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Signature Redacted Death and Purity as Prominent Themes in ’s , Op. 93

By

Elaina Pullano

W. Anthony Sheppard, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Music

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 5, 2015 Intimations of Death

Benjamin Britten’s health decline had been a gradual process, but no one could have predicted that he would suffer a minor stroke during his heart surgery on

May 7, 1973. The stroke left him with impaired function to his right arm and hand and, as a result, his days at the piano were over.1 Britten had a hard time coping with his loss of function, and as a result he was unable to write pieces for , his longtime partner and renowned , that featured a piano accompaniment because he was unable to accompany Pears himself and was unwilling to let another pianist take over that role. The only pieces that Britten wrote for Pears after the stroke were

Canticle V: The Death of Saint Narcissus (Op. 89) and , featuring

Pears and harpist .2 A theme that became prevalent in Britten’s last compositions (Opus 89 through 95) is that of death and morbidity. Canticle V is an example of this trend, as are the final song in Sacred and Profane (Op. 91) and the cantata for mezzo- and orchestra Phaedra (Op. 93).3 This theme was also present in , the last he completed before he underwent the surgical procedure.

The morbidity in Phaedra, as well as in Britten’s last works as a whole, was noted by David Matthews:

For Britten on the other hand death was something willingly to be accepted, almost welcomed. "Death will give me freedom; oh it’s nothing not to live; death to the unhappy’s no catastrophe!" as Phaedra 1 Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music (London: Hutchinson, 2013), 446. 2 Patricia Howard, "Reviewed Work: A Birthday Hansel Op. 92; Harp Suite Op. 83; Canticle V; Second Lute Song from '; Two Scottish Folk Songs by Britten, Pears, Ellis," The Musical Times 117/1604 (1976): 831, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/960191. 3 Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 416-418, 448-449. sings… words that (as evident from the orchestral music that follows them) echoed Britten’s own mental state.4

This morbidity served to compound his ever-present passion for the battles between good and evil, as well as between purity and corruption, topics with which, as Pears had mentioned, “Britten was constantly concerned.”5 This concern for morality intensified further as Britten’s life went on, reaching its peak during the late 1950s when he wrote the church parables and later .

Phaedra represents the culmination of an entire life’s worth of compositional experience, combined with the composer's well-refined views on morality and a touch of melancholy from losing the use of his hand. A solo cantata for mezzo-soprano, strings, harpsichord and percussion, it was described by Britten himself as drawing from the Baroque style, especially in that the recitative sections are accompanied only by a harpsichord and cello: a recreation of the continuo unit.6 It is also the only solo vocal piece he wrote after his stroke that was not intended for Peter Pears; it was written for . Britten’s decision to set Phaedra, of all narratives, for Baker is likely due to a compilation of factors. He had heard Baker perform ’s

Les Nuits d’été at the 1975 Festival, and decided to write a piece for her to perform at the following year’s festival. Baker gave the world premiere performance at the 1976 on June 16, 1976. As a singer, she was known for her skill in performing Baroque operas, such as Handel’s and, importantly,

Britten’s own . Baker took over the role of Lucretia after 4 David Matthews, "Britten's Third Quartet," Tempo 125 (1978): 23, accessed April 2, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/944932. 5 Graham Elliott, "The Operas of Benjamin Britten: A Spiritual View," The Opera Quarterly 4/3 (1986): 43, accessed November 23, 2014, http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/. 6 Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 395. passed away and proved her adeptness at performing Britten’s

“chamber operas,” a genre label he utilized for a number of his works starting with

The Rape of Lucretia, meant for a chamber ensemble and vocalist instead of a full orchestra.7 Additionally, the American poet Robert Lowell had just released his

English rhyming-couplet translation of ’s drama Phédre in 1960, allowing the play to come to Britten’s attention in English, the language in which he preferred to set the majority of his vocal works.8

Given that Britten knew Baker had been able to adeptly handle the role of

Lucretia, it is not surprising that Phaedra shares many traits with The Rape of

Lucretia, the key one being the shared themes of death as a means to restore purity, and inappropriate romantic thoughts/actions as the cause of the female character’s loss of original purity. Both works also end in C-major, with its unblemished key signature serving as a signifier of Lucretia and Phaedra finally achieving redemption and innocence through death. Additionally, it is possible that Britten drew ideas from

The Rape of Lucretia when composing Phaedra because he was in a weakened state.

