Britten's 'Lyrics and Ballads of Thomas Hardy': Sad Tales for Winter

Author(s): Wilfrid Mellers

Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 142, No. 1877 (Winter, 2001), pp. 27-33
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1004574 .
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Britten's
'Lyrics
and ballads
of
Thomas
Hardy'
Sad tales for winter
In the 25th
anniversary year
since the
composer's
death
WILFRID MELLERS revisits a classic
English song cycle
IN 1953 BENJAMIN BRITTEN COMPOSED
-
only
a few
years
after his
Spring symphony
of 1949 - his
wintry masterpiece,
under the
title of Winter words. The work is a
cycle
of
settings
for tenor and
piano
of
poems by
Thomas
Hardy who, superficially, may
seem the least like-
ly
of Britten's
many poetic masks,
who include
Auden, Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Blake,
and
William Soutar. We're
apt
to think of
Hardy
-
espe-
cially Hardy
the
poet
- as
old, sere, retrospective,
living
in a
past
he'd not
only
lost but
thought
he'd
humanly
failed
in;
whereas we think of Britten as
perennially young,
if not for that reason
lacking
in wisdom. Over the
years, however,
I've come to
think that the
Hardy cycle,
Winter
words,
is the
finest and most
deeply
characteristic of the
cycles
dedicated to a
single poet,
and to voice and
piano.
In between the
Spring symphony
and Winter
words Britten
composed
his second
grand,
and
tragic, opera, Billy Budd,
and since most of Brit-
ten's chamber works are in some sense
chippings
from his
operatic workshop,
it
may
be
helpful
to
approach
the
song-cycle by way
of the
opera.
It
has often been said that all Britten's
operas gra-
vitate around the same
theme;
and the limitation
of
range
is
part
of the evidence of his
genius.
In
dealing
with innocence and
persecution
Britten
knew what he
knew,
and that the theme of the
sacrificial
scapegoat
is relevant to our time is
patent enough.
We are obsessed with innocence
because we have lost
it;
and for the same reason
we resent and
persecute
those who haven't. Brit-
ten couldn't have dealt with this theme so
power-
fully
if it hadn't been
deeply personal
to him. What
matters is that his art
creates,
from
personal
con-
flicts that don't concern
us, myths
that
prove
to
be
deeply
and
disturbingly pertinent.
And - at least
before Death in Venice -
Billy
Budd must count as
Britten's most
obsessionally personal opera:
so
much so
that,
at the time of the
original perfor-
mances,
I
momently
wondered whether the
per-
sonal interests weren't too
strong
to be
mytho-
logised.
One can
put
the
point simply by saying
that Melville's womenless man-of-war cannot be
an
adequate image
for the
Ship
of Life.
Grimes,
though
an
unhero,
is
genuinely
a
tragic character,
the
Sauvage
Man
who, given
different circum-
stances, might
have
grown
to civilised conscious-
ness.
Billy
is not a
tragic figure
because we aren't
aware that he has
potentiality
for
growth.
He is a
child
destroyed by
his
childishness, by
a stammer
that we cannot
accept
as mea
culpa
- as
a,
let alone
as
the, 'tragic
flaw'. For this
reason,
the crucifix-
ion
analogy,
so
stridently emphasised
in the first
production,
seemed
illegitimate. Billy
cannot be
equated
with
Christ,
who did
grow up,
the hard
way.
Later
productions,
with the Christ
equation
played down,
convinced me that it's
unhelpful
to
compare
Budd with
Grimes,
since in
Billy
Budd
the drama is
mainly psychological
and
archetypal,
not social nor
even, except
in a rather
special
sense,
moral. Thus the
ship
isn't so much the World
as the Mind: and the mind is that of
Captain Vere,
who is the
opera's
central character because he's
the
only
human consciousness we're aware of.
Billy
and
Claggart
are what
they
are: their white and
black are both within Vere's
psyche,
and the
opera
tells us that
growing up
is a
complex equilibrium
between the
contradictory impulses they
don't
'stand for' but are. We cannot
-
as
Billy
tries to
-
dispose
of evil
by
a blind
blow,
provoked by
the
inarticulateness of the
good
within us. To
accept
destiny,
with
courage
rather than in will-less
passi-
vity,
is the most formidable - the most
'special'
in
the sense referred to above - moral
obligation
we
are
likely
to come
across;
and Britten's marvellous
musical
metaphor
for this
acceptance
- the
pro-
cession of slow
major
triads
that, echoing
and
resolving
the minor triads of
Claggart's
aria of
destruction,
initiates the death-sentence - moves
us so much because we know that
Billy
cannot live
to taste the fruits of
experience.
Yet this resolution
is,
of
course,
not
Billy's
but that of
Vere,
who has
lived
through
his life to find
peace
in submission
to a law
'beyond good
and evil' because it
recog-
nises their
mutuality.
The action of the
opera
is
enclosed within the
memory
of this old
man,
whose name means truth.
Truth is
old,
like our
image
of
Hardy,
and like
him it is unblinkered in its
acceptance
of
destiny.
