with keen understanding of the music of language, enabled him to pull the words off the page so that the text and music became inseparable. Britten could not be satisfied with composing a beautiful melody and a pleasing accompaniment. He strived to honor and reflect any words he set, but he wanted his music to be heard on a footing equal to the words. And he wanted the listener to listen actively. In a speech given in Aspen he said:
Don’t just day-dream when listening to it, but listen seriously to the music that you feel one day you may like. I am afraid many people like music only for the ideas it gives them. They imagine wonderful scenes, or themselves involved in some romantic situation. They may enjoy this, but it is not the music they enjoy, but the associations stirred up by this music. The fullest benefit and enjoyment to be got from listening to music is a much deeper thing–the appreciation and love of the tunes for themselves, the excitement of the rhythms for themselves, the fascination of the harmony and the overwhelming satisfaction which a well-constructed piece of music gives you. These are the things which the good composer offers you. The good listener is ready to receive them.
At all times his text settings shimmer with clarity and expressive detail. They are never pedantic, purely intellectual, or an inaccessible exercise. More than anything, his text settings–and all of his music–reaches toward a greater purpose. “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them to ‘enhance their lives.’”
From a young age Britten was naturally drawn to poetry, and when he met W. H. Auden in 1935, his knowledge and appreciation broadened even more. Auden introduced him to a wide range of poetry, from Donne and Rimbaud to Chaucer. In an interview with Charles Reid for High Fidelity Magazine, Britten said:
I had always read poetry. I find it, in a way, easier to read than prose; but the person, I think, who developed my love was the poet, Auden, whom I met, I think, in [my] late teens…he had an enormous influence on me for quite a considerable period. He showed me many things. I remember, he showed me Chaucer for the first time. I’d always imagined that was a kind of foreign language, but as he read it, which was very well, I understood almost immediately what it meant, and I find now that it isn’t so difficult to read–one must just have confidence and read ahead and then the meaning comes very strongly, very easily.
Another important influence on the young Britten was the Frank Bridge, who began giving Britten composition lessons only after he was persuaded that the fourteen-year old boy was worth nurturing. Bridge gently opened his young pupil’s eyes to politics, travel, architecture and literature, but his greatest gift was in guiding Britten toward the highest musical standards.
In everything he did for me, there were perhaps above all two cardinal principles. One was that you should try to find yourself and be true to what you found. The other, obviously connected with it–was his scrupulous attention to good technique, the business of saying clearly what was in one’s mind.
Britten carried these principles with him all his composing life.
The varied compositions on this program shine a broad light on Britten’s versatility in song writing. He set both past and contemporary poets, arranged countless folksong melodies, realized many Purcell songs and created five canticles–mini self-contained dramatic works, one liturgical setting and four poetic meditations.
The opening Fanfare and Prologueis part of a prelude and postlude from The Heart of the Matter that bookends his Canticle III, a setting of Edith Sitwell’s “Still Falls the Rain: The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn.” Britten had met Sitwell when she came to Aldeburgh to be the reciter of her poetry as part of William Walton’s Façade, and soon they became fast friends and admirers of each other’s work. In 1951 after receiving a book of her poetry, Britten wrote:
I find them, the later ones especially profoundly moving. There is a grandeur of conception in them which is heartening, & a lack of sentimentality most remarkable when dealing with such contemporary subjects. The Heart of the Matter was composed in 1956 and added to Canticle III as part of an Aldeburgh evening featuring Sitwell reciting her poetry. The whole evening became somewhat of a philosophical question and answer framework with readings and music surrounding Canticle III.
Frank Bridge’s most important compositions are were orchestral and chamber works. He did, however, write many songs throughout his life. The beaufiful “Where she lies asleep” and “Love went A-riding” are both from Bridge’s later period. But in his early twenties, he wrote sixty songs, many of them among his best. The early “Far, far from each other” (1906) is for voice, viola and piano; it shows Bridge at his best. Its arching form is carefully crafted; the viola opens as a solo voice, then poignantly weaves around the vocal line, and finally breaks off into its own soaring line. This piece is particularly fitting on this concert, since it was the viola that brought the Bridge and Britten together: the violist Audrey Alston had introduced Bridge to her young, promising viola student–her student who also loved to compose.
