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Syllogism and symbol: Britten,Tippett and English TextBarbara DochertyPublished online: 24 Aug 2009.
To cite this article: Barbara Docherty (1989) Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and EnglishText, Contemporary Music Review, 5:1, 37-63, DOI: 10.1080/07494468900640531
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text
B a r b a r a D o c h e r t y I
An evaluation of the validity of Arnold Whittall's division of twentieth-century composers into syl- logists (my term) such as Benjamin Britten, who set up a frame and diversify within it, and symbolists such as Michael Tippett, who seek a centre among converging polarities. Four key voice-and-piano settings of English text are examined - Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945) and Winter Words (1953), and Tippett's Boyhood's End (1943) and The Heart's Assurance (1951) - to find what emotional and structural sensibilities attracted each composer to his text, and how far their musical structures accom- modated or subverted the literary design.
KEY WORDS: Syllogism, symbol, metre, structure, quantity, diction, blank verse, strophe, voice- and piano-setting, song
Arnold Whittall has posi ted a division a m o n g twent ie th-century compose r s into those 'syllogists ' w h o set up a f rame and diversify wi th in it, never losing control of the dominan t idea, and those ' symbol is t s ' w h o seek a centre a m o n g convergin~ rhythmic, ha rmonic and melodic polarities, diversi ty be ing a tool of resolution. ~ Whittall ascribes Britten to the first 3 and Tippet t to the second category; 4 this article is an a t t empt to evaluate the validi ty of such labels by an examinat ion of four key voice-and-piano set t ings of English text, all wri t ten wi th in a ten-year span but occupying very different posi t ions wi th in their compose r s ' oeuvre - for Britten, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (op.35, 1945) and Winter Words (op.52, 1953) and for Tippet t Boyhood s End (1943! and The Heart's Assurance (1951). s The Holy Sonnets and The Heart s Assurance are ear ly -mature ' song cycles, 6 but Boyhood s End is (like the Concer to for Double String Orchest ra , 1939, and the first Piano Sonata, 1938) a work whe re Tippet t ' s aesthet ic first a ppea red as greater than the s u m of isolated personal pass ions and Winter Words (like the Sechs H61derlin-Fragmente, op.61, 1958) is a late work. 7
Two crucial issues m u s t be addres sed in such an evaluat ion. The first relates to those aspects in a wr i ter ' s emot iona l and structural sensibilities that attract a compose r to a text - that sent Britten to John D o n n e and T h o m a s Hardy , for bo th of w h o m the t y ranny of form and deco rum s was a central concern, and Tippet t to W.H. H u d s o n and Alun Lewis/Sidney Keyes, w h o respect ively wrote prose and poe t ry that was intuitive and unres t ra ined. The second is the effect on the wri ter ' s "verbal mus ic" (that ex tended relation of vowels and consonan ts that we call p rosody) 9 of the c o m p o s e r ' s "mus ic of music" (Tippet t ' s t e rm for the song we hear w h e n the words are set, a ccommoda t ing the literary des ign or, to a grea ter or a lesser extent, des t roying it): 1~ does the syllogist a lways revere his text, devis ing musical s t ructures to mirror its formal contours and the symbol is t spu rn it, bend ing words wi thou t compunc t ion to express an a rche typa l pain? Or is it ra ther
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38 Barbara Docherty
that the syllogist's unyielding fidelity can threaten to distort his writer's vision, the symbolist's more wilful manners to clarify and distil it?
I. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne Sonnet Structure and Metre
Both Donne's and Britten's art (and Hardy's, as we shall see) needed to live in rooms that they built themselves, within the "varying and yet rocklike limits" of self-imposed forms.ll Like the solo song, the Petrarchan sonnet - fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameters, an octet presenting the argument strictly separated from a sestet meditating on it (see Example la) - is an organized rhetorical pattern of precise bounds, through which personal passion can be given controlled dialec- tical expression in argument, paradox and resolution. When Donne wrote his nineteen Holy Sonnets (1609-18), the verse form first used in English by poets such as Thomas Wyatt was in transition, with Shakespeare, Spenser and others attempt- ing to loosen the rigid Petrarchan mould in the 'English' sonnet. This set the argument out in three quatrains and resolved it in the final two lines; if the twelfth had enjambement (overflow) into the thirteenth, the line and a half remaining pointed the moral or hortatory climax even more strongly. The nine sonnets Britten set 12 all observe the Petrarchan groundplan, but I, X, XIV, XVII and XIX develop their ideas in the English style and four (III, VII, XIV and XIX) have enjambement, reflecting both the security of the cell and the need to kick against its walls. Britten seemed to find a similar liberation in imprisonment; as Example lc demonstrates, it is possible to 'scan' his settings almost as strictly as Donne's text. The eighth-line caesura is marked by an audible end-stop ("paine./woe." in III and VII, for example), the mental step back to review the ground in ninth or thirteenth line emphasized by a change of dynamic or a change of key; in the quasi-English sonnets, three musical quatrains are created by the use of the same end-value for each within the twelve-line span ("(yester)day;/weigh;/(sus)taine;" in I).
Diction and Quantity
This need to demonstrate form, asserting an order achieved, obsessive in Hardy, is apparent also here. Britten's syntax is fastidious, defining internal punctuation no less carefully than the structural caesurae just discussed. Interjection and question resonate in the vocal line as in the reader's ear ("Soule!/beginne?" in IV, "rent?" in III), the line-end inflection carrying Donne's argument unswervingly pursued, the note values 'rhyming' and the summatory gesture ("ravish mee." in XIV, "piteous minde." in XIII) made as explicit in the music as in the text: the importance of 'lastness' is another sensibility that Donne, Hardy and Britten share. Where Donne scourges himself in staccato self-disgust, Britten bludgeons the ear with semiquaver and quaver blows ("but knocke, breathe, shine" in XIV);
/ / / / / Oh my* ] blacke SouleT I n o w t h o u I ar t s u m I- m o n - e d *Reversed 1st foot John Donne, Sonnet IV
Example la Iambic pentameter: 5 feet of unstressed (.) and stressed (/) syllables.
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 39
~ j G r a b ' e , , ; . . , V . ~ ' - _
v o , c , ~ - - I- - - f f - - - f - - - - p ~ l ~ L . . . . . - ~_ . J _J, #,__~L~:_:;' !, r, eJ O h r ay b l a c k e S o u l e l n o w l h o u a r t S u m - moned
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0 .
'~=~ ~ ~ I . ~ 1 ~ . - - �9 �9 �9 j i i ~ - ~ -
Boosey & Hawkes Ltd Example lb Musical setting of Example la.
Oh m y blacke Sou le ! n o w t hou art s u m m o n ed (//) (/) (/) (//) (...) (...) (...) (...) (...) (..) (...)
Example lc 'Scanned' setting of Example lb, dividing the musical notes into 'stressed' and 'unstressed':
(/0 (/) ,t (.) (See Docherty, "Sentence into Cadence" for further examples
of this 'musical prosody')
/ / She in the I h u r - l i n g night
Alun Lewis, Compassion
Example ld
She in the (11)(11) (...) (...)
Example le Musical setting of Example ld
hur ling night (I)(I) (I) (11)(...) Example If 'Scanned' setting of Example ld
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40 Barbara Docherty
in XII they are judgemental, in XIX the poet's inconstancy made music and in III they capture with precision both the penitent's stifled sobs ("returne againe/Into my") and the sinner's restless unease ("itchy Lecher"). Even in those sonnets where the mood is reflective there is a tension between release and reticence, the need to feel and to control. III's lamentation is chaste after the initial surge of despair ("O/Mourne/vaine;'), expressed in tight-lipped cadences; in VII, the declamation is extravagant ("imagin'd/scattered/Lord,"), but the strict five-note melisma (Example 2a) is a measure of the reckoning yet to come and XVII's grief, at the emotional centre of the cycle, is the more terrible for its refusal to let go. Only in X is the voice set free ("deliverie./sicknesse'), lauding death's death in accents which bespeak Britten's conscious debt to what T.S. Eliot has called the "collective personality" o ! his art: that perception not only of the "pastness of the past, but of its present .13 Graham Johnson has discerned the influence of Brahms's Vier ernste Gesfinge on this setting, 14 but Britten's precision in his 'linkage technique '15 would seem to make a more germane model surely one of Purcell's majestic Odes and Elegies, more particularly The Queen's Epicedium, work on whose realization is contemporary with the Holy Sonnets. 16 Certainly both the "saturated" melismas 17 and comminative minims and semibreves are Baroque in inspiration.
destb, )mu hum.bar.less hi - r i n - l - t i e s Of
r
Example 2a
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Rhetoric and Style
One may adduce several superficial reasons to explain what brought Britten to Donne in August 1945. Donne was an English poet, of the generation after Dowland and Campion and before Purcell and his librettists, all of whom Britten was exploring as performer and scholar at this time. The 'freedom governed by law' of Donne's sonnet structure was a challenge, and a chance to summate those techniques in setting English text already demonstrated in the Serenade (1943) and Peter Grimes (1945), pour mieux sauter, via the chamber operas, towards Billy Budd (1951). Donne's morbidezza must also have sorted well w i th the mood of that summer, the war in Europe barely three months over and the concentration camps in Germany newly liberated. The real reasons, both emotional and tech- nical, perhaps lie deeper. At the age of twenty-one, Donne 'chose Hell', by his apostasy from the Catholic church courting damnation and disjunction from God, and the struggle between the unquestioned beliefs of youth and the subversive
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 41
desires of maturity are nakedly expressed in the Satires and Sonnets he wrote in adolescence and early middle age; one may speculate that Britten's social apostasy, as a conscientious objector and a homosexual, brought him close to his poet's torment. The fact that sonnet construction sets up a dialectical facade through which desires and inconstancies can be scrutinized under poet's or com- poser's absolute control must also have exerted a powerful appeal. For Donne and Hardy, writing poetry was a means of discovering and exposing personal and moral conflict, and setting may have been a similar act for Britten; certainly the paradox that consciousness is pain, and pain is life inhabits these settings (and dominates those of Winter Words). The settings' "persistent logic "18 is an exact metaphor of Donne's hunger to argue a path from the chaos of personal experi- ence to some more lasting order, and the scarified soul is conjured no less by Donne's asphyxiated diction than by Britten's febrile accompaniments and pal- pitating vocal line ("breake, blowe, burn/But am betroth'd unto your enemie" in XIV). But for those rare moments when the "sinne of feare" is still, Britten can also find a lyric tone. In X, the voice caresses the thought that sleep, like death, can silence all despair ("Much pleasure"). ~9 In XVII, the ear is ravished in the sensual no less than the rapacious sense, chastity and licence counterpoised. 2~
"Music of Music"
We must now examine if, and if so how, the song we hear when a poem is set must necessarily supplant that poem's imaginative impact in the l!stener's mind, and so
21 destroy appreciation of it in its original form : do Britten s musical syllogisms distort Donne's vision by their very fidelity?
