Notes
- Lewis , G. , ed. 1982 . Michael Tippett: A Celebration , 112 – 112 . London : The Baton Press . My term ‘syllogist’ implies the imposition of a calculated structural imperative, ‘symbolist’ the fact that composers of this type, and certainly Tippett, proceed by symbol, periphrasis and allusion.
- 1982 . The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques , 40 – 40 . Cambridge : CUP . cf. 43–4, 58, 98.
- Lewis , ed. 1982 . Michael Tippett: A Celebration , 112 – 112 . London : The Baton Press . in a third category Whittall lists composers (such as Mahler) for whom form is a matter of balanced diversities, deliberately unresolved.
- At once a summation of technique achieved and a signpost toward unexplored ground, see Docherty English Song and the German Lied Tempo June/September 1987 161–2 2 2
- As this study will show, in the psychological sense (although also because only three major voice-and-piano works Songs and Proverbs of William Blake and The Poet's Echo 1965 and Who are these children? (1969) follow, if Tit for Tat (1969), a revision of de la Mare settings first written in 1928–31, is discounted).
- Richardson , J. 1977 . Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity , 89 – 89 . Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
- Tippett distinguished these perspectives in 1960 (ibid.) for the heat generated by his contention that destruction of a text's verbal music is an inevitable corollary of setting it, see Docherty English Song and the German Lied Tempo June/September 1987 161–2 2 3
- Richardson , ed. 1977 . Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity , 80 – 80 . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . Hardy's need to assert the ‘madeness’ of his poems was central to his art.
- Kermode , F. , ed. 1975 . Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot , 119 – 120 . London : Faber . 38; how the “music music” of these cycles forges links with its own past is discussed on p. 41 and 46–7 above.
- Palmer , C. , ed. 1984 . The Britten Companion 292 – 292 . London
- Mitchell , D. , ed. 1987 . Death in Venice , 86 – 86 . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . 211. The formal model would surely have been English, though cross-national linkages often colour a mood or emotion (Docherty, op. cit., p. 10).
- Palmer , ed. 1984 . The Britten Companion 274 – 274 . London
- Mitchell , D. and Keller , H. , eds. 1952 . Benjamin Britten: a commentary on his works from a group of specialists , 71 – 71 . London : Rockliff .
- As is the case in The Rape of Lucretia (1946), with the personal circumstances of whose librettist the setting of XVII was intimately bound up Duncan R. Working for Britten The Rebel Press Bideford 1981 53 53
- Stevens . 462 – 462 . op. cit. 466, alluding to Suzanne Langer's thesis (Problems of Art, London: Routledge 1957, p. 85) that in joining two works one must necessarily lose its integrity; also see Docherty, op. cit., p. 9.
- Kermode . 1975 . Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot , 60 – 60 . London : Faber .
- Whittall . 45 – 45 . op. cit.
- A vocal line built from two 4-note shapes Evans P. The Music of Benjamin Britten Dent London 1979 351 351
- Southworth has distinguished some 250 different rhyming schemes and 540 stanza patterns in the 900 poems, written over the course of sixty years, Collected in 1930 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy Columbia University Press New York 1947 162 162
- See p. 52–4 above. In English song, the same process is demonstrated respectively by Arthur Somervell and John Ireland/C.W. Orr, with Ivor Gurney typifying the Lewis/Keyes position Docherty B. English Song and the German Lied Tempo June/September 1987 161–2 75 83
- Hardy , F.E. 1930 . The Life of Thomas Hardy , 78 – 78 . London : Macmillan .
- In Peter Grimes 1945 however new the feeling, form frequently derives directly from nineteenth century Italian convention (cf. Britten's and Mascagni's Carter (Cavalleria Rusticana), though Britten's is an English Carter whose heritage is also Purcell and Arne). By 1964–8, the Church Parables' new feeling is articulated in technical solutions specific to their needs, built on the experience of expressing similar emotional situations in Albert Herring (1947) and Saint Nicholas (1948).