He composed Phaedra directly into full score, a choice that was unusual for him, but that was presumably made because writing into full score meant less writing overall and thus less physical effort.9 Given this, it is highly possible that he took thematic

7 Kenneth Chalmers. "chamber opera," The Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed April 3, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e1272. 8 Robert Lowell and Saskia Hamilton, The Letters of Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 369-370. 9 Benjamin Britten and , Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913-1976, Vol. 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 686. ideas such as finishing in C major from The Rape of Lucretia and used them in

Phaedra in order to reduce his physical exertion during the composition process.

In addition to the similarities between Phaedra and The Rape of Lucretia, there are striking similarities between the former work and Death in Venice. The unifying factor between these two works is that of unrequited love, where

Aschenbach’s pedophilic and homosexual love for Tadzio is much like Phaedra’s seemingly incestuous love for Hippolytus. Neither of these characters is able to attain the human object of their desires, though Phaedra does admit her passions to

Hippolytus within the work. Aschenbach never even makes a move on Tadzio, and instead observes him from afar and lets his thoughts drive him into despair. Another trait Aschenbach and Phaedra share is a desire for death to absolve them of their inner turmoil over this illicit love. True to their respective characters, however, Phaedra is proactive and uses “Medea’s poison” to end her life, whereas Aschenbach chooses to not leave Venice when there is a cholera outbreak, allowing himself to die as punishment for his sins. It is unclear exactly what “Medea’s poison” is, as there are two examples of Medea using poison in myths to achieve her ends. One example occurred when she murdered her husband’s new bride-to-be by giving her poisoned clothes as a wedding gift, as punishment for her husband abandoning her and her children. The other example occurred when she tried to give a cup of poison to

Theseus, King Aegeus’ long-lost son (and Phaedra’s husband in Phaedra), as he returned and she knew that her children by Aegeus would lose their claim to the throne.10 It is tempting to see both Phaedra and Death in Venice as expressions of any

10 Michael Stapleton, The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology (New York: P. Bedrick Books, 1986), 134-136, 199-202. guilt Britten may have felt for his homosexuality, but to see either of these works as such is to ignore the deeper conflicts between good/evil and purity/corruption that are so pervasive: they drive both plots and dictate the ways in which both Aschenbach and Phaedra deal with their inner turmoil.11

Structure and Orchestration

Britten’s Phaedra, as mentioned above, was designed as a solo cantata that drew inspiration from the Baroque style. The Baroque cantata as a unit was a flexible format, in which the composer had the liberty to structure the work in a way that would best capture the emotion and text of the poetry he (or she) was setting. Given the format of Phaedra, it seems to best resemble the Recitative-Aria-Recitative-Aria

(R-A-R-A) format that was used in Italian solo cantatas, a form that Frederic Handel utilized in about half of the cantatas he wrote.12 Britten included the short Prologue in which Phaedra serves as a temporary narrator of sorts and sets the scene for her tale of misfortune. However, it is a point of interest that Britten’s “aria” sections are more reminiscent of the arioso style, as there are only two instances of text repetition in the entire work and minimal melismatic phrases. The text repetition and melismas occur only within the Presto movement of the work, one that falls under the “aria” or arioso heading. Thus, it would seem that Britten was choosing to pay more attention to the text than to the traditional format of a standard aria. However, it is interesting that he set a majority of the text in such a way that the grammatical flow of Lowell’s poetry

11 Elliott, "The Operas of Benjamin Britten: A Spiritual View," 43. 12 Colin Timms et al, "Cantata," Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, Accessed January 30, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04748pg1. is retained instead of the rhyming couplets. There is no evidence of consistent internal rhyme or attention to the end rhyme of Lowell’s couplets, and the musical lines do not consistently rhyme.

