Peter Thickett Set & Costume Designer Crispin Lord Lighting Designer Edward Saunders Marketing Manager Thea Waxman

Curlew River Benjamin Britten Cast The Madwoman Richard Robbins The Ferryman Ben Bevan The Traveller Ivo Almond The Abbot Tom Herring The Spirit James Bennett Chorus Tenors Philip Barrett Liam Connery Gethin Lewis Chorus Baritones James Edwards Jevan McAuley Jonny Venvell Chorus Basses Shaun Aquilina Max Loble Production Team Producer / Musical Director Frederick Waxman Artistic Director Peter Thickett Set & Costume Designer Crispin Lord Lighting Designer Edward Saunders Marketing Manager Thea Waxman Ante Terminum Productions Benjamin Britten (1914 - 1976) Several decades after his death, we have a more complete picture of Benjamin Britten as a composer than during his lifetime. Works from his youth and works that he suppressed have been played and published; the late music can now be seen as a distinct phase, in some ways as forward looking and as influential as Stravinsky’s. Above all, Britten’s central place in the history of 20th-century music seems more and more assured. He is one of very few composers born in the last century whose whole output - from operas to solo pieces - has gained a secure place in the repertoire. Britten was born into a middle-class family in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 22 November 1913. His mother encouraged him to learn the piano and the viola, and to compose; by the age of fourteen he had written over 100 works. Little of this abundant juvenilia has so far been heard, but Britten himself selected Five Waltzes for piano, composed between 1923 and 1925, for publication in 1969: they are not simply charming but have the feel of genuine music. In 1927 he began studying composition with Frank Bridge, and immediately made huge strides. The Quatre Chansons Françaises (1928) show an extraordinary sophistication both in the choice of texts and in the handling of the orchestra. A few years later he was writing chamber works, such as the Quartettino (1930) for string quartet, whose up-to-date musical language rivals anything being written in Britain at the time. The young Britten was iconoclastic, often scornful of his older, less gifted contemporaries; his music was brilliant and unsentimental. He was the cleverest composer around, and also the most musical. Throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s Britten was tirelessly prolific; his opused works are far outnumbered by the vast quantity of incidental music of all kinds - for films, plays and especially BBC radio - that he produced with unflagging industry. His 1939 score for J.B.Priestley’s play, Johnson Over Jordan (1939), is a good example of the type of music that he was able to compose in a few days, yet with undiminished care and skill. The ‘Spider and the Fly’ (1939) movement shows his grasp of the popular musical idiom of the time, an interest that is fully evident in his first opera Paul Bunyan (1940), which sometimes uncannily anticipates Oklahoma! and contains some of the most invigorating music he ever wrote. Had he stayed in America, Britten might well have written Broadway hits as well as operas. As it was, his two years in America confirmed him as a tonal composer at a time when the idea of tonality was under threat - and had been questioned by Britten himself in some of his earlier music. The radiant diatonicism of Young Apollo (1939)- his first response to American light and space - symbolizes this fresh start. Britten’s last twelve years produced Curlew River (1964) and produced the opera Death in Venice (1973), which sums up the conflict of innocence and experience that obsessed him all his life; three cello suites for Rostropovich which are the finest since Bach; and a string quartet - no.3 - worthy to stand alongside Bartók. There is a special poignancy about the works of the final three years, composed after his unsuccessful heart operation: they bravely confront death, whether openly, as in Phaedra (1975), or secretly, as in the last movement of the Suite on English Folk Tunes (1974) - a small masterpiece which, even if nothing else of Britten’s were to survive, would mark him as a great composer. Synopsis The parable is told by four ’stock’ characters and The boy was beaten by this master and then a chorus, who, in the tradition of Noh theatre are abandoned by the river. Local people cared for all men: the Abbot, who is also the narrator, the the sick child, who, clearly dying, made a last Ferryman, the Traveller and the Madwoman. request. “Please bury me here, by the path to this Curlew River opens with a processional of the chapel. Then, if travellers from my dear country Abbot and his monks to the hymn Te lucis