That Britten should have turned to
Hardy,
in the
intimate medium of chamber
music,
after his
ep-
ic Melvillian
seascape,
therefore seems natural
enough;
for all his
cosmopolitan sophistication,
he was a
profoundly English composer who,
after
THE MUSICAL TIMES / WINTER 2001 27
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the unknowable wastes of the
ocean,
comes home
to the
English countryside
at a time
long enough
ago
to be aware of an historical
past, yet
near
enough
to be
immediately apprehensible.
And with
his
customary self-knowledge
Britten chose
just
those verses which are
germane
to his
purpose.
They
are not
Hardy's greatest poems,
which tend
to be those most
deeply
rooted in his
personal
history
-
usually
too
rhythmically
and
emotionally
subtle to take or need
projection
into sounds
other than those of the
speaking
voice. Poems 2
to 7 of those Britten selects come into the
category
he calls 'ballads': dramatic
vignettes
that set a scene
and tell a
tale, tiny operas exploiting
Britten's
'phy-
sical' auralisation of
experience.
The
opening
and
closing songs, however,
are
lyrical
and
philosoph-
ically
reflective,
the theme
being precisely
the
relationship
between Innocence and
Experience.
The first
poem, pointedly enough,
is called 'At
day-close
in November'. The
rhythm
of the verse
accords with the bleak
landscape, making
for a
calm
acceptance
of
impervious
Time's threat to
childhood's innocence. 'Old'
Hardy,
like old
Cap-
tain
Vere, knows,
but the
young
ones
don't,
their
happiness lying
in their
ignorant unknowingness.
Britten's musical
images
are
precise. Although
the
verse's
pulse
is slow and
weary,
the music is
'quick
and
impetuous',
like the children's
frolicking,
while
the bitonal chords
(often
telescoped
tonics and do-
minants) and the dislocated or
syncopated rhythms
of the
piano
enact both the wind-blustered
sway-
ing
of the trees and the
agitation
within the
aged
poet's
heart. The intermittent unison
Ds, always ap-
proached by
a
tightly Phrygian
semitonic
Eb, sug-
gest
a stoic
acceptance
of the
inevitable,
the bitonal
arpeggios being loud,
but the unison Ds
always
soft.
While the
telescoped
harmonies and dislocated
rhythms
continue in the
piano part,
the vocal
line,
though
anchored on the intermittent unison
Ds,
is
highly
chromaticised,
with
traditionally
'obscure'
D minor as the basic
tonality, acting out,
as so often
in
Britten,
our
undeniably
obscure
pilgrimage.
The
vocal line is no less
distraught,
sometimes
grow-
ing
from verbal
inflexion,
but at other times vio-
lently contradicting it,
as in the stress on the ar-
ticle in the
opening phrase:
'The ten hours'
light
is
abating'.
The hiatus in the fastish waltz
rhythm
as
the 'late bird
wings
across' is both
physical
action
and
psychological distress; similarly
with the
pine
trees
imaged
as
'waiting waltzers',
wherein Britten
doesn't hesitate to
repeat
words to
intensify
the
physicality
of his musical
metaphors.
In the next
stanza the hemiola
rhythm
stretched across the bar
lines makes the beech leaves wither to
yellow-
ness, and the recurrence of the
opening phrase
for 'set
every
tree in
my June
time' now
gives
an
offbeat stress to the crucial 'I': the
person
who in-
stigated
the then-new tree-life that now - in a
hemiola
droop
of a
major
sixth underlined
by
false-
related triads both
major
and minor - obscures
the
sky.
The final stanza is introduced
by
the
original
cross-accented tonics and dominants now in
trip-
le
piano,
and the vocal
line, grown
more
major
than
minor,
rocks
sweetly through
intervals
widening
from fourth to
fifth,
to
sixth,
to
seventh, crooning
of the children's blissful obliviousness.
Again,
ex-
tensions to the vocal line both make action audible
and
point
its
meaning:
consider the melisma on
the word 'never' that makes the children 'ramble'
while at the same time
stressing
the word's re-
morselessness.
Similarly,
the
emphasis
on the
word 'no' in the
phrase
'when no trees'
transmog-
rifies minor into
major
third as
part
of a
warmly
drooping sixth,
balanced
by
a
rising
seventh at
the remembrance that here life once was. The
hushed harmonies
shilly-shally
between
major
and
minor, though
for the
deathly
final
phrase
('none
will in time be
seen')
the decline down the scale
to the tonic
D, again by way
of
Phrygian El,
is
irremediably
minor. This time the downward-
pushing
Eb
stays
in the final bitonal
arpeggios
which, being
between triads of A and Eb
majors,
are
now a devilish tritone
apart.
The ultimate unison
D is a brief
quaver, pp
but accented: a
wary accept-
ance
evanescing
into silence.
After
philosophical
reflection Britten turns to
specific
instances - to what
Hardy
calls 'moments
of vision' or 'satires of circumstance'. The second
poem, 'Midnight
on the Great
Western', presents
a scene and a human situation with vivid immedi-
acy.
