BRITTEN

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

(1913–1976)

London Philharmonic Orchestra – Nocturne

Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997

The work of Benjamin Britten is infused with a unique poetic feeling, and vocal compositions – operas, choral settings and song cycles – dominate his output. He had a particular empathy for poetry, and directed his energies towards bringing out the underlying humanity and sense of the words through the music, rather than simply using the words as a convenient skeleton. Like Schubert, he was a master of melodies which underscore the beauty of a text and, in Britten’s case, the finer the poem, the greater the music it could inspire.

It is also the case that he had a particularly astute ear for what lines would sit well with music, and they are not always the best known as poetry, not even those which are judged the ‘best’ by conventional literary standards. A prime example would be his setting of Christopher Smart’s poem Jubilate Agno, written in Bedlam in the 18th century. Britten’s writing here not only comes to terms with the oddness of that fantastical and little-known work, but seems to act as a kind of précis and summing up of the poem as a whole, capturing the full spirit of the complete work in a fragment of it.

He also, unusually, set foreign language texts – French, German, Italian and Russian as well as the more conventional Latin. While these works have been criticised by some as simple exercises in style, they often represent the most profound exploration of his vision and imagination. Much has been made of the fact that he identified with some of the more extreme poets, but it seems Britten had a kind of kindred feeling with “lost sheep” as he called them; “bewildered but gifted young men of whom he was fond”, as his long-time collaborator the tenor Peter Pears put it. Rimbaud for instance, author of the Les Illuminations, adrift in Paris in the latter part of the last century, wrote all the poetry he was ever going to write by the age of 19. Smart and the German Hölderlin were both mad. Their texts echo a common theme in Britten’s work: the vulnerability of innocence, and he always retained a ‘naïve’ (even childlike) sense of nostalgia himself, which could imbue his pastoral or evening works with a sense of piercing melancholy, built up out of a rich store of memories from an irretrievable past.

In English, too, his literary sources were broadly based. Even before his association with the poet WH Auden in the 1930s his vocal works had shown a sophisticated taste for the esoteric, and afterwards it was probably Auden who led him to ever more recondite texts. In time he would set works by Auden himself, Hardy, Eliot and Donne, as well as the eight poets represented in tonight’s concert, Nocturne.

A distinction should be made between the actual song cycle, which tells a story, and a collection of poems by one or several authors linked by a common theme. Nocturne is of the latter variety, and explores the dreamscape of images and impressions conjured up by these eight individuals. It is scored for strings and seven obbligato instruments, each of which supports a single poem.

Nocturne, in fact, takes up where the song group Serenade fifteen years before left off, with an image of the poet sleeping peacefully in his bed. Shelley’s line “On a poet’s lips I slept” from Prometheus Unbound immediately sets the scene. Muted strings invoke the rhythm of gentle breathing which, in one form or another, recurs throughout the series of songs and acts as a linking device.

In Tennyson’s The Kraken, the bassoon, based on the common chord of B flat minor, uses its murky lower register to conjure up the image of the sea monster wallowing in the depths, while in the next piece, Coleridge’s The Wanderings of Cain, the harp echoes the plucking of the fruit carried out by ‘A lovely Boy’ girdled ‘with a twine of leaves’. The melodic line and the image are simultaneously innocent and unselfconscious. In Middleton’s Blurt, Master Constable the horn is called upon to create a wide range of night sounds from bells chiming to night birds calling, dogs barking and cats mewling.

Now at dead of night the mood darkens, and the timpani sound ominously beneath Wordsworth’s recollections of violence and terror. Only here, in the extract from The Prelude, is the breathing rhythm absent as the poet, in evoking the horrors of the French Revolution, is depicting an insomniac. At the height of a crescendo, tremolo strings stand for the remembrance of war and its legacy in the present, the same orchestral device Britten uses in the prelude to Owen Wingrave. Recollection of the thing itself turns into the reality of its aftermath in Wilfred Owen’s The Kind Ghosts with cor anglais obbligato, and the bleak, melancholy mood eventually resolves into nothingness with rising pizzicatti.

The gentle flute and clarinet accompaniment to Keats’s Sleep and Poetry is literally like a midsummer night’s dream with its invocations of bees, flowers, roses and the blessed balm of Sleep itself, returning us to a warmer world, the world of the living which goes on no matter what horrors occur either in our sleeping or waking state. In the final poem of the set, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, the strings come rapturously into their own for the first time and triumphantly affirm the consummation of the whole piece. Of all the instruments featured in the work, it is they who most nearly conform to the unadulterated human voice, and as such they lead the ensemble in a ringing paean to love.

Nocturne had its premiere in Leeds on 16 October 1958, with Peter Pears as the soloist.

PS

This is obviously all from books since I did not share the writer’s enthusiasm for Britten’s famous melodies. I’ve tried listening to the strangled sonorities of Owen Wingrave and Billy Budd but they make no sense to me, they just sound strained and unpleasant. And why are the settings always so drab? Might as well be putting them on in a church. But this was a programme note directed at Britten’s fan club and it was no business of mine to act like a downer on the proceedings so I toed the line. That’s the difference between being a professional and being a retired freelance: then, I needed to be a team player; here, on my own website, I can say what I like.

Having said that, my prejudice is nuanced. I have always enjoyed the exciting crescendo of The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, for instance, though then again this was based on a theme of Purcell, so Britten couldn’t take all the credit. On the other hand, the four ‘Sea Interludes’ from Peter Grimes are charming and tuneful, which may suggest I’ve only ever been exposed to the more difficult parts of the score. My answer to that is, if you can write easy stuff like the ‘Interludes’, why subject us to any difficult parts at all? Maybe I haven’t listened hard enough. Maybe I ought to give him another go. But as my finite time on this earth begins to run out, I would rather spend what little I have left revisiting the kind of stuff I know I like, rather than risk wasting it on stuff I might not. My aural knees these days prefer the flat prairie over the difficult ascent, if I may thus torture my own metaphor. Same goes for books. I read War and Peace a couple of years ago just so I could say I’d done it. But if you asked me anything about it, I would need to reply in the words of Woody Allen: “It concerns Russia.”