Britten’s “The Birds” is the only song that survives from the years of his study with Bridge. When Britten presented this song to his teacher for his approval, Bridge pushed him to rewrite the ending. In the Sunday Telegraph, Britten wrote:
I had a terrible struggle with this before finding what has been called ‘the right ending in the wrong key.’ Bridge made me go on and on at it, worrying out what hadn’t come right, until I spotted that the cycle of changing keys for each verse needed such an ending.
“Vigil” and “The Ship of Rio” are two other charming examples of Britten’s early song writing. They are set to the poetry of Walter de la Mare, a poet for whom Britten seemed to have a particular penchant. Looking back on these early songs, Britten wrote, “I do feel that the boy’s vision has a simplicity and clarity which might have given a little pleasure to the great poet, with his unique insight into a child’s mind.”
About his John Donne Sonnets,Britten said in an interview with Murray Shafer:
I wrote my John Donne Sonnets in a week while in bed with a high fever, a delayed reaction from an inoculation. The inoculation had been in order to go on a tour of concentration camps with [the violinist]Yehudi Menuhin in 1945. We gave two or three short recitals a day–they couldn’t take more. It was in many ways a terrifying experience. The theme of the Donne Sonnets is death, as you know. I think the connection between personal experience and my feelings about the poetry was a strong one. It certainly characterized the music.
Winter Words, ‘Lyrics and Ballads’ by Thomas Hardy, bears a kinship with his Holy Sonnets of eight years earlier, a succinct style tied together with careful motivic unity. By 1953, Britten was enjoying considerable fame and access into elite society. Despite his acceptance into such circles, Britten continued to quietly maintain his personal and political stands. Ever the artist to let his music speak on his behalf, he found Hardy’s simple but heartfelt messages striking a chord in him. “Proud Songsters” is a breath of fresh air, but not without a telling twist that could apply to man: the shimmering and exuberant bird song ends with the gentle reminder that the miracle of a song bird came from seemly nothing, “…only particles of grain, And earth, and air, and rain.” “Before Life and After,” the second song in the Hardy set, is a reminder of Britten’s extraordinary craft. A seemingly simple song accompaniment is, on close listening, a deft harmonic progression that perfectly illuminates the arc and poignant crux of the bitter poem about the loss of innocence. Years after he composed Winter Words, Britten heard a broadcast of Pears singing the Hardy songs. He wrote to Pears saying that hearing the final words of “How long, how long, how long?” forced him to turn the radio off–he could not bear to hear anything after that.
In 1939, Britten and Pears moved to the United States to escape the political issues that were rising in Europe. Although things went very well for Britten and Pears (they appeared regularly together in recital, and Britten had successfully collaborated with Auden on the opera, Paul Bunyan), Britten began to feel homesick after reading an article on George Crabbe, written Ian Forrester, that began, “To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England.” Britten’s response was, “We’ve just re-discovered the poetry of George Crabbe–all about Suffolk!” He wrote to a friend, “You see, I’m gradually realizing that I’m English–& as a composer I suppose I feel I want more definite roots than other people.”
By then it was 1941, and the War was in full swing; Britten felt it important to return home to support England, even though, as a pacifist, he refused to fight or participate in the military. On the trip home, he began work on Peter Grimes, basing it on a George Crabbe poem, and worked on folksong arrangements for his well-established recitals with Pears. In performance, these arrangements were well enough received that Britten continued to arrange folksongs for many years – sixty-one folksongs of various origins: English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, French, and American. Always intent on reflecting the heart of any given text though his music, Britten’s inventive folksong arrangements challenge the listener with unexpected harmonic punctuations (“The Ash Grove”), emotionally driven and incessant rhythmic figures (“O, the sight entrancing”), and silences (“Oliver Cromwell”).
Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, op. 74, composed in 1965, is one of the few of Britten’s song cycles not written for Peter Pears, although Pears had carefully selected the proverbs and poems for him to set. The songs were composed for the great lieder and opera singer/interpreter, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who three years earlier had participated in the first performance of the War Requiem. The gnarly Songs and Proverbs express the darker side of man’s existence (the Donne settings come to mind), and is composed in a daring harmonic and rhythmic style that uses a twelve-note theme throughout—a style that Britten would continue to employ right up through his last opera, A Death in Venice.