The
poem's jogging yet lilting rhythms,
im-
pelled by
their internal
rhymes
and consolidated
by
the short final line to each
stanza,
have a
theatrical seductiveness
suggestive
of music-hall
to which Britten's aural
imagery responds
with
precision, presenting
the little scene as an 'in-
stance' of childhood's
'unconsciousness',
which was
the
general
theme of the
preludial poem.
Music-
ally,
Britten
opens
with an
ingenious pianistic
simulation of the
railway engine,
which hoots in
eliding
triads of C minor and (in effect)
B
major
by way
of a
half-pedalling
device. When the train
starts
moving
it's in
bumpy
staccato
quavers
re-
inforced
by
double
appoggiaturas,
over which the
vocal line
'journeys'
in
wandering
melismata on
an
arpeggiated
dominant triad. The train
noise,
at
first in
3/4,
then in a 6/8
figure
that often crosses
the
barlines, journeys
to 'dark'
Eb minor,
with a
momentary
lift to E minor that renders the
boy
'bewrapt past knowing'.
These vocal roulades
evoke the little lad's
vacancy as,
ticket stuck in
hat,
he travels
through
the
night, knowing nothing
of
his
destiny
nor
even,
like us
grown-ups, knowing
that he doesn't know! The melisma at the end of
the stanza is
again
in
Eb minor, though
the final
third becomes
major, shifting back,
as the domi-
nant
G,
to C minor for the next stanza. This has
music identical with the
first,
for the
journey goes
THE MUSICAL TIMES / WINTER 2001 28
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on, regardless
of
anything
we
may
think of or
hope
for it. But the third
stanza,
when the words
specu-
late about a 'world unkown' - that of the
Journey-
ing Boy's pre-consciousness?
- sinks from C to Bb
minor, making
the
boy 'plunge
alone'
bitonally.
The final stanza returns to the train's C minor
jog-
ging, though
after the melismatic
journey
the vocal
line
opens
into C
major,
or at least into a mode
that veers towards
Eh,
often with flattened second
and
sharpened
fourth. Here the
rhythms
of the
singing
line and the
piano's
train become
desyn-
chronised,
and the music
grows agitated
as it
momentarily
reaches the E minor it had ten-
tatively
touched
on; Gh turns, however,
into the
fifth of the
original
C
minor,
in which
key
the
triplet arabesques
meander a final time. The last
note in the voice
part
is
briefly
and
touchingly ES,
so the
promise
(if it's C
major)
or the threat
(if
it's
E
minor)
is left in
suspension.
The train
grinds
to a
halt, whistling
'from afar'.
The next
poem, 'Baby
and
wagtail',
is one of
Hardy's wry
little
jokes:
which also concerns 'Un-
consciousness.,
and
perhaps
the birth of conscious-
ness
also,
since at the end the
baby
threatens
to think.
Hardy's
arch little
poem
has the
coyness
of the
magazine
verse of its
period,
and Britten's
waltzy
lilt and 'added note'
tea-shop harmony
catch
the manner
scrupulously.
Yet of course
Hardy's
poem, though slight,
is not
magazine verse,
both
because its
point
is satirical and because the events
are described with such
emotional,
as well as
physical, precision.
Britten treats the
jokey poem
jokily, making
it a scherzo that
gives
him
op-
portunity
for
physical description
that is also
psychological insight.
The
'accompaniment'
is in
a
lilting
6/8 in
ambiguous tonality;
the first 'tea-
shop-like'
chord
might
be F
major
with added
sixth, though
no
key
is
decisively
established,
and
the
vague
tonal direction reflects the random co-
mings
and
goings
of the creatures
through
the
ford. The
wagtail's flutterings
are manifest in the
pianist's right
hand
figuration,
in
semiquavers
in
12/16
against
the left hand's 6/8. The vocal line is
poised
in 2/4 over the
triple rhythms.
The
open-
ing phrase, evoking
the
baby,
smiles
through
an
innocuous (but
presumptively godly!)
fourth and
fifth: and the
blaring
bull has the same
figure
be-
cause he is
'pre-conscious'
too.
Although
the
wag-
tail 'shows no
shrinking',
Britten makes him chir-
rup
a shade
nervily, though
the
rocking
bass coun-
ters the faint
fright
with a reiterated triad of inno-
cent A
major.
The stallion inverts the
falling
fourth
to a
rising
fifth without
exacerbating
the bird's
composure:
while the
mongrel
slinks back towards
F and
Bs,
less bold in line but with a
piquant
false
relation between A and
Ab.
The
wagtail, dipping,
sipping,
and
prinking, provokes
a mini-cadenza
in the
piano part,
which takes us back to the ori-
ginal figures, only
to
dissipate
in
contrary
motion
chromatics,
the final chord
being
a
glowing
A
major
triad. So
perhaps
the
baby
decides not to
think,
after all!
The next
number,
'The little old
table',
is an-
other 'satire of circumstance' which
complements
the
previous
one in that it is not about a
baby
but
about an old man
(Hardy himself), remembering.
