Program Notes (January 16, 2009 @ 8pm)
Lachrymae
Five Flower Songs
Phaedra
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
Rejoice in the Lamb, orch. Imogen Holst
Notes by David Hoose
No single concert of one composer’s music could ever give the whole picture—even of a composer like Anton Webern, whose complete music can be played in less than three hours. So, the hope that five or six works by Benjamin Britten, one of the most prolific and imaginative artistic minds of the 20th century—whose music stretched from chamber music to orchestral canvases, from intimate opera to grand opera, from song to requiem—could offer a full palate may be met with a bit of hunger. But even the most modest meal of Britten’s music gives satisfaction—and encourages eager anticipation of the next. This collection of colorful and searching works from his most fertile years, years that surround the composition of Peter Grimes, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Albert Herring and Spring Symphony, and of one astounding composition from his last, increasingly exploratory years, does just that.
Lachrymae (1950)
For viola solo and string orchestra.
During the years that led to up to his composing Peter Grimes, Britten turned most of his focus toward music for the voice. Even a purely instrumental work like Lachrymae has its roots in song, though, of course, the words are never heard. Britten wrote these ‘Reflections on a Song of John Dowland’ for William Primrose, who gave the first performance with the composer playing piano. It is this version that has come to be loved by violists, but in 1976, Britten orchestrated the piano part for small string orchestra, recomposing some of the music, and making the unusual request that the one violin part be played by the second violins of the orchestra. The design of the single movement Lachrymae resembles a theme and variations, though the theme itself is quite a bit longer than the kind Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, or Hindemith might have used. Since his theme, an entire song, is really too long to be the basis of a cogent set of ever expanding variations, Britten focuses only on the song’s beginning, even in the introduction, where opening of the song sounds clearly in the bass instruments but dissolves into the mist. Only in the final touching moments of Lachrymae does the full span of the song surface.
If my complaints could passions move,
Or make Love see wherein I suffer wrong:
My passions were enough to prove,
That my despairs had govern’d me too long.
O Love, I live and die in thee,
Thy grief in my deep sighs still speaks:
Thy wounds do freshly bleed in me,
My heart for thy unkindness breaks:
Yet thou dost hope when I despair,
And when I hope, thou mak’st me hope in vain.
Thou say’st thou canst my harms repair,
Yet for redress, thou let’st me still complain.
Can Love be rich, and yet I want?
Is Love my judge, and yet I am condemn’d?
Thou plenty hast, yet me dost scant:
Thou made a God, and yet thy power contemn’d.
That I do live, it is thy power:
That I desire it is thy worth:
If Love doth make men’s lives too sour,
Let me not love, nor live henceforth.
Die shall my hopes, but not my faith,
That you that of my fall may hearers be
May here despair, which truly saith,
I was more true to Love than Love to me.
Five Flower Songs (1950)
For unaccompanied four-part chorus.
Although unaccompanied choral music is close to the heart of many British composers, from Charles Villiers Stanford, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams to Peter Maxwell Davies, this particular medium doesn’t actually represent a large portion of Benjamin Britten’s output. He composed a lot of choral music, but not much a cappella choral music. But what he did compose—A Hymn to the Virgin, A Boy is Born, Hymn to St. Cecilia, and the Five Flower Songs—is distinguished by inventive rethinking of the medium’s expected bounds. The result is unlike anything before or since. Britten is able to breathe fresh air into a 19th century medium in part because he composed for voices as if they were instruments, and for instruments as if they were voices. Hymn to St. Cecilia pushes in this voice-as instrument direction most dramatically, and the resulting fleet-footed virtuosity pushes aside almost all soothing choral sonorities. The Five Flower Songs still retain some of that rich sound that St. Cecilia denies, but the rigor with which Britten crafts each of the voice parts and their interaction gives even the most sensuous of the songs a veneer a good deal tougher than we hear in much unaccompanied music by Britten’s contemporaries. Even the exquisite “The Evening Primrose,” the most hymn-like movement, never succumbs to an easy harmonic twist for its own sake, since, as in the Bach chorales, the harmony emerges directly from precise interweaving of beautifully shaped lines.