Britten's accompaniments in the Holy Sonnets settings bring before the ear the fear, starved hope and rare consolation that were the objective constituents of Donne's universe, pursuing a rhythmic/harmonic analogue for each poem's metaphysics with only rare respite, a musical equivalent of the device used by poets such as Cowley and Donne, elaborating a philosophical or verbal conceit to the furthest extent to which ingenuity could stretch it. "~ This presents a musical trope disjunct from the subjective passion displayed in the vocal line, and in settings such as IV, XIV, XIX, XIII and I threatens to overbear it. Thomas Campion's songs "Come let us sound with melody" and "Faire, if you expect admiring" work out their rhythmic scheme with similar resolve and it is the body of English lute song contemporary with the Holy Sonnets that stands behind these settings and makes their evocation of Donne's aesthetic so potent. The accompan- iment note clusters are a replication of lute tablature in pianistic terms, and the widely spaced vocal line looks like Dowland on the page. Dowland's use of semibreve and minim as question mark and end-stop ("Can shee excuse", "Fine knacks for ladies", for example) as we have seen pervades the Holy Sonnets settings, the melismating quintuplet exactly transliterating Donne's "scattered bodies" in VII and the 2 + 2 note figure in X ("but thy pictures", etc.) having a direct ancestor in Philip Rosseter's "When Laura smiles" (Example 2b). The defiant prefatory fanfares in Morley's "Absence" appear again in X, whose philosophy it shares, and in III Britten (as Dowland in "If my complaints" and "Stay time") repines in 4ths in full Jacobean finery.
Whatever the felicities of internal detail, this need to demonstrate structural derivation and relation 23 must impose its own imperatives upon the chosen text.
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42 Barbara Docherty
F " t d . - 7 2 - 7 6
v lewcs with Oe
Ill OCO nlorcolO l | d . f I f , "
Example 2b
Faber&Faber
In XIV, while the sinner's heartbeat hammers no less in Britten's staccato triplets than in Donne's monosyllables, in the second quatrain the fever is spent and the diction labours without hope, while the accompaniment pursues its predeter- mined palpitations. Only in the final quatrain, when spiritual paralysis is gal- vanised into bitter reproaches at an unresponsive God, are oral and aural sense again aligned. Similarly in IV: the sinner is called from the depths in double- octave F sharps, the last trump clanging and the voice trapped in obsessive self- regard; 24 "doome"s minim is an eternity; the hanged man's breath exhales down an octave (Example 3) and the redeemed one is washed clean, stripped of all tonal colour. But the dotted-note semiquavers in the accompaniment persist even after the sestet has ceased to flay the penitent, unifying the vocal line but implying a singleness of purpose at the furthest extreme from Donne's vacillating soul. III, XVII, VII and X, by contrast, display an unsurpassed fusion of poetic and musical sensibility. In VII, for example, Baroque D major accompaniment fanfares and tre- molandi falter in face of the soul's abounding sin, regaining their former pomp only when the pardon is sealed and the voice has climbed back to its original pitch from the abasing depths of the sestet. Ear hears what eye and mind perceive: the frustrated soul denied God's sight and the musically 'frustrated' trumpet denied its top A for twelve bars; a heart-stopping realization of how ill prepared are the living for the reckoning which will follow the awakening of the dead; and a final reconciliation of the voice's fiat 4ths with the sharp ones that epitomized the soul's frustration in the opening lines. Here, formal proportion illuminates the poem, as the musical euphuisms of the 1953 settings were to enrich Hardy's text.
to e z - e . c ~ . t i . o a t
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Example 3
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 43
II. Winter Words
Yet at first sight the poetry of Thomas Hardy would seem to offer the syllogist composer meagre reward. Donne's metrical certainty is in Hardy replaced by prosodic abandon, iambics, dactylics and Sapphics rubbing shoulders with poems whose 'metre' is a matter of contrived stress patterns and accentuated allit- eration. In place of Sonnets, Odes and Epithalamia of standard form and cir- cumscribed content Hardy provides satires, ballads, visionary moments and philosophical vignettes, with as many formal shapes as there are ideas to be expressed, as Hardy in fact stands at the nineteenth-century extreme of that process of dissolution of poetic form whose antipode is T.S. Eliot in England and poets such as Rimbaud and Rilke in Europe~ By the time Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes were writing, regular iambic or similar metre Iwas seen as a trap which necessitated some measure of evasion, even if forth were not totally over- thrown, a6 but Hardy still looked backward, trying (as Cowley and Donne had done) to express new affections in old ways, however bad the fit. Since he was a consummate craftsman, the challenge of reconciling feeling and form drew from him solutions as radical as those that composers such as Frank Bridge and Britten in the 1930s and 1940s achieved in instrumental writing and in solo song. Here no doubt lay one of Hardy's fascinations for Britten, quite apart from common emotional concerns: the pain of estrangement from childhood nescience; time's power to wither place and face; man's casual violence to his fellow man. Hardy's definition of poetry as "emotion put into measure ''27 as well describes Britten's attitude to the business of composition as Hardy's lifelong search to expose and express his own unique sensibility, a8
Metre and Structure
�9 Effort and struggle were for Hardy inseparable from the process of articulating his perceptions: what in other poets was called "polish" he deemed failure to per-
,,ceive. "29 Five of the eight poems 3~ Britten set observe a strophic quatrain or quatrain + coda form, but having assumed the straitjacket Hardy proceeds to demonstrate how its discipline can be infinitely varied to serve a newly-created need: "sucht davon erst die Regeln auf "31 applies to this poetry as to no other in England at this time. 32 Only that line/stanza length, metre and stress pattern that will precisely express the poem's perception is admitted into its structure, even if this entails some "small rebellion" against the received prosodic order.B3 "At day- close in November "34 is a disarmingly simple three-quatrained lyric that is in fact a case study of Hardy's prosody. The feet in each line (and the silences between them) are units of time and emotion - spondaic for key points of description or pain, dactylic for the narrative impetus flowing towards tragedy or a smile. The alternate line-end trochees 35 in the first two stanzas ("(a)bating, waiting/noon- time, June time") contrast the ebbing of daylight and the poet's life with the more tangible entities still active in the landscape, which have a spondaic solidity in the middle of the line and an iamb or anapaest at its end ("late bird, black heads/ across, in the eye"). The weak opening stress of the second, eighth and twelfth lines ("And","And","That") echoes the oral storytelling tradition that Hardy would have known in childhood, where every "And then" couples a weakly
36 stressed pause for breath with a fresh narrative impetus to the tale. Lines 5-10
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44 Barbara Docherty
are more diffuse and shorter-winded, as leaves and memories float by ("yellow the", "in the eye", "tree in my"), but the final couplet regains a spondaic certainty: that the poet in the summer of his life made a mark upon the landscape ("tall trees", "grew here"), and that dissolution will in its own time come to poet, trees and the as yet nescient children ("none will"). Like the poem, Britten's setting is on the surface a brief moment of vision that would join present to past, and make sense of both, and like the poem the surface conceals a formidable 'prosodic' architecture. Britten's syllogisms in Winter Words are not imitative, as in Donne, rather they parallel (and at times exceed) the texts' virtuosity, a 'recomposition' far closer to Tippett's practice than the 1960s debate on textual violence or reverence would lead one to expect. 37 Here, there is internal assonance ("hours', (aba)ting, bird, pines/float, tree, ne(ver), none") and mirror imagery ("wings", "across") of the most subtle kind ("(ob)scure" and "wings", for example, have the same effect of blotting out the landscape and the same minim + 2 crotchet shape). Hardy's iambic structure for the bb ~ line-ends in the first two stanzas is observed ("cross, toss/eye, sky"), as is the change to spondees in the 9th and 11th lines ("through here", "grew here"). But the gale whose capacity to dislocate man's life no less than the landscape is implied in Hardy is in Britten a far more destabilizing force, as the later discussion of the cycle's "Music of music" will show.