Although
this
poem
is
bleakly
about non-com-
munication,
this is not because
memory
is dim-
med but rather because it is too acute: and Britten
captures
this
by making
his
setting
the most
'realistic'
song
thus
far,
since the
creaking
of the
table becomes the substance of the music. The
piano part
enunciates the Creak in
rocking qua-
vers in 2/4
('quick
and
light'), spiced
with false
relations that are double
appoggiaturas,
inter-
spersed
with a
scale-figure up
or down
that,
cross-
ing
the
barlines,
and
overriding key,
makes the
creaks
bumpily spasmodic.
That is what we would
expect
of a table that's even older than
Hardy was;
but the vocal line - which at first seems to be
merely onomatopoeic
like the
piano-part
-
changes
at the reference to 'one who
gave you
to
me',
for
these words are set to a 'warm'
melisma, intensify-
ing
the
Phrygian
E minor. The first stanza ends
with
wriggling semiquavers
that transform the
table's creak into
squawk;
and
although
the second
stanza
begins again
with
physical
imitation,
the
breaks in the vocal line shift attention from the
table's material
creaking
to the mental state of the
man who
regards
it. The
point
lies in
'my' (Hardy's)
incomprehension
of the reasons for the woman's
gift,
all those
long years ago:
and the extended
melisma on the word 'did' in the
phrase
'I did not
understand',
adds
pathos
to the
lyricism
of the
setting
of the words 'one who
gave you
to
me';
indeed Britten's stress hints that
Hardy's
words
mean
that,
while he then did not
understand, now,
he does. I
suspect
this was
Hardy's
intention
too,
though
that we're not sure whether the
nostalgia
is
pleasurable
or
painful
is an
aspect
of life's irre-
mediable
ambiguity. Although
this is
very
much a
Song
of
Experience,
it seems to leave the old man
baffled, unknowing.
The chromaticised
appoggia-
turas in the melismata iron out the
bitonality
of
the
creaky accompaniment
into
Phrygian
E
minor,
as the final stanza returns from recollection to the
table here and now. The
lyrical
melismata recur
on the final
phrase,
'from
long ago',
a third
lower,
landing
on the tonic E.
Though
the heart of the
song
has been the
reinvoking
of emotion
long past,
if not
totally buried,
that final
droop
to the tonic
renders the
feeling
elusive,
even
ghostily
insub-
stantial,
as
compared
with the hard little table we're
left
with, semitonically squeaking
into the eternal
silence.
The next number, 'The choirmaster's burial', is
the
longest song
and forms the climax to the
cycle, being
a ballad in the basic sense that it tells
a
psychologically complex story.
It's a
story,
we
note,
of the 'old
times',
when
Hardy
was a lad: a
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ghost story
narrated
by
a 'tenor man' who had
sung
for the choirmaster
through many years;
and it
turns on the contrast between the choirmaster's
Blakean innocence and the vicar's
mundane,
and
therefore
unBlakean, experience.
In this tale the
vicar is on the
world's,
and
perhaps
the
Devil's,
side,
while the choirmaster is on God's side - as
God,
it turns
out,
is on his. The measured move-
ment of the shortlined
rhyming
verses creates his
openhearted simplicity:
which Britten echoes
by
setting
the narrative in
open-eared Anglican
litur-
gical incantation,
in the
Mixolydian
mode on
Bb.
The
piano accompanies
with simulated church-
organ
the
request
that the
hymn
'Mount
Ephraim'
should be
played
at his
grave-side:
and there's a
hint of dominant modulation before the
potential
vision of the
seraphim
lilts in
airy
dotted
rhythmed
triplets
back to B1 with flat
seventh,
to fade on an
unresolved second.
The
worldly
vicar
prompts
a
quicker tempo
(the
service must be hustled
through,
it
might rain);
and also an
abrupt
shift to A
major.
There's a
subtle inversion of values here: for
although
Bb is
traditionally
an
'earthy' key,
in this
context,
as the
key
of the
simple-hearted
choirmaster in its Mixo-
lydian
modal
form,
it enshrines
spiritual veracity:
while the vicar's innocent' A
major
can
only
refer
ironically
to his
professional
role as a 'dealer' in
spirits
and
spooks.
The
Lydian sharp
fourths in the
vicar's music
piquantly
admit the Devil into his
pseudo-godly song,
and the vast tonal distance
between Bb and A
majors,
modalised or
not,
is
pal-
pable.
The
piano's rolling figure
sounds both
pon-
derous and
pompous; possibly
it emulates the
corporeal
movements of
grave-digging, reducing
the burial service
literally
to an
earthy dankness,
as
opposed
to the
spiritual hope,
if not total
faith,
the choirmaster has in his
seraphic
vision.
The choirmaster's
Mixolydian
Bb returns,
tou-
chingly,
when the vicar
stops orating, having
de-
cided that 'it had better not be'. But the return is
momentary,
and
when,
to
get
it
through
faster
'They bury
the Master Without
any tune',
music
is
virtually
banished from Britten's
score,
for the
vocal line turns into
numbly
reiterated Bts and
the
piano part
becomes a
chugging
of
quavers,
pointed
with
aggressive
double
appoggiaturas.