In his Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, each proverb clearly sets up or comments on a song. “The Chimney-Sweeper” is a child’s painfully honest declaration religious hypocrisy. Britten adeptly sets the text to repeated, syncopated rhythmic figures, interspersed with commenting flourishes. The “Poison Tree” is an unrelenting and terrifying song that brutally builds to its evil ending. “Tyger! Tyger!” continues with the cynical pessimism of “The Poison Tree,” and Britten’s fleet writing creates a terror equally strong but different from that of “Tyger! Tyger!”
Britten held deep respect for Henry Purcell and his sensitivity in his setting of texts. In a pamphlet issued for two concerts at Wigmore Hall honoring the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death, Britten wrote:
Almost the greatest importance of Purcell for us to-day is the example of his prosody. Here surely is the way to make the English language live again in song. He is successful in every kind of prosody; - the natural declamations (as in the recitatives of Saul and Endor); the elaborate and artificial coloraturas (as in If Music be the Food of Love) and the simple regular tunes (such as Fairest Isle). No composer can ever have loved his native tongue as Purcell did. He was indeed the Orpheus Britannicus.
Purcell never fleshed out the full harmonies in his own songs, as it was tradition for that task–realization–to fall to the performer. Britten, understanding that this performer’s responsibility was very personal, wrote in an essay called, On Realizing the Continuo in Purcell’s Songs,
The most I have hoped for is to have drawn attention to some of these wonderful and useful songs by a lively enough version, and hope therefore that eventually other people will like these songs enough to arrange them themselves.
A recital of Britten songs would not be complete without including songs of W.H. Auden poems, for these two men’s friendship and collaboration were long-lived. This group of songs all written between 1935 and1939, combines ones from the collections Fish in the Unruffled Lake, Two Ballads, The Red Cockatoo & Other Songs, and Cabaret Songs.
The seed of the his Cabaret Songs was incidental music written in 1937, for Auden’s The Ascent of F6, in which the song “Blues” appears. Hedli Anderson, a cast member, brought the song to life and inspired Britten to compose a group of cabaret songs. Perhaps feeling he had to defend writing songs of a lighter nature, Britten said in a BBC interview:
I maintain very strongly that it is the duty of every young composer to be able to write every kind of music–except bad music. That has nothing to do with high-brow or low-brow, serious or light music. It is a very good thing for a young composer to have to write the lightest kinds of music. I knew, at that time, a very good cabaret singer who asked me to write some songs for her. I obliged and wrote to the best of my ability some ‘blues’ and a calypso of which I am not at all ashamed and which I often play for my friends’ amusement.
“When you’re feeling like expressing your affection,” included in The Red Cockatoo & Other Songs, is not officially a part of the Cabaret Songs, but it falls into the same category. The song was most likely written for John Grierson’s GPO Film Units. Two other songs, “Night covers up the rigid land” and “Under the Abject Willow,” are settings of poems that Auden had dedicated to Britten, the latter clearly intended to encourage Britten to be more cheerful about his homosexuality. The light and almost flippant setting of the poem suggests that Britten could not heed the poem’s advice. Still, Britten liked the poem it enough to set it twice, once as a duet and once as a solo song. These two poems, as well as “Fish in the unruffled lakes,” appear in Auden’s Look, Stranger!
Over the course of his life, Britten wrote five Canticles. Their text sources are disparate, ranging from liturgical sources to contemporary poets like Edith Sitwell; all are dramatically charged enough to make them invite staging. Canticle II is perhaps the most moving out of the five, a reflection of Britten’s deep feeling about the suffering of children. Its text is from the Chester cycle of mystery plays, and it was composed for Peter Pears and Kathleen Ferrier to perform on a series of concerts organized for the funds of the English Opera Group. Canticle II is primarily a dialogue between God (the tenor and mezzo-soprano singing in unison), Abraham (tenor), and Isaac, (mezzo-soprano). In referring to their performances together Britten wrote, “‘Abraham and Isaac’ when performed with such sincerity and charm, pleased the public.”