The orchestration that Britten employed in Phaedra is unique; labeled as

“dramatic cantata for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra,” the subtitle implies a scaled down, but still full, orchestra. However, the “orchestra” consists solely of strings, harpsichord, and two percussion players, who have to handle the bell, cymbals, gong, tenor drum and drum. The emphasis on percussion is clear, as this is an unusually large grouping of percussion instruments, especially because the recitative sections only contain the continuo unit and the other sections only contain strings. Britten uses the different colors of each percussion instrument to enhance the thematic and melodic content of the work. He uses the timpani to create a driving pattern under the vocal line for both the Prologue and the Presto, as well as changing the pitch to indicate the different interlocutor (B for , D for Hippolytus, refer to note 13). He uses the cymbals and bass/tenor drums to create a repeating pattern that rhythmically doubles the strings at Rehearsal 8 and 14, which adds intensity and a sense of determination to the text, fittingly because these moments correspond to when Phaedra is openly admitting to Hippolytus that she loves him and is asking for him to kill her. (See Example 1.) Example 1. Britten, Phaedra (London: Faber Music Ltd., 1992), Rehearsal 8.

The piano reduction still includes the percussion parts notated in most cases, as only the timpani can be replicated by a piano. The fact that the percussion parts are included in a piano reduction highlights the importance of the parts. Thus, performances that utilize the piano reduction would benefit from finding a percussionist to perform these parts so that the cumulative expressiveness of the orchestration is displayed.

A notable feature of the structure of the cantata is the fluidity of the time signature that Britten employs throughout. Consistently, he sets the two recitative sections in simple meter and the other three sections (Prologue, Presto and Adagio) in compound meter. However, the meter is rarely static; it changes rapidly, so much so that in the first recitative it changes nearly every measure at certain points. Britten simply denotes the time signature change as the top number in parentheses above the measure (ex. “(5)”), rather than writing out the whole time signature. This rapid cycling of the time signature does not follow a pattern, but likely was done so that the melodic lines could better match the text and create more speech-like inflections. It also adds a sense of instability to the work, namely to Phaedra as a character. The audience is unable to ascertain either a clear tonal center or a set rhythmic pulse as they listen to the majority of the piece. By doing this, Britten highlights the fact that

Phaedra is in a state of emotional distress, which she has experienced not only throughout the temporal span included in Lowell's play, but clearly from a point long before the play’s narration begins. This also allows for a discernible contrast at the points where a tonal center or rhythmic pulse is established, however briefly. Britten uses these moments of “clarity” and “order” at dramatically relevant points, as when she is slipping into unconsciousness at the end of the Adagio. It is important to note that these moments of clarity occur more often with the tonality than with the time signature, as Britten stays true to the speech-rhythm of the text through the end of the work.

A possible explanation for these structural choices on Britten’s part is that he intended the whole work as a “mad scene” where Phaedra recounts the memories and experiences that led her to this point, and eventually to her death by the end of the cantata. Herein lies the largest challenge a performer of Phaedra faces: how to treat the work from a theatrical perspective. In Lowell’s version, Phaedra engages in dialogues with Oenone, her maid, Hippolytus, and Theseus. Britten takes sections of these dialogues and sets them as monologues with no easily discernable indications of the other parties being present.13 The performer thus must first make the choice of whether the work should be lightly staged or left as a recital setting where mild gestures and facial expressions alone carry the emotional burden. From there, the performer must decide how to treat these “monologues” and either refer to different

“invisible figures” to indicate the different interlocutors or treat it as though Phaedra is entirely alone and this is truly a mad scene where she converses with people who are not present as the poison takes its hold on her. The latter explanation is more tempting, particularly since Britten had such success with the mad scene at the end of

Peter Grimes. Additionally, it accounts for the extreme fluidity of the piece, as each movement flows into the next. In terms of structure, Phaedra appears to more closely resemble Schoenberg’s Erwartung than a typical florid Baroque mad scene, because of its flow-of-consciousness style of text delivery and the fact that no one else is on stage to validate Phaedra’s actions or mental state.14

13 Keys seem to be indicative of Phaedra’s interlocutor, as the key signature is always A major when she converses or thinks of Theseus, D major/minor when she converses with Hippolytus in the Presto, and a blank key signature (no tonal center) when she converses with Oenone in the two recitatives. 14 Stephen A. Willier, "Mad scene," The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 30, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O007756.O.W. Neighbour, "Erwartung," The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 30, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O901462. Textual Adaptations

The ways in which Britten sets the text within the structure of the cantata as a whole is a reflection of both the formal Baroque cantata form and Lowell’s text.