Hardy's use of metre as an instrument of language rather than a blank acrostic is demonstrated even more forcefully in "At the railway station, Upway", 39 an eighteen-line construct that yields its secrets most readily to retroactive analysis - seeking out the line-end patterns and then working backwards towards the beginning of the line, which frequently leaves one syllable hanging out of the metre ("Spoke", "The (constable)", "As (the fiddle)". The shapely intricacy of the form copes effortlessly with anapaestic conversation ("I can do", "quite my own", "said no word"), dactylic approaching train wheels ("before the", "constable") and spondaic moments of mental or moral strain ("grimful", "so free"). A violin tunes up, has an opening flourish and pizzicati and a final down bow; a train distantly shakes the china in the waiting room and then halts, and in eighteen lines, with a mastery of economy and proportion, is drawn a picture of ordinary people caught in life's ordinary perplexities. Britten's response is as artless as the child, a semiquaver/quaver monotone ("There is not much that I can do") mimicking Hardy's narrative as it persistently defers both the train's arrival and the poem's parting shot. The rare departures from this scansion are calculated with Hardyesque care: for the aa, dd and ee rhymes in the first two stanzas ("do, you/(o)lin, in/twang, sang'); 4~ for place and character ("station", "boy", "con- stable looked"); and for the bitter central refrain ("glee", "free", "me").41 With par- ticular subtlety, the convict is not distinguished from the landscape, a grotesque of fate put out of mind by gaoler and fellow travellers alike. Only the repetition of "This life so free" is a 'recomposition', glossing the pain shared by poet and composer at the power of environment to chain the spirit of those who cannot adapt to its demands.
Quantity and Diction
Hardy's abiding desire was to defeat the "rote restricted" and routine, and his scansion consistently thwarts prosodic expectation. "When all went well ' , 42 for example, could have been expressed as a regular iambic; the use of "went"
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 45
retroactively turns the line into a double spondee, forcing on the reader's mind the gulf between an innocent prelapsarian world and the conscious present. 43 In "Wagtail and baby ' , 44 the alternate line-end iambs ("whereto", "(wad)ing through") and trochees ("drinking", "shrinking") contrast the reality of ford and passing creatures with the more unfocused moral scrutiny of the watching poet, bird and baby. 4s Punctuation moves closely with the verse ("abating,/across,/ waiting,/toss" in "At day-close in November"), or opposes it with enjambement, particularly when the narrative gathers pace before a closing irony or sorrow ("you mark and mete/This region of sin", for example), 46 and it is often the most overtly regular diction that conceals the greatest social or moral ambiguity: "con- sciousness,/prevailed, "47 preface a stanza coda depicting a world innocent and unaware; "cross/reaffirmed" run into their coda, consciousness having germed, the barriers of nescience come down. Britten's diction is far removed here from the scrupulous pedantry of the Holy Sonnets settings; in "Midnight on the Great Western", while Hardy's variations on a strictly strophic ground - the mirror codas of first/fourth stanzas and double lamb refrain in each stanza's opening line ("the journeying boy", "O journeying boy") - are not ignored, Britten's 'versifica- tion' goes far deeper. The song's first two stanzas outdo Hardy in their strophic conceits ("In the third, In the band/what (he was), lamp's (sad beams)", etc.), re- inforced by the assonating 16- and 11-note figure for "jour(neying)" in first/second and third/fourth stanzas respectively. 48 This displays Tippett's (and Purcell's) manners, grossly inflating the dactyl in a euphuistic trope such as Hardy fre- quently used to express moral or social unease. ~9 Britten s extension of the coda to the first, second and fourth stanza is again a 'poetic' device, implying a Donnean summation to the argument of each preceding quatrain by assonance ("whence he came", "living thing") and literal recapitulation (the septuple quaver for "whence", "living", "are').
Language and Style
When Wessex Poems was published in 1898, it was the archaic vocabulary and ornate alliteration that excited the critics' most scathing response, s~ The poems Britten set are more restrained, but still give the lie to any view that Hardy used such devices out of ill-tutored perversity. Accented alliteration and assonance patterns give pace and shape to a discursive sensual or social narrative, constantly drawing the reader back to the moral or material crux. In "At day-close in November", the assonances are an uncomplicated gloss on the wind's passage through the wood ("waltzers, waiting/leaves, yellow", etc.). In "Midnight on the Great Western", by contrast, alliterative stress is as important a structural device as metre or quantity, carefully placed phrasal or syllabic pairings bringing the reader up short before physical detail (" seat, sat/lamp' s, (oi)ly', etc.) or the sacred/ profane dilemma at the centre of so much of Hardy's and Britten's art ("soul, sphere/(re)gion, of sin", etc.). In "The little old table "51 and "At the railway station, Upway", alliteration is deliberately held back, in the first until " W h a t . . . history hangs" in the penultimate line, the exhalation a precise analogue of the uncountable years since the gift was made, in the second ("grimful glee") to drive home the abyss between the reality of the situation and the convict's fantasy. Britten's musical 'alliteration' elaborates Hardy's gesture, less to mimic the poet's pathos or despair as to draw its conclusions more universally, to the moral
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46 Barbara Docherty
and social anxieties of his own place and time. The assonances in "At day-close in November" are exaggerated by melisma ("waltzers", "waiting") and repetition ("tall trees") until the wood (and hence al!,nature) seems drunken and out of control, while the treatment of journeying creates significant new assonance structures. "The little old table"'s opening "Creak" releases a mimetic impulse that conveys both the tactile present of the time-warped "relic of householdry", and its_power to unde,.rwrite the continuity of our,personal past into an uncertain future. ~ This is that ' imaginative apprehension' , an "animating power akin to love" that can perceive and express the metaphysical design in the workings of an apparently indifferent nature, that was Hardy s highest goal 54 and is pervasive in Tippett's music.
Why Hardy's poems, perhaps more than any others Britten set in English, s5 drew this perception from their composer may again be addressed from a self- evident and a less self-evident perspective. Winter Words (September 1953) was a parergon to work on the opera Gloriana (March 1953), and both are an extrovert celebration of 'Englishness' and a tour de force of setting style (set piece ensembles, choral interludes and intimate duets in the opera, satires, philosophical fantasies and ballads in the song cycle56). In both, also, time constantly reminds age of its loss of youth, and it is here that Hardy's deeper importance may reside. 1953 was Britten's fortieth year; 57 the awareness that "halfte des Lebens", and the better half, was irretrievably lost is felt for the first time in these settings. 58 Britten's sen- . �9 �9 , ~ " 1 , , , , , , , �9 �9 - - �9 , , 5 9 sltlvlty to my June time , long ago , As if all time were theirs could be
dismissed as superior craftsmanship did not the songs so palpably sound to be 'old man's music', written by one already looking back at time's deceit. 6~
"Music of Music"
The musical tropes that could encapsulate Donne's world, and the poetic forms in which it was expressed, could be drawn freely from the Jacobean Bookes of Ayres; no such vocabulary lay to hand with which to syllogize Hardy's aesthetic, even were this no more than a matter of finding a version of pastoral that suited Britten's taste. The roistering and melancholic strands that had dominated English son~ before 19356r were philosophically and emotionally one- dimensional, ~ ill fitted to express either Hardy's protean thought or Britten's growing desire to set what lay unspoken behind the text: 63 it is significant that the two settings in most obvious lineal descent from this tradition- "The children and Sir Nameless" ("Yarmouth Fair", 64 "Budmouth Dears "65) and "If it's ever spring again" ("Beckon to me to come", 66 "Summer Schemes "67 to take but two examples) - were the two finally excluded from the completed set. This new perspective may account for Winter Words's stylistic instability and lack of that single-minded syllogizing that underpinned the Holy Sonnets settings; 68 the syl- logistic frame here is found not so much in internal (emotional/rhetorical) as in external (social/experiential) form. 69 Gestural echoes of Purcell 7~ and Schubert 7] may be discerned, but in the main Britten, like Hardy, had to find the poems' "own rules" and devise a rhetoric of his own. Two earlier songs were seminal in this regard, Frank Bridge's "When you are old" (1919) 72 and "Journey's End" (1925). '~ The Yeats setting captures all the bitter-sweetness of time's capacity to give and take away, the sudden passion of "How many moments of glad
I t ' l l l 7 4 grace closely foreshadowing How long, how long? "The Wolfe is a small
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 4 7
drama of childish uncomprehending wisdom and adult awareness of the nihilism of time that is a sourcebook for Winter Words, and was "ransacked ''75 accordingly.
Britten's "intra-musical perception" is demonstrated again and again in these settings. The moral thickets of "At day-close in November" are matched by a tonal complexity rare in his solo song, 76 the major/minor, tonic/dominant and tonal instability and "widening and narrowing of the musical space "77 a precise metaphor not only of the narrator's munificent past and fast constricting future but also of that tension between nature's permanence and man's transience 78
7 9 , , �9 �9 brought by age, and by war. In Mldnl~,ht on the Great Western", the ritornelli minor triads are strophic onomatopoeia; s~ they are, however, also symbolic of a , , , , 8 1 cycle of experience , whose development in the third stanza effortlessly carries Hardy's transition from earthly to more rarefied philosophy. "Wagtail and baby" shows poet and composer as well-matched ironist, 82 textual and musical non- chalance concealing immense subtleties of observation. Disingenuous surface detail -bull , mongrel, the wagtail s 66 prinking s3 and the baby's 6 ruminations that culminate in a picture of infant logic that is a song cycle in itself 84 - hide a "chain of causality from A - E - A that Hardy would have envied. 8s "The choirmaster s burial", by contrast, is one of Hardy's narratives of moral crisis, conjuring the disasters brought by failure to perceive, until too late, the truth behind the cir-
8 6 , 8 7 cumstance. Hardy s easy narration, framed by unaccompanied declamation by the tenor viol player who tells the tale, is carried by predominantly crotchet utterance and bound internally by the repetition of the hymn tune "Mount Ephraim" which, with the vicar's ponderous fiats and the ckuaveringly gabbled funeral, 'places the scene as economically as a metal gravure. ~8 In "Before life and after", as in many of the Winter Words settings, the vocal line has a superficial sweetness that is the more painful when the accompaniment simultaneously exposes the raw pain behind the social smile.89 Arnold Whittall has demonstrated how this song parallels Hardy's remorseless descent from nescience to conscious- ness, 9~ the discordance increasing from an uneasy D major/G major in the first stanza via B b/A on "hope" to Eb/B major after "if something ceased", with the left- hand triads more and more disjunct from the upper lines. Nescience is "re- affirmed" by the return to the cycle's primal D (major), but the implication that life goes on (by an extended and varied recapitulation of "At day-close in November"s opening bars) is an empty consolation.