Mixolydian
incantation in
Bb recurs, however,
to
effect a da
capo
when the vision of the
Seraphim
is
apparently
fulfilled. The
exfoliating
dotted-
rhythmed triplets
make
angels
dance to the 'an-
cient
stave',
the
lyricism
now
being
more sustain-
ed,
and
garlanded
with
piano figurations
that lu-
minously glow,
'like saints in
church-glass'. Again,
Time is effaced in elisions of
tonic, dominant,
and
subdominant; and
again
the vocal line fades on
an unresolved
second,
with the
piano
on a C
minor chord with
suspended
seventh. The final
phrase,
'Such the tenor man told When he had
grown old',
distances the old
tale, being sung
un-
accompanied
in the
style
of
Anglican
chant which
seems,
as
part
of
Hardy's anciently
rural
world,
to
have been with us 'since Time was'. The last note
is a flat
seventh, denying
cadential
finality:
but
although
this mini-drama lasts
only
around five
minutes,
it covers an emotional
range
not alto-
gether
remote from the
(recently produced) epic
drama of
Billy
Budd. That
great opera
also ends
with
unaccompanied chant,
when
Captain Vere,
outside the
action,
'freezes' the tale in a Time
past
that is also
eternally present:
as
are,
in Britten's
setting,
the choirmaster and the vicar of
Hardy's
ballad.
tT HE last two
songs
have concerned love
and death in
retrospect
and
memory.
The next number has no human
po-
pulation
and neither tells a tale nor re-
counts a
specific
incident. 'Proud
songsters'
is
about birds as
birds,
and returns to the initial
theme of un-consciousness.
Though
the
song
is
not
narrative,
it is
physically descriptive, capturing
in
burgeoning present
moments the
'pre-conscious'
life
existing within, yet
oblivious
of, temporality.
A
simple
if
irregular
vocal line (in 5/4) is
gar-
landed with
piano triplets,
secundal
quiverings,
and
chattering trills, creating
a
sonority
that is
richly scrunchy, sap-filled,
as those loud
night-
ingales
chortle
away
to their
bursting
hearts' con-
tent,
'as if all Time were theirs'. On this
phrase
the
voice
expands
in a
joyous melisma, though
at the
same time the
shimmering
seconds become un-
stably chromatic,
since the birds' time is not
really
for
ever, except
in the sense that
they
don't know
that it isn't. The second stanza looks back from
the birds' ebullient
present
to a
past
a mere
year
ago
when these 'brand-new' birds were
only 'par-
ticles of
grain,
And
earth,
and
air,
and rain'. Al-
though
there's a sudden modulation to Mixo-
lydian
G and a
quietening
of
dynamics,
Britten
doesn't abandon his secundal
quiverings,
nor his
5/4
metre,
which he
may
have chosen because it
reflects - like the 5/16 ostinato of the
Agnus
Dei
of the War
requiem
- Nature's or God's
magical
pentacle.
When he reaches the final
phrase
of the
slower-pulsed
second verse Britten
ignores
Har-
dy's marvellously expressive punctuation
in order
to
rise,
in both vocal line and
pianistic
twitter-
ings,
to the
original exultation,
with a
long
melis-
ma on the word 'air'.
Hardy's punctuation
accords
better with our
nostalgic
human
response,
which
Gerald
Finzi,
in his
deservedly
well-known set-
ting,
follows
meticulously
Britten's
version,
how-
ever,
is more in tune with the
implications
of Har-
dy's poem,
in that it
indulges
in no
retrospection
but
simply accepts
Nature's
fecundity,
however
darkly
'consciousness'
may
be threatened
by
our
own,
as well as the
birds', ephemerality.
From Nature's unconsciousness we return for
the seventh
song
to the all too human
pre-
THE MUSICAL TIMES / WINTER 2001 30
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dicament,
and to a
poem
that
exactly
balances the
second
poem
- and the first narrative 'ballad' - in
the
sequence.
'At the
railway station, Upway'
is
both a moment of vision and a satire of cir-
cumstance, taking
us back to the
song
about the
Journeying Boy
in the
railway carriage,
but
pre-
senting
a still clearer
dichotomy
between inno-
cence and
experience.
Britten's
setting
is mimetic
and
operatic,
the
piano part consisting
of a
stylisation
of the
boy's fiddling,
notated on one
stave
only.
He
plays free-rhythmed
variations on
the violin's
open strings,
around fifths on G and
E,
intensified with
Phrygian
Abs
and
Fls;
and on
alternating descending minor,
and
occasionally
major, thirds,
which
gravitate towards,
but don't
reach,
innocent A
major
- at least until the
very
end,
and even then the thirds are
ambiguously
major
or minor.
Moreover,
the thirds are not
'open',
like Britten's
fingerprint
'chains of
thirds',
but are
chromatically compromised:
as is
appropriate
to
a ballad in which innocence and
experience,
in
the forms of
boy
and
convict,
are so
bluntly
ex-
posed
and
opposed.
The
boy's
oratio recta is
speech-
inflected, supported by
drone
notes,
often bitonal
or in false
relation,
on the
pseudo-fiddle.