- Richardson . 1977 . Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity , 83 – 84 . Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
- “[If you want to measure something] … you must first seek its rules” Wagner R. Die Meistersinger Act 1, scene 3).
- Richardson . 1977 . Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity , 14 – 14 . Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
- See Docherty Sentence into Cadence 7 7
- At its most triumphal when reality least warrants it; cf. Vere's Claggart, John Claggart, beware! (Billy Budd, Act II, scene 2) and Aschenbach's Hymn to Apollo (Death in Venice, Act I, scene 7).
- Before life and after
- Midnight on the Great Western
- Before life and after
- Archaisms or neologisms within plain English or polysyllables within predominantly monosyllabic speech, as “incurious” here, “unblinking” and “athinking” in (3) and “testimonies” and “reaffirmed” in (8). Hardy hoped that such diction gave “bite and strangeness” to the verse, forcing his readers to address the moral and social stresses to which they preferred to close their eyes. Zietlow P. Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mass. 1974 31 31
- Cf. “Postponement” (1866), “Snow in the Suburbs” and “On Martock Moor”, both published in 1925 Zietlow Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mass. 1974 26 26 99–100).
- Another of the Late Lyrics and Earlier 1922
- Midnight on the Great Western see p. 47 above.
- Cf. Old Furniture Moments of Vision Zietlow, op. cit., p. 160.
- Zietlow . 1974 . Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy , 185 – 186 . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press .
- But not more than in the Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente see below.
- And “his Ensembles [do] not sound like his Duets [nor] his Satires like his ballads” Benjamin Britten: a commentary on his works from a group of specialists Mitchell Keller Rockliff London 1952 69 69 adapted, and see below); cf. the tour de force of ‘Americanness’ in Paul Bunyan (1941).
- See Docherty English Song 77 83
- Finzi's and Ireland's Hardy settings, looking back in turn to Quilter, Butterworth and Somervell, colour every nuance of the text but rarely venture to express the universal experience of which the particular pain or delight is merely a paradigm; this was ever Tippett's ‘setting philosophy’, but Britten moved towards such a position in solo song for the first time in these settings (although the use of orchestral interlude and textual ‘silence’ to express the archetypal The Rape of Lucretia Act II, scene 2, Billy Budd, Act II, scene 2) was established in opera from the first).
- The progression from voice-and-piano settings that remain linguistically and musically ‘in context’ On this Island 1937 to those where first the emotional (Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, 1940, Holy Sonnets, 1945) and then the philosophical response (Winter Words, 1953, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, 1965, Who are these children?, 1969) break the poems' bounds, is underexplored.
- Warlock , Peter . 1924 .
- Finzi , Gerald . 1933 . A Young Man's Exhortation
- Ireland , John . 1926 . Five Poems of Thomas Hardy
- Finzi , Gerald . 1936 . Earth and Air and Rain Cf. also Robin Milford's setting of “If it's ever spring again” (1938).
- Britten “filtering his emotional response until only [that] detail” that will etch on the mind the moral and social resonance of the scene remains Southworth The Poetry of Thomas Hardy Columbia University Press New York 1947 14 14 what Evans (op. cit., p. 358) calls an “intra-musical perception”. Herein lies Winter Words's ‘compositional’ importance: Britten came to it, as he came to Gloriana, only when his personal stock of ‘English’ idiom was deep enough to express Hardy's (and William Plomer's) world.
- Dido and Aeneas (Britten/Holst, 1951) in the D minor opening of (1) and the passing dissonances of (8) The Britten Companion Palmer London 1984 362 363
- Palmer , ed. 1984 . The Britten Companion 295 – 297 . London although the psychologically more percipient Schumann seems a more likely model (see below).
- Yeats , W.B. 1893 . The Rose (from Bridge setting the first two stanzas only and repeating the first as a coda.