III. Boyhood's End
'Sentence into Cadence' concluded that Tippett sought to address the "explana- t i o n s . . , outside the words", 91 the better to reconcile our shrunken inkling of the Good 92 with the petty cruelties of daily existence, while Britten sought rather the right specifics of a social environment, that the universal might then be dis- cerned. 93 That work considered only the Holy Sonnets, and we have now seen how far Winter Words brought Britten towards Tippett's standpoint. It has still, however, to be demonstrated how the related ascription of 'symbolist' to Tippett's work is justified not only by the The Heart's Assurance, which stands relatively late among Tippett's handful of solo vocal settings, but also by Boyhood's End, the first solo vocal work of his maturity. 94
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48 Barbara Docherty
Content and Style
Boyhood's End is a setting (slightly amended) of a forty-five-line paragraph 9s from Chapter XXII of Far Away and Long Ago, the autobiographical "history of [the] early life" of the Victorian writer and naturalist W.H. Hudson. Hudson was born in the Argentine in 1841, and the Celtic strain inherited from both parents may have con- tributed to that sensitivity to the numinous in nature that gave his writing such imaginative power. Hudson came to England in 1874 and made a precarious living as a literary hack and contributor to natural history journals until the "brick wilderness" of London drove him to attempt to recreate the spiritual beauty of nature in a series of 'out-of-door' essays such as Nature in Downland (1900) and A Shepherd's Life (1910) that set the soul of a place in time and in its landscape with the perception of a Monet or a Crome. Hudson never lost the "visionary gleam" of childhood and in his late seventies, ill in hospital in Cornwall, he was visited by a "rare state of mind", an intense reminiscence of his youth that was recorded in Far Away and Long Ago, 96 a picture in its original colours of the Argentine pampas, its violent and often amoral society, and the political turmoil of the 1850s under the dictator Rosas, as it impressed the consciousness of the growing child, that has rarely been surpassed as autobiography.
Hudson as a prose stylist came close to the poet in the intensity of his vision, but his rhapsody is perfectly proportioned and controlled by a Hardyesque "filtering" of tactile and sensory impressions, "synthesising [them] with emotion and evaluating them with thought ' , w His use of language has been compared to Wordsworth and Keats, but Hudson realized that he needed the "scope [and] . . . casual melody" of prose to achieve his more symphonic effects. 9a The emotional perspective of his prose is achieved by a simple means: a sensitive ear for conso- nance ("did I want, did I ask/to rise, To watch, to feel"), an anapaestic rhythm that drives the reader through the narrative in a rising curve of emotional engagement ("(on)ly to keep", "(sur)prise and de(light)") and a spondaic or iambic firmness to the beginning and end of cadences ("what, then"; "to have?"; "(shin)ing void!"). An unobtrusive architectonic skill that Hardy would have appreciated is at work here, retaining the casual mood of essay form but still able to convey the archetypal behind the seemingly inconsequential, so that the slightest things become profound and the commonest commonplace beautiful ("deep hot nest", "coots and courlans conversing", "wide hot whitey-blue sky").
The young Hudson recalled in Chapter XXII "sings out of [a] situation "99 of sudden apprehension on his fifteenth birthday that the "glad emotion" of childhood will wither in manhood to a "dull low satisfaction" with his daily lot. Hudson conveys this sudden consciousness of past rapture and impending loss in a bewildered opening question and a surge of answering emotion released as the sensory wonders of the threatened paradise crowd the mind. Tippett's question sticks in the throat, pp, falling by a third and barely able to climb back up the fourth to "want?", dreading to hear his own reply, which comes with an arioso "Wagnerian crash"l~176 as the metaphorical roof, the previously secure self-percep- tion of adolescence, falls in. The architecture of the following three hundred bars is examined in detail under "Structure and form" below; first we may marvel at the setting's sure grasp of emotional detail: the uningratiating piano prelude, an intimation of the "dull low satisfaction" ahead; the denied but already com- prehended futility of "want", since what the boy had is already beyond reach
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 49
except in m e m o r y - "keep" clings to a vain hope for six bars, but the seventh drop from "only" to "have" admits the reality. The repetition of "to rise each morning" and the melisma on "day" and "year" gloss the previously unquestioned succes- sion of the seasons, just as the quickening of the pulse from predominantly crotchet to quaver/semiquaver utterance ("insect, every bird/returned") conjures a multiplying number of hustling legs and fapping wings in the mind's ear. "[T]rance of delight" is mesmeric, the plovers' notes crazed at their first appear- ance and as dislocated as the boy's mind, a fifth up, on their return, their wings arching in thirds as they fly south over the bulrushes musically flattened by the wind. "Plucked" points the hollowness of such sensory feasting, the "nothing" left in the hand no longer a green stem alone, however long the fingers remain clenched around it (Example 4). This hollowness is carried into the scherzo, the dotted rythms far more than simple mimesis of horses' hooves or dessicating sun, 1~ rather a recognition that the mirage on the plains at noon now extends to the boy's desire. A certain reconciled tranquillity is regained in the finale, the boy's transcendent intimacy with the sky, alive and intelligent and feeling with him, unforgettably caught in the repeated "shinings" and "ecstasy", where the voice levitates beyond the veil of earthly understanding. 102 But this is not some flatulent, amorphous rhapsodizing that violates the classical poise of the para- graph s closing cadences; 1~ the very fidelity to the tactile and kinaesthetic in Hudson 's verbal music purges the setting of excess and paradoxically intensifies its impact on the hedonistic imagination, senses leading to passion and the physical to eternity.l~
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Example 4
Structure and Form
The inflexible period-bound structures of prose create constraints of a different order to those of Donne's metrical verse or the increasingly radical retreat from it practised by Hardy and Lewis/Keyes. In his desire to recapture that sense of "time in eternity" unique to memory, Hudson let his prose surrender to the boy's
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5 0 Barbara Docher t y
emotion, the opening question and response followed by eight sentences 1~ that build an edifice of Doric proportion, the first and second parallel single statements of visual and aural reminiscence ("To watch each June/To listen in a trance"), the fourth (the Hafiz apostrophe and quotation) a compound cadence balancing that of the "If the question" opening reply�9 Its excited sibilants initiate the pentastich upward curve of passion ("To climb trees/- the five long pointed/To lie on a grassy bank/; to let my s ight / - the large alamanda-like flower") 1~ that has at once the immediacy and the evanescence of the past's present in the mind. 1~ Tippett's architectonics extend from small-scale subtlety (amending Hudson 's "every (June and July)" to "each", cadencing with "each morning" and "each familiar flower") to the major 'aural periodicity' achieved by word repetition, cadenza and decora- tion. The last two will be considered under "Music of music" below, but the first foreshadows that 'aural phrasing' of the poem so central to The Heart's Assurance's ability to express the inchoate and intuitive in its poets' thought. We have seen above how the setting of "to keep" and "to rise each morning" has a psychological
" 1 0 o ." , , resonance, repelling even for a little the impending death of sense, just as To listen, listen" glosses both the boy's trance-like state and the first barely recog- nized failure of the ear. The day-long arching of wings above the plain sounds in the repeated "flying, flying south", but the 'recomposition' of Hudson 's final bipartite cadence as a 'quatrain + coda' ("To lie on my back/, To lie on my back/ to gaze up/. To gaze upI~ gaze and gaze") is less successful, underscoring the desperate attachment to vanishing rapture but destroying Hudson 's easy transi- tion from natural to supernatural ("To lie on my b a c k . . , and gaze u p . . . ; to gaze and gaze") by almost too much structural artificeJ 1~
This need to clarify and organize, "measuring" a text into "proper form", length and proportion, 111 brings us to the crux of Tippett's approach to a text, both technical and philosophical. Musical and dramatic structure must express a collec- tive truth, tied to no particular identity, place or time, so that it may give "ordered discourse" and objective substance to the inarticulate "cry" of modern man. m These seminal structural principles make no distinction between orchestral and vocal works, Tippett's sonatas are like his song cycles and his symphonies like his concertos, 113 in the sense that all display a tension between linear form and lyrical flow, Purcellian invention and Beethovenian restraint. In the absolute music, this dichotomy is displayed in tonal instabilities and the collision of formal proce- dures, in the vocal music by the methods used - often derived from purely instru- mental procedures - at once to heighten and to subjugate the text's own music. In The Heart's Assurance, the poems are prosodically dismembered in the service of a rigorous 'emotional scansion' of Tippett's own devising; 114 in Boyhood's End - to which Tippet, came after experiments in madrigal setting ("The Source "11s and , , , , 1 1 6 , , , , The Windhover , both 1942) and antiphonal motets ( Plebs Angelica , 1943) the subjugation of the text 117 is achieved by what one may call 'additive emotional' techniques, an application of the Purcellian trope of parallel restatements of key 'textual centres' to crystallize and give formal clarity to what would otherwise be unfocused 'Dionysian' feeling ("to keep/to rise each morning/To listen")J 18 This is another instance of 'retroactive' prosody, Tippet 'arguing back' Hudson 's ,, ,, 119 flying, flying into the second and fourth sentences to create a new assonantial
1 2 0 , , , , structure. The piled up cadences of the andante replicate How shall my soul � 9 How shall I stem", the final allegro aria in The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation, m and desire to replicate the protagonist's agonized suspension
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 51
between doubt and faith but, as we have seen above, in fact diffuse both the aural and the emotional tension.
