Sunday Classics tidbits: "Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony"

Jean-Michel Le Gal and Sara Topham as Lorenzo and

Jessica at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival, 2007

"Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony."

-- Lorenzo, in The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1

by Ken

These are, of course, some of the most beautiful lines in the English language (music lovers old enough and geographically fortuned enough to have experienced the idiosyncratic radio host Bill Watson heard these lines on a nightly basis), and a stark reminder of why composers who approach Shakespeare in foreign languages have a signal advantage over their anglophone brethren: Working in English, how do you add music that enhances rather than diminishes the music built into the language?

For music lovers, this Merchant of Venice scene is a fundamental text, and it's not hard to understand why Vaughan Williams was drawn to it, and brave enough to undertake the rash act of setting a compressed version of it as his Serenade to Music, for 16 vocal soloists -- four of each voice range, identified by the initials of the first singers of the parts. (The Serenade was on the program for the concert with which Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic inaugurated Philharmonic Hall. It's not their fault, or Vaughan Williams', that the event provided so historically inauspicious. The live recording of the Serenade found its way onto an all-VW LB CD that I don't have.)

As we listened to Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on "Greensleeves" last night, I thought originally that we would hear the Serenade to Music in tomorrow's Sunday Classics post, but "soft stillness and the night" just aren't meant for the daytime.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Serenade to Music

[Note: There's no indication of characters and little sense of "dialogue" in Vaughan Williams' setting. Perhaps foolishly, I've tried to indicate how the lines play in Shakespeare's original, as well as indicating places where text is omitted.]

[LORENZO:] How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
. . . Look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,
And draw her home with music.

[JESSICA:] I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

[LORENZO:] The reason is, your spirits are attentive . . .

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. . . .

[PORTIA:] Music! hark!

[NERISSA:] It is your music . . . of the house. . . .

[PORTIA:] Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.

[NERISSA:] Silence bestows that virtue on it. . . .

[PORTIA:] . . . How many things by season season'd are
To their right praise and true perfection!
Peace, ho! The moon sleeps with Endymion
And would not be awaked.
- - - - - - - - -
Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

16 soloists; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded Nov. 5, 1969
16 soloists; New York Virtuosi Chamber Symphony, Kenneth Klein, cond. MMG, recorded c1986

TOMORROW: Our second hearing of Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, plus the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and two jolly, jaunty excerpts from the "Aristophanic Suite" from The Wasps.

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