ante pass this way, their shadows will fall on my grave, terminum. The Abbot explains to the congregation and plant a yew tree in memory of me.” For the of a time not long ago when “a sign was given of people who live along the river the boy’s grave is God’s grace … in our reedy Fens … [where] the sacred, “… some special grace is there, to heal Curlew River runs.” The monks who are to play the sick in body and in soul”. the Ferryman, the Traveller and the Madwoman are ceremonially dressed in their robes, the All now understand the boy who died is the son pilgrims take their places and the story begins. for whom the Madwoman is searching. “O Curlew River, cruel Curlew, where all my hope is The Traveller and the Madwoman have come to swept away.” The Ferryman tries to console her. cross the Curlew River, which ‘”lows between “Your sad search is ended.” And he and the two realms”. The Madwoman, a noble woman, Pilgrims lead the grief-stricken mother to her has journeyed eastwards from the Black son’s tomb. Mountains in search of her child, kidnapped 12 months ago. The Ferryman and pilgrims mock As all pray the voice of the dead boy suddenly her at first, demanding she entertain them with echoes their chant, Custodes hominum psallimus her singing, but when she asks them an ancient Angelos. Alone now, the mother suddenly sees the riddle “Wild birds of the Fenland, though you spirit of her son. “Go your way in peace, mother. float or fly, wild birds, I cannot understand your The dead shall rise again and in that blessed day cry; Tell me does the one I love in this world still we shall meet in heaven.” Freed from her grief live” they are chastened, and let her aboard. and with her wits restored, the Mother kneels in a prayer that ends with a joyous emblematic As they begin their crossing, the Ferryman stops “Amen”, the final note of which resolves into a poling his boat. “Today is an important day, the long-delayed unison with the full cast – a signal people are assembling in memory of a sad event.” of her return and acceptance. The actors in the He tells the story. On this day a year ago, a young drama are disrobed and as monks now hail “a boy arrived in the area with a vicious master who sign of God’s grace.” “In hope, in peace, ends had abducted him from his home near the Black our mystery” intones the Abbot. And the Mountains. company process away from the centre of the church once again singing the hymn Te lucis ante terminum. Curlew River was a compositional turning point for Britten, marking a change to a sparer style of writing, with greater rhythmical independence between parts and more use of heterophony. He had made use of both of these techniques previously: the former notably in The War Requiem, and The Prince of the Pagodas; and the latter in St Nicholas, but here they are employed to a far greater extent. Throughout the piece, subgroups of instruments and voices in the ensemble play at different tempi, musically desynchronising and necessitating the invention of a new notational device, the ‘curlew sign’ below, first appearing in the score at The Travellers’s entrance. A note is held or a phrase repeated at this sign until the parts resynchronise. In the opera, some typically Britten-ish ideas are used. Instruments are paired with characters; The Abbot and chorus with the organ, the Madwoman with the flute, the Ferryman with the horn, and The Traveller without any stable instrumental (or harmonic) home (which is the kind of glib-sounding idea which only in the hands of Britten is most masterfully realised). Similarly, motifs are paired with concepts, the most obvious example being the ‘Curlew Motif’ below, others (other than the ‘character’ music) include the ‘Riddle Motif’, and the pentatonic nursey rhyme-like melody which occurs twice, first near the start, when The Madwoman sings of her maternal love for her child, and again at the end, when the miracle occurs - the flute is transformed into a piccolo and the spirit of her dead child is seen. Curlew River is Britten’s first ‘serious’ opera since The Turn of the Screw, a decade previously (Noye’s Fludde does come between the two), and in addition to those familiar ideas used in his earlier operas we hear the effect of two major new influences, derived from this libretto but going on to permeate the rest of his oeuvre. Those influences are the music he heard when in Japan, on the holiday during which he saw Sumidagawa, and that of medieval English music. The Japanese influence is necessitated by the source of the material, and the medieval by Plomer’s transformation of the story into an English mystery play - the setting the Fens, and the birds curlews.

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