Tippett was professionally very engaged with realizing and performing Purcell, Tallis and other pre-classical music at the time Boyhood's End was written, but this cannot alone account for his choice of Hudson 's text, tailor-made for cantata form though its 'poetic prose' must have seemed. As with Donne and Hardy, the attraction had both a pragmatic and a psychological validity. One may point to the obvious here - a writer and a composer who both approached the tangible world through their perceptions and who both perceived its latent mystery and imma- nence; both of whom suffered a compulsive need to love and to know; to both of whom technical maturity and material recognition came late. One may point also to the fact that Tippett came to Hudson, as Britten to Hardy, at almost the same turning po in t - nearing forty, but like Hudson about to lose sight in compositional terms of 'boyhood' rather than early maturity, with the "dull low satisfaction" of a public persona and loss of private 'innocence' ahead. Boyhood's End, for all its classical contours, is a driven work, impelled by a common fear.
"Music of Music"
Whereas Britten's vocal and orchestral works tend to be sui categoris and not cross- fertilizing, 122 Tippett's oeuvre displays an 'accumulative' pattern with clusters of technical or emotional parerga, in later years often centring round a vocal work. 123 The affinity of manners in the music composed from 1935--45, however, ~24 is less straightforward of analysis, 'accumulation' here being the gradual acquisition of a personal motivic, rhythmic and chromatic vocabulary and the works a succes- sive exploration of how proliferating ideas in quartet, sonata and choral media could be directed and controlled; Boyhood's End and the First Symphony are the mature fruits of the search. 12s Boyhood's End is a baroque cantata, displaying a formality of design usually assumed to be as antithetical to Tippett as it is congenial to Britten. A piano continuo underpins a hieratic, neo-classical struc- ture 126 of recitative (Introduction, 1st movement) and aria (alleRro, scherzo and
127" Finale) that "organizes" Hudson 's images of inner experience, distancing and generalizing their personal pain. Modally, the music is as wandering and insecure as the boy's mind, unstable 7ths, 3rds and 6ths 128 setting up a harmonic progres- sion only to deny it, so that the ear is forced to share the "keen apprehension" of the text, never resolved or still. This apparent indifference to formal harmonic procedures and deliberate structural ambiguity mimics the narrative's sedulous movement from anguished questioning to visionary affirmation, concealing in order to reveal. Semitonal dissonances drive the music along an unobtrusive path, a 'programmatic logic' that allows rhapsodic arcs of melody to flow around selected moments of explosive emotion ("I want", "dance", "plucked", "shining void!", for example) that both crystallize the image in aural terms and impel the music in a "seamless reminiscence" that abjures any sense of undirected passion: both Hudson 's concluding rapture and Tippett's final D major seem inevitable when they are attained. ~2~ The same covert artifice underlies the relationship between voice and accompaniment, the discreet strophism of "morning, June/ climb, hand, feel", for example, fulfilling the function of Hudson 's reiterated infinitives. The ten bars of unaccompanied declamation in the andante ("climb trees . . . deep/on a grassy b a n k . . , mys t (e r ious) /amid . . , di(vine)") holds its
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52 Barbara Docherty
breath with the boy in his first startled realization 13~ that he had "[never] been fully conscious before", 131 the piano joining the voice at the highest point of won- derment ("hot nest/(myst)erious/(di)vine yellow").
Tippett's most contentious action as "composer-poet", 132 however, concerns the vocal coloratura that can at once discharge the protagonist's personal pain into more generalized poetic utterance (since the particular words in which it is expressed lose definition) 133 and render articulate and universal the inarticulacy inherent in such deep emotion: 134 Tippett's melisma can delineate with equal felicity apprehension ("want", "keep"), disbelieving delight ("south"), ethereal fantasy ("float") and visionary unrestraint ("uprising", "ecstasy", "shining"). This is that same "elaboration" that was deemed to have been fatal to The Heart's Assurance's effectiveness as a song cycle, 135 and though Tippett's new 'periods' here have an assonantial 'grammar' of their own ("day,year/year, north/floating (by), shining", for example), Hudson 's measured prose is inevitably damaged ("want" is "inflated" from a single- to a 15- and "uprising" from a 3- to a 32-'stres- sed' word, for example). Herein may lie one root of the syllogist/symbolist divide; to express such "uncreated images of truth", 136 moments out of time and mundane experience, 137 Tippett needed an 'extra-terrestrial' music, subjective, abstract and profligate, naming what the text does not, a matter of psychological and moral just as much as technical response. 138
IV. The Heart's Assurance
This need to express "another meaning and another science', 139 and whether in doing so Tippett wilfully flouted some unspoken canons for the setting of English text, to the detriment of both poem and song, is particularly pertinent to The Heart's Assurance, the settings made in 1943 of three poems by Alun Lewis and two by Sidney Keyes, I4~ since it was these settings that formed the main plank in the thesis contra Tippett advanced in 1965.141 Example ld - f does indeed make clear the gulf between Britten's unyielding scansion and Tippett's extravagant delivery, that would make tangible a pain beyond plain words. But this is to ignore the gulf between 1618 and 1918, in prosody no less than in emotion. The metrical certainty of sonnet structure, and even the rebellious regularity of Hardy's verse, are in Lewis and Keyes replaced by a metrical instability where implication rather than statement 142 and a deliberate desire "[not] to say gracefully all that poets have said" 143 become the instruments of art. Both poets, like Hudson, and like Tippett, discerned the artist's function as being to give "some inkling of t h e . . , fusion of finite and infinite, spiritual and physical, which is our world"; 144 for such a vision a music that was something other than conventional "monumental homes,/[or] marble cenotaphs "145 was necessary.
Metre and Structure
Lewis's "difficult poetic ambition", his " . . . striving/To make articulate the groping voices "146 created an unrestraint in both form and diction 147 that is only with a struggle contained within the by then fragile bounds of conventional prosody. "Song" maintains an iambic tetrameter or pentameter form throughout
148 its nineteen lines, the unbroken tempo that life had before war, and death,
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 53
became familiar; but the pentastich's first line catches its breath, clinging to the metre but bespeaking dislocation, loss and fear. "Compassion" has a Hardyesque disingenuousness, lucid dactyls or anapaests for the opening and closing stanzas ("Stroked away/Nor did she ever stir") and sentential feet 149 (ctactyl + spondee for "Shivered and grew still", for example) to express the terror of the central eight lines. The relation between volatile emotions and prosodic instability is demonstrated even more clearly in "The dancer", which contrives to convey the burned-out defiant brilliance of the bereaved lover (enjambed dactyls + iambs, ""He's in his grave . . . I dance""), the sterility of the lonely future (entirely regular iambics, in painful contrast to the prevailing prosodic turbulence, ""To k e e p . . , doom"/"And now I dance . , my bread" ") and the unreality of reality at such a time (the feverishness inherent in anapaestic/dactylic metre, "My feet like/ had he not/Out of the/And so I ' , etc.). Keyes's search for an explanation "beyond the words ''15~ led him to depart even more radically than Lewis from previous poets' "grace", partially in "The heart's assurance", totally in "Remember your lovers"s blank verse. "The heart's assurance" conjures "The dancer"'s febrile hyperconsciousness by the same dactylic/anapaestic means ("O never trust/still raised to/For the care(less)"), and imparts formality by the three-quatrained structure and sudden spondaic moments of pause ("Go back", "pride is") at the same point in the first and third stanzas. Just how far conventional prosody could be "evaded" can best be seen in "Remember your lovers", however, where pen-
, , , , 151 tameter, tetrameter and hexameter form is achieved by poetic geometry that constructs each line in sentential feet (spondaic apostrophe, "Young men" + 2 dactyls for the pacing footfall, "walking the/open streets" in line 1, for example), investing such moments with an "image/Impregnable to time". 152 The precision of this geometry may be seen in the internal cadencing of line 13, when the disem- bodied irresolution (anapaest + anapaest + trochee) of"From the dark/antecham/ ber of" suddenly hardens into the spondaic reality of "desire", or the strophic scansion of lines 8, 15 and 22. The 'musical literacy' of Tippett's response to Boyhood's End's architectonic problems is demonstrated even more forcibly here,~S3 strophic organization made audible either by line-end assonance ("hear./ bless./town." in "The heart's assurance", "bands,/(cen)taur./breast./will." in "Compassion") or accompaniment figures ("The dancer", "Remember your lovers"), and exact musical analogues of the texts' few concessions to form. The tetrameter that opens the first three quatrains of "Song" is set to the same figure, which returns only slightly modified when it returns in the pentastich. Keyes's strophic colon in "The heart's assurance" is a crotchet throughout, and his blank verse is unified by the opening ritual adjuration "Young men . . . remember your lovers", which encompasses both music and emotion of the setting to follow. Tippett's favoured terminal is a crotchet, although he does not employ it with Britten's implacable consistency, but his final gestures are emphatic (cf. "love." in "Remember your lovers"). More subtle is the 'aural inflexion' contained in the seemingly arbitrary word repetition within each setting, 'phrasing' the poem for the ear as more conventional punctuation does on the page. Tippett imparts a 'hexametric' unity to the first and third quatrains of"Song" where Lewis does not, by the repetition of "in Eden/how trivial"; in "Compassion", the strophic euphony is reinforced by the repetition of each stanza's concluding phrase ("blood soaked bands/to her breast/his dark will/the god-faced centaur"); and in "The dancer" the same effect is achieved by syllogistic melismas ("I dance/I'd dance/I danced/I dance").
