Sunday Classics: A sneak peek into the sound world of Benjamin Britten

At the heart of Britten's haunting opera Peter Grimes are the four Sea Interludes, orchestrally evoking life in a poor Suffolk-coast fishing village. The first, "Dawn," which joins the Prologue and Act I, is played here by the Boston Symphony in Leonard Bernstein's "Final Concert."

by Ken

Way back when (in August 2007, actually), writing briefly about some music of Igor Stravinsky, I caused a flutter of sorts when I described him as "one of the last three great composers":

I really want to talk about Stravinsky one of these days, and I plan to get to it really soon. Awhile back I startled Howie by saying that we've already had the last three great composers we're ever going to have--Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), all now long since safely dead and buried. This seems so obvious to me now that I forget how stark it may sound to others. But these are the last composers who seem to me, through the sheer force of their imagination, to have transcended the exhaustion of the musical language they inherited, or could scrounge up or invent.

The proposition still seems to me so simple and uncontroversial that I wonder at the fuss. What bothers me is my failure to deliver on the implied promise there. Since then we have bumped up against Shostakovich but not said much of what I hoped to say about these three composers. And I'm afraid today we aren't going to do a lot more than bump up against Britten. Still, we have to start somewhere.

One problem is that I still haven't figured out how to get control of musical samples. My position is that there's no point in my blithering on if you can't hear the music, which is the important part. As a matter of fact, I've had a Britten piece on the drawing board for two years now, which was to kick off with the first of the Sea Interludes, "Dawn," from the composer's most-performed opera, Peter Grimes, ideally picking up from the Ellen-Grimes duet at the end of the Prologue and continuing into the awakening-village opening of Act I, and then what is for me the emotional core of Britten's War Requiem.


The War Requiem, written for the dedication of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (destroyed by German bombs in 1940) in 1962, interspersed poems by the antiwar poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who died in military action a week before the signing of the armistice that ended World War I (his parents are said to have received notification the day the armistice was announced), with the traditional Latin Requiem text. The excerpt I was aiming for was Britten's setting, as part of the Offertorium of the Requiem, of Owen's "Parable of the Old Man and the Young," a retelling of the story of Abram and Isaac, by the tenor and baritone soloists, that veers off track at the end, culminating in one of the more harrowing images I know -- "the old man" Abram slaying not just his son Isaac but "half the seed of Europe, one by one."

THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN AND THE YOUNG

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

-- Wilfred Owen

Back in 2007 the Britten pickings on YouTube were mighty slender, and I scratched at how to produce my own audio clips, at least, in the process tantalizing Howie with the War Requiem excerpt, for which I couldn't actually find a recording that satisfies me. I'm still not wildly happy with the Bernstein "Final Concert" performance of the "Dawn" Peter Grimes interlude, which seems to me to seriously underplay the whole piece -- and underplaying is something Lenny was rarely accused of. (He had made a better recording of the Grimes interludes with the New York Philharmonic.

Still, the performance is good enough to allow the listener access to the interplay of unexpected tone colors, harmonies, and rhythms with which Britten conjures this musical image of dawn in a fishing village on his beloved Suffolk coast. Like all the Sea Interludes, this is music that's meant to play straight into the imagination, and I've found that even after long acquaintance it becomes more haunting with each hearing.

Strangely, the War Requiem has become one of Britten's more played compositions, and there is now a fair amount of it on YouTube, but I haven't turned up the Offertorium at all, let alone in an acceptable performance. I say it's "strange" that the Requiem is now played so widely, because it has always struck me as one of Britten's less accessible works, except at the most obvious level -- the interplay of the Owen poems and the liturgical text, and their symbolic connection to the occasion for which the piece was written.

(Note to Howie: We'll come back to the War Requiem. I promise. Eventually.)

I have made one happy discovery on YouTube: a lovely performance of Britten's 1942-43 Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31, a setting for this unusual group of performers (inspired by the availability of Britten's life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, and the brilliant young horn player Dennis Brain) of six quite diverse poems, with a Prologue and Epilogue. It's broken into three clips; this middle one encompasses the second, third, and fourth songs, the "Nocturne" (Tennyson's "The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls" from The Princess), "Elegy" (Blake's "The Sick Rose," aka "O Rose, thou art sick," and "Dirge" (the anonymous 15th-century "Lyke-Wake Dirge"):


The "Nocturne," "Elegy," and "Dirge," the second through fourth songs from Britten's Serenade, are performed by tenor John Mark Ainsley, horn soloist Danilo Stagni, and the strings of La Scala's Orchestra filarmonica conducted by Jeffrey Tate. (Part 1 of the Serenade is here; part 3, here.)