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943)
The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings may be Britten’s first fully mature, conceived and realized music, and its inspiration is unsurpassed in any other of his music, before or after. The Violin Concerto (1939, revised 1958), Les Illuminations (1939), and Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) are undeniably brilliant, and nothing is taken from them by saying that the Serenade is of a different order, with a power and eloquence akin to that of Peter Grimes and the War Requiem.
Britten composed the Serenade for the tenor Peter Pears, his life-partner, and for Dennis Brain, the musician whose playing dramatically raised the standards of horn playing and continues to inspire hornists today. When Brain was killed at the age of thirty-seven in a late night, post-concert car accident—he loved fast cars—he was mourned as only the great violinists, pianists and singers ever are. The peculiar and defining musical personalities of Pears and Brain seem so closely tied to Britten’s musical ideas that it’s difficult to imagine the Serenade ever having been composed without their inspiration; all who sing or play it since seem still to hear the resonance of these two artists.
Britten’s sophisticated love of words shows in all his vocal music, both in his choice of texts and in his penetrating setting of them. He responds to words’ currents and undercurrents, cares for the finest details, and guides his music with intellectual and musical clarity—all at once—as few composers can. There are composers whose music caresses every word, milking every literal meaning, but fails to create anything larger than the moment. On the other hand, there are those who write beautifully designed music that makes the words seem incidental. But Britten, in his Serenade, weaves the small and the large into a whole so responsive and so unified that it is difficult to imagine anything removed or changed. The music’s sophistication eludes analysis.
The Serenade is of the night, its physical, emotional, and spiritual shadows, comforting or confusing, haunting or harrowing. Cotton’s “Pastoral,” gently swinging like a lullaby, eases the distortions that creep up in the dark; the horn repeatedly floats down to gently shut the eyes. In Tennyson’s “Nocturne,” ancient bugles blow in the sunset, first thrillingly, then as if a distant memory, and then aggressively; between the calls, the light from the setting sun cuts sharply through the clouds. The Serenade turns darker with the groans of “Elegy.” They eventually cease, and the speaker confesses the heart’s sin. The groaning resumes, and nothing has changed. Taking up the horn’s final sour notes, the speaker begins the “Dirge” painfully alone. A low, threatening tune intrudes, struggling to break free of its rigidity; the higher strings pile in with the same material one after another and threaten to pull the speaker into the abyss. The horn enters rudely, exits as abruptly, and the wailing speaker continues obliviously. These two movements, “Elegy,” confessing the evil in man, and “Dirge,” cautioning us to care for the impoverished, lest there be a dear price to pay, are the dark center of the Serenade. Each of this pair mirrors the other: “Elegy”–horn, speaker, horn; “Dirge”–speaker, horn, speaker.
Ben Jonson’s lyric poem “Hymn” (to Diana), hardly sounding like a hymn, scurries by in delight over the words’ delicious sounds. The music propels unstoppably, until a quick exit clears the way for the concluding magical music, Keats’ “Sonnet.” The speaker hovers in the misty and mystical clouds, but for a veiled whisper of, “Or wait the ‘Amen.’” Framing the Serenade are two identical movements for the horn alone, Prologue and Epilogue. The distant Epilogue makes clear the timelessness of the speaker’s journey, one that has been, and will be, taken again and again.
With a result at once ancient and modern sounding, Britten specified that these movements be played on the natural harmonics of the instrument. His knowing use of the horn enjoyed an embarrassingly wrong-headed criticism of the work’s first recording.