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54 Barbara Docherty
Quantity and Diction
Tippett's 'destructive impulse' was discerned above all in his treatment of quantit)(, his licence with the tex!,~pified by the expansion of Lewis's "essentially simple "154 pentameter in "Song' s third line ("Its c r u e l . . , and she") into a triple execration which appears wantonly to violate "cruel"s trochee; examination of the rest of the line, however, reveals rather Boyhood's End's desire to recompose the poem's sense, in order to bring the "uncreated images" before the ear. "Song" concerns the endlessly revolving belt of life's (and specifically war's) petty miseries, and it is on this treadmill that "cruel" is caught. Inescapably, again, the opening dactyls of "Compassion" ("She in the/hurling night") are destroyed by Tippett's long breathed sorrow, but again the effect is to make manifest the reality that the poem relates, the fact that love is the one moveless truth in a world out of control. In "The heart's assurance", similarly, love's fear is in every semiquaver to which "never" is set at the opening of the poem, destroying Keyes's trimeter but creating an "impregnable image" of desire's infidelity. Here, however, Tippett's respect for Keyes's diction makes musical demands which the words can fulfil only at the cost of their own integrity, and since the sense discerned by the ear is then lost, some violence to the poem is done. Keyes balanced his spondaic admonition ("Go back, ') by a dactyl + anapaest that has the sense of conversation snatched in the lull of an air-raid or the cessation of guns ("And what I'm saying (is)"); set as ten semiquavers and quavers this becomes a breathless aural gabble, conveying urgency but little sense. In "the dancer", likewise, Lewis's fireflies whirl in iambics while Tippett's spin giddily, becoming more erratic (and so more aurally unclear) with each repetition. "Remember your lovers" is an interdict against death's power that has echoes of Donne's Sonnet X. ls5 Tippett's almost note-to-a syllable form precisely mirrors Keyes's plain passion, and the strophic use of minims ("Young men,/sky/dream/eye. ') has the mood of liturgy.
Language and Style
The subject matter of The Heart's Assurance is "Love under the shadow of death", 156 and for both poets the need to reconcile the conflicts of soldier and
. , , , 1 5 7 lover, wishing love and living love s destruction , was a personal no less than 158 a technical desire. In both, the insistence on asking ultimate questions led to
risks, Keyes in his diction, Lewis in the unrestraint of his bewilderment or euphoria, which often pushed his technical and imaginative resources to their limit, where Keyes relied more on understated implication and hieratic threnody. Lewis's elemental, intuitive striving to affirm in a time of negation demands "greater statements "1s9 from their composer, and receives them ("you and she", "things turned bad" in "Song"; "the terror", "Death/Shivered", "the god-faced centaur" in "Compassion"; "dread/Of death" in "The dancer"), the counterba- lance between extravagant detail and rigorous linear argument a precise reflection of the textual tension between feeling and form) 6~ The visual and tactile quality in Lewis's verse is again and again made aural truth ("Death taps" in "Song", "hurling night", "Shivered and grew still" in "Compassion", "the heart's fear" in "The heart's assurance" are only four examples), "filling the void of feeling "16t with exuberant, reconciling images that deny constraint. Keyes's was a colder passion, and Tippett's response is more "bound in chains" and syllogizing
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 55
("never, never, never/Young men . . . remember your lovers", for example), driving home the Calvary nails in "The heart's assurance"'s second stanza and in "Remember your lovers" arpeggiating death's wisdom and the wilderness of love. In this setting above all, Tippett finds "synonyms for love's great word", 162 uncreated images of unquenchable power ("pain rising/fused your sight/ meadows drunk/bitter dream/lust/and let you die"): if there is as Keyes maintained "no speech to tell the shape of love", 163 this music comes close to being SO.
It will already be apparent how close were both poets' concerns to Tippett's own apprehensions in the summer of 1945164- Lewis the imprudent Dionysian, 165 "holding [within himself] Turbulence and Time", 166 Keyes the allusive, "obscure" pastoralist who would make terms with death in its time of triumph: 167 were these settings Tippett's own "crossing of the desert" into a worn-out postwar world where there was a sort of peace and material satisfaction, but from which love's food was absent? 168
"Music of Music"
Tippett's pain, and the creation coming out of pain, 169 discharged in The Heart's Assurance's formal clarity no less than in the transcendent images ("you and she", "Remember this, Remember this" in "Song"; "the god-faced centaur" in "Com- passion"; "rising across your sky", "and let you die", "unquenchable wisdom" in "Remember your lovers") that seemed so excessive to those who treasured the "narrow strictness" of the syllogist perspective. 17~ We have already seen how Tippett's 'aural inflexion' underscores the poems' formal structure, and the purely musical 'strophism' is no less telling. The rising 4th on "you and she" in "Song"'s 3rd line is inverted and elaborated for "She offered you" and "He took you" in 7th and 11th lines, just as the dolce simplicity that delineates past love, its unclouded pleasure, and its innocence ("Naked in Eden") is transformed to accommodate "a shining apple from the tree" and "how tr ivial . . , alarms" in suc- ceeding stanzas. The sense of love's transcendent power stretching into monotone eternity ("That l i fe . . , live on Long') 171 is suddenly arrested by a return to the opening 7th ("journeyman/Long after Death has come"), stating the poem's unstated affirmation that war is but a temporary trespasser. In "The heart's assur- ance", the alternating moods of coloratura unease and plain-cadenced solace are both set out in the piano prelude, the divergent key schemes for the first two stanzas coming together in the third, conflating the musical with the textual emotion. "Compassion" is even more subtly organized, in six related sections polarized around E-B-F#, the precarious psychological ("lucid/Loosed/Drew") and structural A major equilibrium under perpetual threat from the 6 against 4 note demisemiquaver undertow, the voice's hypoxic gestures desperate talismans against the dark. "The dancer" displays the most overt musical stroph- ism, underlined by the quaver 'parentheses' ("the (lovely) dancer said"), the stepwise upward shift in pitch at the beginning of the second and third stanzas, and the reminiscence of "fireflies illume" in line 11. The same fragile equipoise between chaos and repose underpins "Remember your lovers", the voice's leaping 5ths declaiming synonyms for love over an accompaniment of B b minor/ F major chromatic complexity that reiterates and elaborates figures established in the opening strophe. 172
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56 Barbara Docherty
Such "rat ional construct ion" is in formed by Tippet t ' s "emot iona l and intransi- gent na ture "173 in the detail of these settings, a l ready cons idered briefly above. "Song" ' s set t ing flows wi th the words ("you and she", "From Genesis to Genesis") , sof tening the B minor s u b d o m i n a n t 7th that apos t roph ized jour- n e y m a n and soldier to an F major 7th for the m o u r n i n g wife, the lyric f low d i s rup ted only by the peda l poin t of the p o s t m a n ' s approach and the d rawing d o w n of bl inds that will follow. The rant ing, d r u n k e n images of a wor ld gone m a d ("Hurl ing" , "Gladly" , "will") and the s u d d e n "pool of crystal-clear reflexion "174 ("lucid s imple hands" , " m e a d o w s of her brea th" , " s to rm ' s calm centre" in "Com- pass ion" , the frenetic Purcellian 'divisions '175 ("never" , "careless hear t" in "The hear t ' s assurance" , "fireflies", "pass ion" , in "The dancer") and the grave percep- tions and vast fulf i lments 176 of " R e m e m b e r your, lovers" ("The p lane t pa in" , "bitter d r eam" , "lust as br ight 177 as cand le - f l ame ' , ' and let you die") are explana- tions that only music dare seek, h igh voices that guard joy. and save f rom fear 17a and which, like "ecs tasy" and "upr i s ing" in Boyhood s End, 179 are not to be under - s tood or ana lysed in mere ly ear thly terms.
Even wi th in this l imited analysis, one m a y thus adduce evidence of a (conscious or unconscious) d ivergence in set t ing ph i lo sophy 18~ - Britten, in his earlier vocal works , at least, r emain ing within the "rocklike l imits" dictated by prosodic con- vent ion and the re levant aspect of his musical heri tage, Tippet t s tanding "outs ide" bo th the words and the musical r esponses of his predecessors . Yet such a distinction m a y obscure even while it clarifies, since it is also appa ren t that by 1953 Britten had m o v e d into technical and emot iona l terr i tory where tradit ion was no longer enough , and Tippet t towards that formal and phi losophical constraint that was to issue finally in King Priam and its parergic ins t rumenta l works , and which d e m a n d e d a Britten-like uni fy ing control.
Notes
1. Parts I and IV of this discussion draw on my article "Sentence into Cadence: the word-setting of Tippett and Britten', Tempo, 166, September 1988, p. 2-11; Part II is in some senses work-in- progress, Britten's debt to twentieth-century English song being as yet a largely untilled field.
2. G. Lewis (ed.), Michael Tippett: A Celebration (London: The Baton Press, 1982), p. 112. My term 'syl- logist' 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.
3. The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), cf. p. 40, 43-4, 58, 98.
4. Lewis (ed.), op. cit., p. 112; in a third category Whittall lists composers (such as Mahler) for whom form is a matter of balanced diversities, deliberately unresolved.
5. Boyhood's End is a setting of prose, the other three of lyric or blank verse, but it is paradigmatic of Tippett's approach to a text and Songs for Ariel (1962) is too slight in extent (though not in psychol- ogy or emotional power) to be a valid comparison.
6. At once a summation of technique achieved and a signpost toward unexplored ground, see Docherty, op. cit., p. 2.
7. 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).
8. I. Richardson, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 89.
9. See p. 29-32.
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 57
10. Tipper 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, op. cit., p. 2-3.
11. Richardson, op. cit., p. 80; Hardy's need to assert the 'madeness' of his poems was central to his art.
12. IV (1), XlV (2), III (3), XIX (4), XIII (5), XVII (6), VII (7), I (8), X (9). 13. F. Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1975), p. 119--20, 38; how the "music
music" of these cycles forges links with its own past is discussed on p. 41 and 46-7 above. 14. C. Palmer (ed.), The Britten Companion (London: 1984), p. 292. 15. D. Mitchell (ed.), Death in Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 86, 211. The
formal model would surely have been English, though cross-national linkages often colour a mood or emotion (Docherty, op. cit., p. 10).