The nar-
rative sections are
accompanied by
the violin's
broken
chords, climaxing
when the convict roisters
into his satirical
ditty
about
freedom,
in a dotted
rhythmed
C
major arpeggio,
albeit with
Lydian
sharp
fourth. The violin's thirds
quiveringly
de-
scend from the climax to a low
F,
and the final
quatrain
returns to
narration,
over the fiddle's
sustained bitonal notes. The
'smiling'
constable
affects to be unconscious of the ironic
juxtaposition
of innocence and
experience:
which is the
cycle's
psychological climax,
since in
being consciously
unconscious the constable is a
representative
Modern Man.
Indeed,
Britten's
music,
like
Hardy's
ballad,
seems to hint that both
Boy
and convict
are
innocents,
in the
eyes
of the Law: until the
Boy's original rising
fifth on E returns on the
words 'And so
they
went
on',
at which
point
the
travel and travail of
boy
and convict
become,
like
the
pilgrimage
of the first ballad's
Journeying Boy,
a
synonym
for the human condition. At the end
the
boy's open-stringed fiddling
turns into
arpeg-
gios
of A
major
and
minor,
and
disperses
in semi-
quaver
thirds,
now
floating up
instead of down.
There is no defined
conclusion,
for this
ambiguity
between innocence and
experience,
freedom and
captivity,
life and
death,
is for ever.
Such is the burden of the
final, epilogic song,
'Before life and
after',
the
poem
of which is
spe-
cifically
about the
Fall, equated
with the transition
from unconsciousness to consciousness. The
rhyth-
mic and
metaphorical
life of that
poem
is so
highly
charged
that we cannot take it
baldly
as a state-
ment that
nothingness
or nirvana is
preferable
to
the
pain
of
experience. Paradoxically,
the
language
of
negation
seeks to be
powerfully physical;
the
crash, cross, wrack,
wincing
and
waning,
the heart-
wringing
and
sense-stinging, generate
a kind of
pride
in
being human;
for it is
something,
not
nothing,
to have been
through
so
much,
and we
deserve the however
illusory panacea
of a
respite.
Britten's
setting
affirms this heroic
stance, begin-
ning
in
'glorious'
D
major
with thick triads in the
left
hand,
and with the
right
hand
floating
in
octaves, asymmetrically
between fifth and sixth.
The vocal
line, beginning high
but
soft,
alternates
stepwise
movement with
godly fourths,
while the
bass line mounts the scale from D to
B,
then
quietly
falls. For the first time the
quaver
move-
ment is stilled in wonder on the words 'When all
went well'.
Momently,
the sense of wonder freezes
the
chugging
movement of
Time,
as the voice
moves between tonic and the
major second,
while
the
piano
enunciates concords of G
major, falling
flatwards to C on the words 'none suffered sick-
ness', teetering
in
ambiguous tonality
and in
pain-
ful, thickly
scored false relations
through
the
'starved
hope'
and
'heart-burnings'.
With a return
of the noble
falling
fourths in the voice
part,
a
modulation to blissful G
major
seems feasible
but,
in an
interrupted cadence,
the lower
mediant,
Eb
major,
is substituted for what would have been
the new tonic. The
pulsing quavers
are
again
stilled
to minim concords on Eb and
Bb,
but their effect
is
paradoxical:
for whereas at the minims' first
appearance they'd
told us that 'all went well' before
we were
conscious, now,
while
rendering
the thud
of Time
immobile, they 'bring
wrack to
things'.
Perhaps
this
suggests
that there are
positive
as
well as
negative aspects
to the
growth
of 'conscious-
ness'
through
its remorseless
procession
of
quaver
triads. This seems to be
implicit
in what's left of the
song,
as it is in
Hardy's poem,
since the music
grows
more
lyrically
affirmative the more
texture,
harmony,
and
tonality
are clouded.
The third stanza veers betwen Eb with flat
seventh and
Bb,
its
dominant,
the voice's
arching
fourths
being
ever more
pervasive. Possibly
Eb
here
implies
a measure of human
heroism,
as it
often did in
eighteenth-
and
nineteenth-century
European music;
and
possibly
it's no accident that
the basic
key
of 'Proud
songsters'
had been E;
major, paying homage
to the birds'
(of course
unconscious) heroism. And
although
when
'bright-
ness dims and dark
prevails'
the vocal line
droops
chromatically
in dotted
rhythm,
the
chugging
bass
quavers
rise. On the words 'No sense was
stung'
the minim triads
again
banish the
clumping qua-
vers, though
this time the triads are no
simple
concords,
but a dominant seventh of E
major
fol-
lowed
by
an F# triad that is
simultaneously major
and minor. The chords' stillness is thus not
quite
immobile;
on the
contrary, they
lead into the 'di-
sease of
feeling' passage
which
generates energy
from its
bitonality, organum-style
triads
descending
from B to E
major
in the left
hand,
while the
right
THE MUSICAL TIMES / WINTER 2001 31
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hand,
echoed
by
the
voice,
rises
up
the scale of G
major.
The
pattern
is
sequentially repeated
as
'pri-
mal
rightness
takes the tinct of
wrong',
the bass
triads
muddily falling
from B1 to
Eb,
then from
Ab
to
Dg,
while the
rising
scales reach
up
to
Fl.