Nocturne

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

-- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Elegy [at 1:23]

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

-- William Blake

Dirge [no clear separation point from the orchestral postlude following "Elegy," but the "Dirge" vocal begins at 6:02]

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
REFRAIN:—- Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

When thou from hence away art past,
-— Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
-— Every nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
-— Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
-- Every nighte and alle,
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
—- Every nighte and alle,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
-— Every nighte and alle,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane,
—- Every nighte and alle,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
-— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

-- anonymous

I'm not going to say much of anything about the music. Again, I would simply encourage: (a) alertness to the musical setting as well as the texts, and (b) receptivity to both. I think initially you'll find some moments that grab you immediately, and then with repetition other points will begin to act on you, and gradually all will deepen.

Obviously Jon Mark Ainsley is a very different sort of tenor from Peter Pears, and it's kind of a jolt to me, in the "Dirge" (the song I was actually shooting for here) not to hear the truly dirge-appropriate wailing sound Pears produces his upper range. But it's really only when we hear inspired performers quite different from Britten and his circle that we begin to appreciate the true stature of this music. Jeffrey Tate is the good kind of English sensibilty for Britten (I'll come back to this question of nationality briefly), and is well suited to helping the Italian musicians hear this music.

The most obvious case is that of Peter Grimes itself. When Jon Vickers, a singer who could hardly have been more different in voice and personality from Pears, undertook the title role at the Met in 1967, with the collaboration of director Tyrone Guthrie and conductor Colin Davis, a whole previously unheard dimension of the piece opened up. An instructive lesson in the dangerous provincialization of Britten can be learned from what happend when Vickers and Davis took the show back to England. By the time of the Covent Garden video and audio recordings, most of the dimensionality of the Met performances had been flattened to two dimensions, most noticeably in Davis's blandly conventional conducting (it feels like there's an extra hour or two of mediocre music stuffed into the opera), but unfortunately also in Vickers' more mannered, manicured performance.

There was always tension in the relationship between Britten and his countrymen. The composer was unquestionably "English" and "British" to the core, but not in the accepted conventional ways, and they knew it and resented it, especially in the loftier social circles. Was it because he was gay? Yes. Was it because he was a pacifist (he sought and received conscientious objector status during World War II, declaring himself unable to kill or to participate in killing)? Yes. But I think those were symptoms of Britten's "otherness." The more powerfully Britten's musical supremacy emerged, the more you can see the British musical establishment trying to prop up lesser alternatives who might be passed off as Britian's really and truly greatest composer.

Why, it was almost as if Britten was, gasp, pointing a finger of accusation, perhaps rejection, or even ridicule, at all the institutions Britons held sacred! Um, yeah, kinda, d'ya think? Nah, couldn't be.


QUICK HITS

Four Sea Interludes from "Peter Grimes"

If you can't find Britten's own recording of the Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, try Andrew Davis's,coupled with the composer's ever-popular Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Leonard Bernstein's NY Phil Sea Interludes are available in, of all things, SACD-only format,interestingly coupled with the LB-NYP Holst Planets.

Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings

Peter Pears, Dennis Brain, and the composer recorded the Serenade as early as 1944, with the Boyd Neel Orchestra, and that version has turned up on a Pearl CD, "Benjamin Britten performs Benjamin Britten,"as well as in a valuable four-CD collection of historic Britten recordings -- some conducted by the composer, most not -- in Membran International's Quadromania series. (I paid some ridiculous price like $8 for it at Berkshire Record Outlet, but they don't seem to have it anymore. CD Universe lists it -- at $15.59 for the four-disc set -- but reports it "backordered since 7/28/2009.")

For most listeners, the recording of choice is the gorgeous the gorgeous stereo versionwith Barry Tuckwell filling the gap left by Brain's death in 1957 at the preposterous age of 36. It's coupled with Pears-Britten stereo recordings of the Rimbaud song cycle Les Illuminations (originally written for soprano) and the sequel to the Serenade, the 1958 Nocturne for tenor, assorted instruements, and strings.

War Requiem

There's certainly room for an alternative to the composer's own recording,with the originally scheduled soloists, Galina Vishnevsakaya, Peter Pears, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. But as the recordings continue to pile up, I can't say I've found one that's especially persuasive, or that offers worthy alternatives to Britten's idiosyncratic trio of soloists.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The updated list is here.

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