16. For the linkages between Purcell and Winter Words, see p. 46 above. 17. Palmer (ed.), op. cit., p. 274. 18. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (eds), Benjamin Britten: a commentary on his works from a group of specialists
(London: Rockliff, 1952), p. 71. 19. Cf. lulling charities in the Serenade's final Keats setting and Sleepe is a reconciling in Dowland's Weepe
you no more, in the light of p. 40 above. 20. 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 (R. Duncan, Working for Britten, Bideford, The Rebel Press, 1981), p. 53.
21. Stevens, op. cit., p. 462, 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. cir., p. 9.
22. Kermode, op. cit., p. 60. 23. Whittall, op. cir., p. 45. 24. A vocal line built from two 4-note shapes (P. Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, London: Dent,
1979, p. 351). 25. 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, New York: Columbia University Press, 1947, p. 162).
26. 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 (B. Docherty, "English Song and the German Lied", Tempo, 161-2, June/September 1987, p. 75-83.
27. F.E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 78. 28. 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 experi- ence of expressing similar emotional situations in Albert Herring (1947) and Saint Nicholas (1948).
29. Richardson, op. cit., p. 83-4. 30. "At day-close in November" (1), "Midnight on the Great Western" (2), "Wagtail and baby" (3),
"The little old table" (4), "The choirmaster's burial" (5), "Proud songsters" (6), "At the railway station, Upway" (7), "Before life and after" (8); (5) is a 48-line ballad, (6) two strophic pentastichs with an internal refrain, (7) a complex scena for three characters and a violin.
31. "[If you want to measure someth ing] . . , you must first seek its rules" (R. Wagner, Die Meister- singer, Act 1, scene 3).
32. Except perhaps Gerard Manley Hopkins. 33. Richardson, op. cit., p. 14. 34. One of the Satires of Circumstance (1914) that share a brevity of form and a reductive irony that
exposes without reproach man's vanity and self-deceit; "Wagtail and baby", from Time's Laughingstocks (1909), shares both the later poem's philosophy and its prosodic traits.
35. Spondaic - 2 consecutively stressed syllables ("bird wings" here "when all went well" in "Before life and after"); dactylic - 1 stressed followed by 2 unstressed syllables ("light i s a " ) . In ballads such as "The choirmaster's burial" anapaests (2 unstressed and 1 stressed syllable) carry the conver- sational/narrative thread ("as I knew", "(spir)it was gone"): trochaic - 1 stressed followed by 1 unstressed syllable.
36. The retroactive scansion that makes the opening rather than the final stress in a line 'feminine' and weak is discussed on p. 44 above.
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58 Barbara Docherty
37. See Docherty, "Sentence into Cadence", p. 7. 38. The prosodic convention for labelling line-end rhymes. Hardy's rhyming schemes range from the
simple abab ((1), (3), (4), (8) in Winter Words) to more intricate abcd + b or bb coda ((2), (6)) and the structurally ornate ballad or scena form ((5), (7)); see p, 45 above.
39. One of the Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), whose prefatory "Apology" stated that the poems collected therein were an "exploration of r ea l i ty . . . [exacting] a full look at the Worst".
40. And for the cc rhymes spanning the first and second stanzas: the quaver extension to the "child - /smiled;" minim is, as in the Holy Sonnets, a punctuation mark.
41. 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).
42. "Before life and after". 43. And see p. 47 above. 44. Like "Before life and after", from Time's Laughingstocks, a miscellany of Heinean vignettes and
more regretful lyrics repining civilization's relentless narrowing of man 's ability to feel; and p. 46-7 above.
45. Moral uncertainty is frequently trochaic in H a r d y - "going" and "not of" stand out among the pre- dominantly iambic line-ends in (2), as do "many" and "any" among the requiescal iambs and spondees of (5).
46. "Midnight on the Great Western". 47. "Before life and after". 48. Observing Hardy's principle that there can be no variation without a regular form to vary, Britten's
"boy" changes in line 11 from a 'trochaic' minim + crotchet to a 'spondaic' minim, marvelling at the length of wisdom in so short a length of days.
49. Archaisms or neologisms within plain English or polysyllables within predominantly mono- syllabic 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. (P. Zietlow, Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1974, p. 31).
50. Cf. "Postponement" (1866), "Snow in the Suburbs" and "On Martock Moor,, both published in 1925 (Zietlow, op. cir., p. 26, 99-100).
51. Another of the Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922). 52. "Midnight on the Great Western"; see p. 47 above. 53. Cf. "Old Furniture" (Moments of Vision); Zietlow, op. cit., p. 160. 54. Zietlow, op. cit., p. 185-6. 55. But not more than in the Sechs HfJlderlin-Fragmente, see below. 56. And "his Ensembles [do] not sound like his Duets [nor] his Satires like his ballads" (Mitchell and
Keller (eds.), op. cit., p. 69, adapted, and see below); cf. the tour de force of 'Americanness' in Paul Bunyan (1941).
57. And his prodigious early achievement had given him an oeuvre that could without reproach have been that of a man of 50 or more: Elgar's First Symphony, for example (op. 55) was completed in 1908 when he was 51.
58. And far more keenly five years later. 59. From (1), (4), (6); this is far more than mere ' thinking himself into' the seventy-year-old Hardy's
shoes. 60. Compare Decca ECS629 with the broadcast performance from Aldeburgh (September 1972),
where the singer's life experience, rather than artistic intuition, has 'caught up' with the cycle's perceptions.
61. See Docherty, "English Song", p. 77-83. 62. 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).
63. 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.
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64. Peter Warlock (1924). 65. Gerald Finzi, A Young Man's Exhortation (1933). 66. John Ireland, Five Poems of Thomas Hardy (1926). 67. Gerald Finzi, Earth and Air and Rain (1936). Cf. also Robin Milford's setting of "If it's ever spring
again" (1938). 68. Although this obviously also reflects Hardy's refusal to repeat a trope if a tale gains point
from a variant: (7) could be another (5), a simple ballad reminiscence of the constable, but is not.
69. 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, op. cit., p. 14), what Evans (op. cir., 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.
70. Dido and Aeneas (Britten/Holst, 1951) in the D minor opening of (1) and the passing dissonances of (8) (Palmer (ed.), op. cir., p. 362-3).
71. Palmer (ed.) op. cit., p. 295-7, although the psychologically more percipient Schumann seems a more likely model (see below).
72. W.B. Yeats (from The Rose, 1893), Bridge setting the first two stanzas only and repeating the first as a coda.
73. Humbert Wolfe (from Yesterday and Today, 1926). 74. "Before life and after". 75. Palmer (ed.), op. cit., p. 32; 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. cir., p. 33-6). Winter Words is in this regard a deeper expression of that "powerful social consci- ence" already demonstrated in Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, The Little Sweep and Spring Symphony (1949) (Mitchell and Keller (eds), op. cir., p. 12-13).
76. But central to Tippett's vocal writing, not least The Heart's Assurance, completed two years earlier; "In der Fremde" (Schumann, Liederkreis, op. 39) seems also influential.
77. Evans, op. cit., p. 358. 78. There is significant 'linkage' here to Britten's own arrangement of "The Ash Grove" (1943) and
earlier English songs such as E.J. Moeran's "In youth is pleasure" (1925) where the dichotomy between a timeless reality and the observer's time-blighted response is palpable.
79. A.E. Housman's "old wind in the old anger" (A Shropshire Lad, 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. cir., 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.)
80. 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 (Mitchell (ed.), op. cit., p. 186-7).
81. 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).
82. Already demonstrated in "As it is, plenty" (On this Island), "Out on the lawn I lie in bed" (Spring Symphony) and in folksong arrangements such as "The foggy, foggy dew" (1947); another possible debt is to the mordant conceits of Quilter's "Why so pale and wan?" and "The constant lover" (1925), both from Five Jacobean Lyrics published the following year.
83. Cf. also "Die Stille" (Schumann, op. 39). 84. And reminiscent of the world of "prams" ("Now the leaves are falling fast", On this Island); the
postlude to "Let the florid music praise" from that cycle is a second case where the coda says as much if not more than the preceding song.
85. Evans, op. cir., p. 359. 86. Cf. Billy Budd, whose framing device for the narrator is not the only parallel drawn; also Aschen-
bach's initial detachment. 87. Britten's narrative technique owing much to Grainger's example in arrangements such as "Six
dukes went a-fishin'" (1912) and "Bold William Taylor" (written 1908, unpublished).
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60 Barbara Docherty
88. Cf. Graham Peel, "In summertime on Bredon" (1911) (Docherty, "English Song", p. 77) and the use of an ironic religious commentary in Peter Grimes, Act II, scene I (and in The Turn of the Screw, 1954, Act II, scene 2).
89. The disjuncti•n between v•cal line and acc•mpaniment 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)).
90. WhittaU, op. cit., p. 151. 91. S. Keyes, "Schiller Dying" (November 1941). 92. A. Lewis, "On Embarkation". 93. Whittall, op. cir., p. 96; Docherty, "Sentence into Cadence", p. 11. 94. There were three voice-and-piano songs to words by Charlotte Mew (1929). 95. p. 293--4 in the 1918 edn (J.M. Dent & Sons). 96. A title perhaps echoing Wordsworth 's "Solitary Reaper"; certainly Hudson carried the music of
those years in his heart long after it was heard no more in his adult consciousness. 97. R.E. Haymaker, From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs (New York: Bookman Associates, 1934),
p. 149. 98. Haymaker, op. cir., p. 95. 99. Stevens, op. cit., p. 464, the situation Tippett needed as a vehicle for his "song-as-scena" experi-
ment, see below. 100. Tippett, quotedinI . Kemp(ed.),MichaelTippett:ASymposiumforhis6OthBirthday(London:Faber,
1964), p. 48, with Stevens, op. cit., the locus classicus of the 1960s textual violence/reverence debate.