- Wolfe , Humbert . 1926 . Yesterday and Today (from
- Before life and after
- Palmer , ed. 1984 . The Britten Companion 32 – 32 . London no less vital ‘resources’ were folksong (see below) and those techniques of parody and satire evidenced in Britten's own early writing (Our Hunting Fathers and Three Divertimenti for string quartet, 1936, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, 1937, Ballad of Heroes, 1939) and the ‘linkage’ with Shostakovich and Prokofiev that they display (Palmer (ed.), op. cit., p. 33–6). Winter Words is in this regard a deeper expression of that “powerful social conscience” already demonstrated in Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, The Little Sweep and Spring Symphony (1949) (Mitchell and Keller (eds), op. cit., p. 12–13).
- But central to Tippett's vocal writing, not least The Heart's Assurance, completed two years earlier; “In der Fremde” Schumann Liederkreis 39 39 op. seems also influential.
- Evans . 1979 . The Music of Benjamin Britten , 358 – 358 . London : Dent .
- Housman's , A.E. “ old wind in the old anger ” . In A Shropshire Lad Vol. XXXI , whose setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1911) was clearly not far from Britten's mind (Satires of Circumstance was published in 1914). (For further evidence that Vaughan Williams was more than a passing influence on Britten's “Englishry” (Mitchell and Keller (eds.), op. cit., p. 49ff) compare the opening of Flos Campi (1925) and the “For us did He/die that we/might live, and He forgive” in The Rape of Lucretia's Epilogue.)
- Cf. the train whistle in “Calypso”, one of the Four Cabaret Songs (1939, published 1980) and the series of “physical metaphors” culminating in the boat engines, vaporetto motor and gondola oars of Death in Venice Death in Venice Mitchell Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1987 186 187
- Cf. the many folksongs that Britten either arranged O Waly, Waly 1947 “The Sally Garden”, 1943, “The Bonny Earl O'Moray”, 1943) or greatly respected (Percy Grainger's arrangement of “The sprig of thyme”, 1921, for example).
- Evans . 1979 . The Music of Benjamin Britten , 359 – 359 . London : Dent .
- Cf. Peel Graham In summertime on Bredon 1911 (Docherty, “English Song”, p. 77) and the use of an ironic religious commentary in Peter Grimes, Act II, scene 1 (and in The Turn of the Screw, 1954, Act II, scene 2).
- The disjunction between vocal line and accompaniment is less marked in Winter Words than in the Holy Sonnets settings, the voice until the final two songs bearing the narrative line with little personal intervention while the accompaniment draws the larger atmosphere — wind, train or country parsonage. In the convict's scena in (7) and throughout (8), however, the positions are reversed, the ‘narration’ of life's confinement and loss appearing in the dissonant piano and the singer stripping the reticent veneer to reveal the naked suffering beneath (a cathartic self-knowledge previously displayed only by cf. Vere It is not his trial Billy Budd Act II, scene 2)).
- Whittall . 151 – 151 . op. cit.
- Keyes , S. November 1941 . Schiller Dying November ,
- Lewis , A. On Embarkation
- Whittall . 96 – 96 . op. cit. Docherty, “Sentence into Cadence”, p. 11.
- Haymaker , R.E. 1934 . From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs , 149 – 149 . New York : Bookman Associates .
- Haymaker . 1934 . From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs , 95 – 95 . New York : Bookman Associates .
- Stevens . 464 – 464 . op. cit. the situation Tippett needed as a vehicle for his “song-as-scena” experiment, see below.
- Tippett, quoted in Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday Kemp I. Faber London 1964 48 48 with Stevens, op. cit., the locus classicus of the 1960s textual violence/reverence debate.
- Kemp , ed. 1964 . Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday , 48 – 48 . London : Faber . even perhaps Hudson's image of his post-nescient world as a wing-shattered bird fluttering on the earth (Haymaker, op. cit., p. 26).