The last
repetition
of the
sequence
takes the
triads down to the tonic D
major
and the vocal
line
up
to
F#.
The ultimate cries of 'How
long?'
oscillate between
high
F# and
G,
the notes the
song
had started
from,
now
loud,
even assertive.
The noble
falling fourths,
echoed
by
the
piano,
reestablish the tonic
key unambiguously,
the bass
triads
wavering
between tonic D
majors
and first
inversions of the dominant seventh. The
piano's
final
falling
fourths are still
potent: although
con-
sciousness,
in
obliterating unconsciousness,
de-
stroys Eden,
it is none the less what man was born
for. Since he 'fell' from
Eden,
and never
really
lived in
it,
he cannot evade 'consciousness'
which,
if he can take
it, may
be his ultimate reward. Even
the most trivial incidents described and the most
fleeting
moments envisioned in the
cycle
have their
place,
and their intrinsic
dignity,
in the
patterns
of
experience.
THIS
is
why
Britten's meticulous
planning
of the
cycle
is not so much clever as
significant.
Two
philosophical,
as distinct
from narrative or
operatic, songs
serve
as
prologue
and
epilogue,
the
prologue being
in
traditionally
'obscure' D
minor,
a
key
of
pilgrimage,
and the
epilogue
in
'glorious'
D
major,
albeit with
many
'fortunate falls' into flat
keys.
Inside the
pro-
logue
and
epilogue
are
placed
two
paired, quasi-
operatic story-songs
with
railway settings
that
imply
human
pilgrimages,
or
journeys
to desti-
nations unknown. The first
presents
an unknown
and
'unknowing' Journeying Boy,
in turbulent C
minor
(Beethoven's
'dynamic' key),
with bewilder-
ing tinges
of 'rational' C
major
or of
'painful'
E
minor,
with some
ambiguity
as to the tonic. The
matching penultimate
number in the
palindrome
concerns a
fiddling boy
at a
railway station, along
with a convict who is conscious of little
except
that he is
handcuffed,
whereas the
fiddling Boy
is
free.
Unsurprisingly,
this number cannot decide
whether it is in
(dour)
A minor or in
(shining)
A
major.
Within the two
railway songs
Britten
places,
in his
palindrome,
two small
scherzos,
the first
being
about a
baby
and a
wagtail,
which
begins
around
pastoral
F
major
but evanesces in blithe A
major
when the
baby
decides - or is he encou-
raged by
Nature or God? - not to think. At the
other end we have a
song
about the obliviousness
of
birds, chattering,
in unconscious
heroism,
in
humanly
heroic EF
major.
Then,
as the midmost
pair,
we have a
song
about an old man
(Hardy
himself) who fails 'con-
sciously'
to
remember,
and therefore to understand:
this
being
in E
minor,
a
purgatorial key and,
indeed,
Bach's
key
of crucifixion. This is bracketed
with the
climacteric,
and
longest, song
about a
dead Choirmaster and a
living
Vicar whose
roles,
as
representatives
of the Flesh and the
Word,
are
reversed: for the dead choirmaster's basic
key
is
Mixolydian
Bb
major
- a tritone
away
from
'purga-
torial' E minor and
traditionally
an
'earthy' key
one
step
down the
cycle
of fifths from
pastoral
F
major
- while the Vicar's
(remote)
key
of A
major
displays
innocence
only ironically,
and even
cynic-
ally.
The
epilogic song
- both the
grandest
and
the
deepest
-
is
pointedly
called 'Before life and
after';
and moves us
deeply
because we know
that,
however
desperately
those
soaring
'How
longs'?'
yearn
for a renewal of Eden's
unconsciousness,
our
destiny
can
only
be
consciousness,
which embraces
pleasure
and
pain
alike.
Consciousness,
of its na-
ture,
involves the
tragic
sense.
Only
human
beings
have it.
Postscript
In
compiling
most of his
song-cycles
Britten usual-
ly
set more
poems
than he
finally
included in the
sequence.
This is true of the
Hardy cycle
discussed
above: of which a new edition has
recently ap-
peared, incorporating
two
settings
made at the
same time as the sanctioned
sequence,
but event-
ually
omitted. Editorial
opinion
insists that these
two
songs
must on no account be included in
performance
of the
cycle
as
originally published
by Britten;
but
presumably hopes
that
they may,
as occasion
offers,
be
performed separately.
We
cannot know for sure whether Britten excluded
them because he
thought they
weren't
up
to stan-
dard,
or because he
thought they
would have
compromised
the
symmetry
of the
cycle
as he
eventually shaped
it. In
offering
comments on
these two
songs, analogous
to the text of the fore-
going essay,
I too
accept
the
published cycle
as an
entity,
whilst
thinking
that the 'new'
songs
merit
attention.