101. Kemp (ed.), op. cit., p. 48; even perhaps Hudson 's image of his post-nescient world as a wing- shattered bird fluttering on the earth (Haymaker, op. cit., p. 26).
102. To discuss "ecstasy" in terms of a vocal gorgia (Kemp (ed.), op. cit., p. 49) is to misunderstand its psychological import: it is (like "uprising" in the allegro) intended to be (almost) in the para- normal domain.
103. Kemp (ed.), op. cit., p. 49, but see also p. 52 above. 104. Hudson is close to Alun Lewis in this regard, as the response the latter's poetry draws from
Tippett demonstrates (p. 52-3 above). 105. The third the brief invocation of the plover's cry. 106. With "that when plucked leaves you" substituted for the "that when plucked sheds its lovely
petals to leave you" of Hudson 's text. 107. This is in fact an 'arch within an arch', since the compound cadences of the fourth and fifth
sentences (discounting the original question and apostrophe) parallel those of the seventh and eighth, framing the tripartite ecstasy of "To lie on a grassy b a n k . . , in your hand".
108. As "ever, ever" in the repeat of "to gaze u p . . . " in the Finale. 109. Replacing Hudson 's "and" (gaze up) with an assonantial "To". 110. Derived from Purcellian practice, see below. 111. Lewis (ed.), op. cir., p. 78-9; Hudson saw a similar need to "[arrange] his sensory d a t a . . , so as
to quicken his readers to creativeness" (Haymaker, op. cit., p. 150). 112. M. Bowen, Michael Tippett (London: Robson Books, 1982), p. 39, 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. cir., 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 - t h a t what is unnameable may be revealed.
113. Cf. the musical and philosophical line that runs from the Fourth Symphony through the Triple Concerto to The Mask of Time.
114. See p. 54 above. 115. Edward Thomas (1915). 116. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877). 117. M. Bowen (ed.), Music of the Angels (London: Eulenberg, 1980), p. 88. 0ne 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
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from an unacknowledged awareness that Britten's superficially more 'reverent' syllogisms achieved the same end by different means.
118. Bowen (ed.), op. cit., p. 88. In Stevens, op. cit., p. 463, Tippett cites "Remember me" (Dido and Aeneas) as one such crystallized moment.
119. Counting from the opening of the passage. 120. As with the amendment of "every (June and July)" discussed above. 121. The Purcell cantata Tippett declared to be the key formal influence on Boyhood's End (Stevens, op.
cit., p. 465). 122. 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 unre- marked (but see Whittall, op. cit., p, 123).
123. The cluster of works around King Priam - Second Symphony (1957), Second Piano Sonata (1962), Concerto for String Orchestra (1963) - for example. Bowen, op. cit., p. 41-2 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.
124. First String Quartet (1935), First Piano Sonata (1938), Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939), A Child of Our Time (1941), Second String Quartet (1942), First Symphony (1945).
125. Boyhood's End's accompaniments, for example, look back to the Concerto for Double String Orchestra and the Second String Quartet, and forward to the Piano Concerto's first movement (1955), Achilles's war cry (King Priam, 1961) and the glossolalia of The Vision of Saint Augustine (1965).
126. Finding even more devastating use in "Remember your lovers", the final setting of The Heart's Assurance, see below.
127. Bowen (ed.), op. cit., p. 21; 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).
128. 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, op. cit., p. 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.
129. Kemp, op. cit., p. 187; Whittall, op. cir., p. 78 explores the dynamic substructure of recurrence, affirmation and denial built around the tones of the D major triad.
130. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago (1918 edn), p. 292. 131. Cf. "Spirtoben na to . . , suobell 'opra" (Britten, Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo), reflecting a similar
wonder. 132. Bowen, (ed.), op. cit., p. 30. 133. Bowen, op. cir., p. 40 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).
134. Used to even greater effect in The Heart's Assurance (see below) and finding fullest expression in The Midsummer Marriage (Kemp, op. cir., p. 185, 210-11).
135. Kemp (ed.), op. cir., p. 49. 136. S. Keyes, "The Uncreated Images" (1942); Keyes's diary spoke of "all kinds of [such] . . .
archetypal images" that fill the mind if it is emptied of the objective and mundane. 137. Cf. "journeying" (2), "did (not understand)" (4) in Winter Words, "meadows", "centaur" (III),
"danced" (IV) in The Heart's Assurance; Britten's estrangement from such abstraction seems to date from his post-Paul Bunyan estrangement from W.H. Auden.
138. The fact that it is 'extra-influential' helps to explain why one cannot 'anatomize' The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation in relation to Boyhood's End as one can English lute song in relation to the Holy Sonnets.
139. S. Keyes, "The Buzzard" (July 1940). 140. Alun Lewis (1915-44) "Song" (I), "Compassion" (III), "The dancer" (IV); Sidney Keyes (1922-43)
"The heart's assurance" (II), "Remember your lovers" (V). 141. Kemp (ed.), op. cit., p. 47-9, the conclusion of which was that Tippett was uncaringin his setting
of English words, bending them without compunction to a philosophical or musical imperative (see Docherty, "Sentence into Cadence", p. 2).
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62 Barbara Docherty
142. M. Meyer, Memoir, The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes (London: Routledge, 194,5), p. xxi. 143. A. Lewis, "After Dunkirk". 144. Meyer, op. cit., p. xvii, 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).
145. A. Lewis, "Lines on a Tudor Mansion". 146. J. Hooker, "Afterword" (Selected Poems of Alun Lewis, London: Unwin 1981), p. 103; A. Lewis, "To
Edward Thomas", IV. 147. See p. 54 above. 148. 3 quatrains, pentastich + couplet coda, reinforced by the incantatory apostrophe ( " O h . . . " )
opening each quatrain. 149. Feet, like Hardy's, that can be coUaged to suit the poet's particular perception. 150. S. Keyes, "Schiller Dying". 151. "[A] way of por t ioning . . , the geometry of living", S. Keyes, "The Buzzard" (July 1940). 152. S. Keyes, "Cervi~res" (September 1940). 153. And above all in the 'destructive' treatment of quantity, see below. 154. Kemp (ed.), op. cit., p. 49. 155. And in its largamente unaccompanied declamation of Boyhood's End and "Spirto ben nato ' ,
discussed above. 156. Stevens, op. cit., p. 463. 157. S. Keyes, "The Foreign Gate", VI (February-March 1942). 158. "Their pain cries down the noise of poetry" (S. Keyes, "The Foreign Gate", IV); Meyer, op. cit.,
p. xv, relates how after Keyes's call-up "Love and D e a t h . . . 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").
159. A. Lewis, "The Crucifixion". 160. See also "Music of music", below. 161. A. Lewis, "A Troopship in the Tropics". 162. S. Keyes, "The Uncreated Images". 163. Ibid. 164. Stevens, op. cit., p. 463; 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 Assur- ance" s poems.
165. " . . . never stale your mind/With prudence or with doubting" (A. Lewis, "Sacco Writes to his Son").
166. A. Lewis, "The Soldier". 167. Meyer, op. cit., p. xvii, xix. 168. S. Keyes, "The Wilderness", IV (December 1942-January 1943). 169. S. Keyes, "Gilles de Retz" (16 May 1941); a detailed study of the autobiographical aspect of
Britten's creativity has yet to be written. 170. W.H. Auden, epigraph, Look[ Stranger (1936). 171. Echoing Grimes's "Now the great Bear and Pleiades" (Peter Grimes, Act I, scene 2), an archetype
of "human grief". 172. The a•ternati•n •f hieratic •ent• and c•n m•t• reminiscent •f Britten, s Canticle • (1947) and Purce••• s
"Lord, what is man?", which is their common ancestor. 173. Edward Sackville-West, quoted by Whittall, op. cir., p. 2; it can be seen also in the architectonics
of the setting as a whole, slow/fast/slow/fast/summation. 174. A. Lewis, "A Troopship in the Tropics". 175. In both the emotional and the technical senses. 176. A. Lewis, "The Assault Convoy". 177. 'Recomposing' "warm" as in the 1945 1st edn. 178. S. Keyes, "Schiller Dying". 179. See p. 49 above. 180. Britten's implicit sympathy with Frank Bridge's distaste for music "that [is] excused as being
philosophic because it [ i s ] . . . ineffectual, badly written and poorly worked out" expressed in a pre-concert BBC radio talk in 1947, is particularly revealing.
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Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text 63
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material.
Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd., for Examples lb, 2a, 3 ~) 1945.
Schott & Co. Ltd, for Examples le �9 1951, 4 �9 1943.
Faber & Faber Ltd, for Examples 2b, from An Elizabethan Song Book (1957).
Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd., for permission to reproduce material from Tempo 166 (September 1988) in parts I and IV.
J.M. Dent & Sons for the quotations from The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1958).
Macmillan, for the quotations from the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (1930).
J.M. Dent & Sons for the quotations from W.H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago (1918).
Roufledge, for the quotations from S. Keyes, The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes (1945).
Unwin Paperbacks, for the quotations from A. Lewis, The Selected Poems of Alun Lewis (1981).
The London Library, Plymouth Music Library, the Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh, and the BBC, Manchester for untiring help in tracking down long out of print first editions, vocal score material and broadcast performance dates.
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