- To discuss “ecstasy” in terms of a vocal gorgia Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday Kemp Faber London 1964 49 49 is to misunderstand its psychological import: it is (like “uprising” in the allegro) intended to be (almost) in the paranormal domain.
- Kemp , ed. 1964 . Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday , 49 – 49 . London : Faber . but see also p. 52 above.
- Lewis , ed. 1982 . Michael Tippett: A Celebration , 78 – 79 . London : The Baton Press . Hudson saw a similar need to “[arrange] his sensory data … so as to quicken his readers to creativeness” (Haymaker, op. cit., p. 150).
- Bowen , M. 1982 . Michael Tippett , 39 – 39 . London : Robson Books . what Hudson perceived in the 1890s as the “mounting psychoneurotic disturbance” of man's loss of contact with the numinous in himself in a life increasingly subject to the machine (the theme of Time's Laughingstocks) (Haymaker, op. cit., p. 362). Britten's structures, by contrast, seek further to objectify what already has a name — the East coast in the 1790s, Donne's England, Venice in 1911 — that what is unnameable may be revealed.
- Thomas , Edward . 1915 .
- Hopkins , Gerard Manley . 1877 .
- Bowen , M. , ed. 1980 . Music of the Angels , 88 – 88 . London : Eulenberg . One may speculate how far the antipathy generated by the expansion of this view (quoting Stravinsky's Charles Eliot Norton Harvard lectures for 1939–40 in a 1947 Third Programme broadcast) in Stevens, op. cit., derived from an unacknowledged awareness that Britten's superficially more ‘reverent’ syllogisms achieved the same end by different means.
- Bowen , ed. 1980 . Music of the Angels , 88 – 88 . London : Eulenberg . In Stevens, op. cit., p. 463, Tippett cites “Remember me” (Dido and Aeneas) as one such crystallized moment.
- The Purcell cantata Tippett declared to be the key formal influence on Boyhood's End Stevens 465 465 op. cit.
- Except in the matter of techniques; the ‘linkage’ between Boyhood's End and Britten's Canticle I (which is rather more than a mere matter of common Purcellian ancestry) has gone largely unremarked (but see Whittall 123 123 op. cit.
- The cluster of works around King Priam — Second Symphony (1957), Second Piano Sonata (1962), Concerto for String Orchestra (1963) — for example. Bowen Music of the Angels Eulenberg London 1980 41 42 cites the oboe melody from the first Ritual Dance of The Midsummer Marriage as an example of the fertilization of Tippett's absolute by his vocal music.
- Finding even more devastating use in “Remember your lovers”, the final setting of The Heart's Assurance see below.
- Bowen , ed. 1980 . Music of the Angels , 21 – 21 . London : Eulenberg . how accurately Boyhood's End captured the archetypal responses of the child on the threshold of adolescence may be seen by comparing it with Samuel Barber's Knoxville — Summer of 1915 (1947), not only the general ambience of the music but also the stress on the visual and tactile (“iron music”, “vanilla” in Knoxville, “Grassy dew-wet earth”, “deep hot nest”, “purest divine yellow” in Boyhood's End).
- Rooted in the harmonic language of the sixteenth-century English composers from Tallis and Byrd to Purcell (just as Tippett's rhythmic language may be traced back to Gibbons, Weelkes and Dowland) Kemp Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday Faber London 1964 95 95 115). Such models, however, prompt less a Brittenesque literal renewal of the earlier techniques as an integration and transmutation into the larger design; see the discussion of coloratura below.
- Kemp . 1964 . Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday , 187 – 187 . London : Faber . Whittall, op. cit., p. 78 explores the dynamic substructure of recurrence, affirmation and denial built around the tones of the D major triad.
- Hudson . Far Away and Long Ago , 1918 edn 292 – 292 .
- Cf. “Spirto ben nato … suo bell'opra” Britten Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo reflecting a similar wonder.