“The same artists [Pears, The New Symphony Orchestra under Eugene Goosens] but this time with Dennis Brain perform the Serenade. The only disappointments here lie in the opening and closing horn solos; a curiously faulty intonation is apparent here and there which jars the magic of both the Prologue and Epilogue. Fortunately this disappears in the first song and from then on Dennis Brain’s customary musicianship and brilliance are very much in evidence.” –‘E.T.’1
SIR,
Your review of the new Decca recording of my
SERENADE FOR TENOR, HORN AND STRINGS has
recently been shown to me. I should like, if you will
allow me, to make a comment on it.In the Prologue and Epilogue the horn is directed to
play on the natural harmonics of the instrument; this
causes the apparent ‘out-of-tuneness’ of which your
reviewer complains, and which is, in fact, exactly the
effect I intend.In the many brilliant performances of his part that
Dennis Brain has given he has always I am sure, played
it as I have marked it in the score. Anyone, therefore,
who plays ‘in tune’ is going directly against my
wishes!
If the critics do not like this effect they should blame
me and not Mr. Brain.2
The Serenade originally included one other movement, “Now Sleeps the Crimson
Petal,” that Britten removed from the whole design before the Serenade’s first performance. It is possible that he first thought this song could end the entire work. (He composed it after he had completed the Keats Sonnet.) But, as beautiful as the movement is, he saw that the design of the larger work wasn’t enhanced by yet more slow music. Or perhaps he discovered the magic of the Prologue’s distant return only in the last stage of composition.
Even though he excised “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” from the Serenade, Britten did recognize its quality. Knowing people would want to perform it, he insisted that no one attempt to reinsert it into the Serenade, and that, if they were performed on the same program, there even be a clear separation of the two works.
Phaedra, Dramatic Cantata for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra (1975)
Composed for voice, string orchestra, harpsichord, and percussion that includes timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, tenor drum, bass drum and a bell pitched on A.
Like the orchestral suite from Death in Venice (on the March program), Phaedra comes from Britten’s last years, ones in which a fertile, exploring mind struggled with a failing body. Just the act of putting notes on the page had become excruciatingly painful, so large, complex works would have been impossible, even if desired. So, in his last works, we see a paring down of scope. Such is, of course, a natural consequence of aging, because the mind begins to see how less can be more and that less must be more—everything must count. Much of his Third String Quartet, a masterpiece in every way, is so spare—naked lines painstakingly searching for the next note—that you can see (and hear) how much each new note cost him.
Although he was forced toward musical efficiency, Britten’s musical imagination was as rich as ever, and he was exploring new territory. Many composers move in unexpected directions in their late years—Haydn, Schumann, Shostakovich and Stravinsky come to mind—sometimes pointing toward ones that the next generation will take up and develop. Whether entering new territory or not, artists’ paring down can bring unexpected intensity, subtlety and depth. So it is with Britten’s soliloquy, Phaedra.
Although much of Britten’s later marvelous music—Canticle IV, “Journey of the Magi,” Canticle V, “The Death of St. Narcissus,” the Third Quartet, and Death in Venice—has yet to assume a beloved place in the hearts of listeners, Phaedra has begun to enter the central repertoire. Britten composed this solo cantata for the great Janet Baker, whose singing of Berlioz’s Nuits d’été at the Aldeburgh Festival inspired him to tell her, “I want to write you a piece like that.” He did more than that. He wrote a piece in which the dramatic intensity of her singing and his thinking became one.
A large part of this work’s inspiration comes from the vivid, occasionally extreme, and sometimes sexually explicit translation by Robert Lowell, of four speeches in Jean Racine’s Phaedra that lay bare Phaedra’s guilt over her lust for Hippolytus, the son of her husband, Theseus. This was text with which Britten may have found very uncomfortable identification, for his adult infatuation with boys, something he struggled with and was embarrassed by (depicted openly in Death in Venice), can only have intensified the emotional reality of this musical confession.
Britten’s musical response to the text often directly opposes it—the hotter the text, the more ascetic the music—and the tension is terrifying. The insistent heartbeat of drums, the disembodied rattle of the harpsichord—evoking new and old—and the assiduous denial of word painting force the music to retreat to a disquieting, claustrophobic place. Britten refuses either to mourn Phaedra’s agony or to celebrate her suicide, and her death happens with haunting simplicity and naturalness that echo none of the passion and pain that led her there; any reflection on its meaning is confined to the moment itself. Never a composer given to indulgent emotion, Britten insists even more determinedly in this, one of his most concentrated compositions, on a fiery discipline that inescapably burns the music into the memory.