Each
song belongs
to a familiar
Hardy-type,
'If
it's ever
Spring again' being
a
song
of
nostalgia,
'The children and Sir Nameless'
being
a satire of
Circumstance. The
nostalgia-number
is in two
lyric-
al stanzas with a brief
refrain, recalling
an ex-
perience
of human love
vividly
remembered in the
context of
Nature,
in a
spring
and summer
pro-
bably long
vanished. The
subtlety
of the verses
lies in the
way
in which Nature - first in the
pro-
mise of
spring,
then in the
dreamy
fulfilment or
possible
disillusion of summer - makes incarnate
the
inevitably
transient
love-relationship,
with his
supportive
arm 'around her' but
then,
more
hazily,
with the murmurous bees achime.
Musically,
the
song
is no less
'physical',
and remarkable for its
economy
The attenuation of the textures involves
tonal
ambiguity,
for
although
one
may
think of
the
key
as B
minor,
it's more
accurately
the
Phry-
gian
mode on F# - a tone that
opens
the
song
as
THE MUSICAL TIMES / WINTER 2001 32
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a
pedal
and on to which the final cadence
resolves. In the
opening section,
marked
'slow',
spring-like yearning
is
expressed vocally
in a
rising
scale rounded
off, however, by
a
falling
fifth. The
balancing section,
marked 'with move-
ment',
deals with the
stirrings
of Nature's birds and
beasts and of the human
lovers;
the taut texture
mingles stepwise
movement and
rising
as well as
falling
fifths in free canon. The
repetition
of the
original
words at the close of the first stanza re-
turns to the
original music,
but modulates to E
minor,
the D#s of which shift
enharmonically
to
Eb. The second stanza (in summer)
substitutes
pedal
Ebs for the
original F#s, transmuting
the
rising
to a
declining scale,
but
inverting
the fall-
ing
fifths into ascents. The effect is elusive and
perhaps ambiguous, leaving
us unsure whether
spring's promise
is fulfilled or
disappointed.
But
the coda about 'the
hay
and bees achime' is so
sun-drenched as to seem
visionary
- a love that
'never was' on
land,
nor
possibly
even on sea.
Modulation shifts back from the Eb
major-minor
complex
and from a hint of Gb
major
to the
enharmonic
F#
of the
opening, fading ppp
on to
unisonal F#s.
Britten's non-committal reticence in this set-
ting adroitly
catches the limbo of the
poem,
some-
where between
memory
and
dream,
or between
potential
futures. The satire of Circumstance is
another of
Hardy's wry puttings-down
of
Authority,
with
unfledged
children as the instruments of
execution. At first the
key
of the
song
is unam-
biguously
white C
major,
in the 6/8
jigging
of a
round-game,
marked
'quick
and
heavy',
the
quick-
ness
(or
livingness) being
that of the
children,
the
heaviness that of the nameless
knight
who ob-
jects
to their
rowdy frolicking.
His
grumpiness
taints C
major
with riotous modulations
as,
in
unwitting irony,
he thanks God for his own blessed
childlessness.
Tonality
returns to C
major
when
Sir Nameless
grandiloquently,
but in the
sight
of
God
childishly,
announces his intention to
per-
petuate
his
'mightiness'
in what he
expects
to be
eternally
durable stone. But the
illusory
nature of
this
grandiloquence
is revealed as the
sculpting
music
painfully grinds through
thirds in
contrary
motion, beginning
in B minor
(a
key
of
suffering!)
but
inching up sequentially,
with abrasive false re-
lations,
to attain a
glorious
resolution in
shining
parallel
tenths in C
major,
with melismatic vocal
decorations to
praise
the consummated Work. This
leads,
after church
restorers,
three hundred
years
later,
have demoted the statue of the nameless be-
cause
forgotten knight
from
pedestal
to
floor,
to a
return to the kiddies'
round-dance,
its
jig-rhythm
now
sharpened by
dissonant
major
sevenths and
false relations. These are aural
images
for
many
generations
of children's hobnailed
boots, chip-
ping
bits off 'this old stone man'. The final C ma-
jor
scales -
upwards
for the
voice,
downwards for
the
piano
- sound
initially triumphant though,
in
the context of
eternity,
the
song
ends
pp
on a wide-
spaced
C
major triad, prefaced by
a
sharp
fourth
of the
Lydian
mode -
traditionally
associated with
healing!
Each of these
settings
is as
poetically percep-
tive as Britten
always
is in
dealing
with
verse,
though
it's not as
easy
to decide where
they might
have been
placed
within the
cycle.
Sir Nameless
and the children make the same
point
as do the
vicar and the choirmaster in 'The choirmaster's
burial', perhaps
less
magically.
'If it's ever
Spring
again'
adds a dimension not evident in the 'sanc-
tioned'
songs,
since it deals with the elusive
relationship
between Nature and human love. I
wouldn't, however,
know where to
place
it with-
out
destroying
the subtle
symmetry
of Britten's
sequence.
Coming
soon in The Musical Times
Fox on
Finnissy
Jones
on Maxwell Davies
Simeone on
Expo
37
Wood on Pierne
To subscribe
please
use the form on
p.14
or visit musicaltimes.co.uk
THE MUSICAL TIMES / WINTER 2001
Wilfrid Mellers's
latest
book,
Celestial music or
the voice
of
God:
some
masterpieces of
European religious
music,
is due out
soon.
33
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