- Bowen , ed. 1980 . Music of the Angels , 30 – 30 . London : Eulenberg .
- Bowen . 1980 . Music of the Angels , 40 – 40 . London : Eulenberg . clearly voices Tippett's view that “it is almost unnecessary for the words [of a text] to be heard” as long as the “situation they express is embodied in the music” (Bowen's emphasis).
- Used to even greater effect in The Heart's Assurance (see below) and finding fullest expression in The Midsummer Marriage Kemp Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday Faber London 1964 185 185 210–11
- Kemp , ed. 1964 . Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday , 49 – 49 . London : Faber .
- Keyes , S. 1942 . The Uncreated Images Keyes's diary spoke of “all kinds of [such] … archetypal images” that fill the mind if it is emptied of the objective and mundane.
- Keyes , S. July 1940 . The Buzzard July ,
- Kemp , ed. 1964 . Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday , 47 – 49 . London : Faber . the conclusion of which was that Tippett was uncaring in his setting of English words, bending them without compunction to a philosophical or musical imperative (see Docherty, “Sentence into Cadence”, p. 2).
- Meyer , M. 1945 . Memoir, The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes , xxi – xxi . London : Routledge .
- Lewis , A. After Dunkirk
- Meyer . 1945 . Memoir, The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes , xvii – xvii . London : Routledge . that “dark imagination that would pierce/Infinite night” (Lewis, “After Dunkirk”) and would “plough the dark ground of our disorders” (Bowen (ed.), op. cit., p. 190).
- Lewis , A. Lines on a Tudor Mansion
- Hooker , J. 1981 . “ Afterword ” . In Selected Poems of Alun Lewis , 103 – 103 . London : Unwin . A. Lewis, “To Edward Thomas”, IV.
- Keyes , S. Schiller Dying
- “[A] way of portioning … the geometry of living” Keyes S. The Buzzard 1940 July
- Keyes , S. September 1940 . Cervières September ,
- Kemp , ed. 1964 . Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday , 49 – 49 . London : Faber .
- Stevens . 463 – 463 . op. cit.
- Keyes , S. February–March 1942 . The Foreign Gate Vol. VI , February–March ,
- “Their pain cries down the noise of poetry” Keyes S. The Foreign Gate IV Meyer, op. cit., p. xv, relates how after Keyes's call-up “Love and Death … became vital problems instead of subjects for laboratory analysis”; Lewis spoke of his experiences “[forbidding] the mind to think, the pen to write” (“The Assault Convoy”).
- Lewis , A. The Crucifixion
- See also Music of music below.
- Lewis , A. A Troopship in the Tropics
- Keyes , S. The Uncreated Images
- Keyes , S. The Uncreated Images
- Stevens . 463 – 463 . op. cit. from the weight of personal emotion discharged in the setting, it was presumably “Remember your lovers” that began Tippett's engagement with The Heart's Assurance's poems.
- “… never stale your mind/With prudence or with doubting” Lewis A. Sacco Writes to his Son
- Lewis , A. The Soldier
- Meyer . 1945 . Memoir, The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes , xvii – xvii . London : Routledge . xix
- Keyes , S. December 1942 . The Wilderness Vol. IV , December , January 1943
- Keyes , S. May 1941 . Gilles de Retz May , 16 a detailed study of the autobiographical aspect of Britten's creativity has yet to be written.
- Auden , W.H. 1936 . Look! Stranger epigraph
- Grimes's , Echoing . “ Now the great Bear and Pleiades ” . In Peter Grimes Act I, scene 2), an archetype of “human grief”.
- Edward Sackville-West, quoted by Whittall 2 2 op. cit. it can be seen also in the architectonics of the setting as a whole, slow/fast/slow/fast/summation.
- Lewis , A. A Troopship in the Tropics
- Lewis , A. The Assault Convoy
- Keyes , S. Schiller Dying