Rejoice in the Lamb (1943)
Composed for four soloists, mixed chorus and organ, here in an orchestration by Imogen Holst, for small orchestra consisting of one each of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, one percussionist who plays timpani, gong, suspended cymbal, triangle, castanets, wood block and tambourine, and a small complement of strings.
Rejoice in the Lamb is a delightful invention, as gratifying to perform as to hear. Benjamin Britten took the text from a long poem, “Jubilate Agno,” by Christopher Smart, an eighteenth century poet of questionable sanity (or at least of an original view of the world), who found God’s presence in everything—cats, mice, flowers, hardship, letters of the alphabet, musical instruments, just as fully as in people. Here the small are no less than the large, the poor no less than the rich, and all who suffer and are lonely can find comfort. The same compassion for the pained, lonely or rejected that underpins the very serious and knowing Cantata misericordium resounds in Rejoice in the Lamb, a joyous, buoyant and innocent embrace of the world. The truth in Christopher Smart’s childlike view captured Britten’s imagination, even if it was a view held by a man in a madhouse.
The unpredictable poem (of which Britten chose only a few sections) flashes with brilliance. From its rambling heterogeneity, Britten drew out a clear arch that, though falling into many discreet sections, flows with inevitability and naturalness. Even in his ‘lightest’ of works, Britten expected the most from his imagination and integrity.
The accompaniment for Rejoice in the Lamb has kept the work out of usual reach of any chorus that performs in a space lacking an appropriate organ. But the discovery of an orchestration created by a trusted friend of Britten on his request has changed all that.
Imogen Holst (1907-1984), composer, conductor, teacher, music editor and author, met Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in 1942, and they became fast friends. First going to the Aldeburgh Festival to do whatever was needed—moving music stands around, putting out music—she became its Artistic Director in 1956, a position she held until 1977, and her tiny biography of Britten remains useful for its inside view and endearing for her love of the person she thought had completed the rebirth of English music begun by her father, Gustav Holst. To Britten she wrote shortly after meeting him, “Your music seems to me the only reliable thing that is happening today. I was brought up to believe that there would one day be a renaissance of English music.... and now it’s all right.”3
Benjamin Britten on Dennis Brain
The tragic car accident of 1st September leaves a musical gap, which can never be filled. It has robbed us of an artist with the unique combination of a superb technical command of his instrument, great musicianship, a lively and intelligent interest in music of all sorts, and a fine performing temperament, coupled with a charming personality. It has also robbed us of a man of rare generosity, simplicity and charm. He came many times to play for us at the Aldeburgh Festival, but last June he came primarily to conduct…. However, what one remembers most clearly of that evening was not his conducting, but his playing in this same concert of the unfinished movement of Mozart’s fragmentary horn Concerto in E. The tutti started with glorious richness. Delicate phrases followed with warm and intense counterpoint, brilliant passages for the violins, soothing oboe melodies. Then the solo entered firm, heroic, and all seemed set for the best of all the wonderful Mozart horn concertos. And then suddenly in the middle of an intricate florid passage, superbly played, it stopped: silence. Dennis shrugged his shoulders and walked off the Jubilee Hall platform. That night, as always, he drove back home to London after the performance. Aldeburgh is not so far from London as Edinburgh, but far enough after a heavy day of rehearsals and performances, both conducting and playing. One protested, one always did, but off he went, laughing. That was the last time I ever heard him play, the last time I saw him. That Mozart fragment sticks in my mind as a symbol of Dennis’s own life. But it is not so easy for us to shrug our shoulders.4
1. E.T., record review (Tempo 33,Autumn 1954).
2. Benjamin Britten, letter, (Tempo 34,Winter 1954/5),
as quoted in Britten on Music.
3. Imogen Holst, letter to Britten, 1942.
4. Britten, Britten on Music.