When Lowell translated Racine’s prose, he was careful to retain the couplet form that

Racine carefully employs throughout. As Lowell wrote about his translation, “My couplet is run on, avoids inversions and alliteration, and loosens its rhythm with shifted accents and occasional extra syllables… My version is free, nevertheless I have used every speech in the original, and almost every line is either translated or paraphrased.”15 Britten followed a similar approach to setting Lowell’s text, as he was careful to preserve the couplet structure in the excerpts he set, with only a few exceptions when half of a couplet began a new topic. He does not use much of the text, using snippets of Phaedra’s dialogues in Acts 1, 2, 3, and 5, and from only one of the monologues within each act. He picked large chunks of the text that are emotional and crucial to the storyline he was trying to convey, and consequently did not focus on the other characters’ storylines or any rapid dialogue between Phaedra and the other characters.

Britten tends to acknowledge broken couplets with a break in Phaedra’s text, allowing a short orchestral idea to fill the place of the other half of the couplet. This occurs four measures after Rehearsal 4, when Britten cuts a line short with “I built her a temple, fretted months and days on decoration” and uses a measure of orchestration to mark the broken couplet. It occurs shortly thereafter when he sets “Venus resigned her altar to my new lord…” and the Presto section begins at Rehearsal 5, where there

15 Robert Lowell and Jean Racine, Phaedra: A Verse Translation of Racine's Phèdre (London, Great Britain: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 8. is a sizeable orchestral interlude. The ellipsis is Britten’s addition; in Lowell’s version, the line ends with an em dash. Textually, Britten makes it clear that the text should continue. However, by inserting the orchestral interlude, he makes the line seem to trail off into the dark, ominous melodic material of the lower strings, more of a connection to the text of the Presto (which occurs an act later in the play) than an allusion to the missing half of the couplet. Given that Britten does not seemingly pay any mind to Lowell’s rhyming, both end and internal, it is not surprising that he would insert the orchestral interludes more for the purpose of retaining the continuity of the drama rather than for musically completing the broken couplet.

Representations of Death

Within the music of Phaedra, Britten reveals his fixation on death and the conflict between purity and corruption. The morbidity of Phaedra is evident from her text alone, as she mentions death on numerous occasions in all of the five sections, starting in the Prologue when she states, “Death was frowning in an aisle-

Hippolytus!” Lowell’s play ends with Phaedra dying onstage after taking “Medea’s poison,” followed by the character Panope confirming the death by saying, “She’s dead, my lord.”16 Britten’s setting does not include Panope’s confirmation, but is able to confirm Phaedra’s death through his musical treatment of the text. On the last line of the second Recitative, Phaedra says, “death to the unhappy’s no catastrophe!” The vocal melody on “no catastrophe!” becomes a motif for her impending death, and is repeated throughout the Adagio in both the vocal and string parts. It occurs for the last

16 Robert Lowell and Jean Racine, Phaedra: A Verse Translation of Racine's Phèdre (London, Great Britain: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 90. time within Phaedra’s final phrase of the piece: “resume its purity.” This fatalistic twinge to the motif is compounded by Britten’s percussion orchestration. A gong

(more specifically, a tam tam) strikes simultaneously with the first note of the death motif being played, and this pattern starts in the Adagio and continues until the final iteration when Phaedra sings, “resume its purity.” (See Example 2.)

Example 2. Britten, Phaedra (London: Faber Music Ltd., 1977), Rehearsal 21.

The gong has been used historically in many spiritual practices, aiding in meditation, enlightenment, ethereal projection, and even exorcisms.17 Whether Britten had any of these specific connotations in mind when orchestrating this piece is unclear, but it is no coincidence that the tam tam coincides with the death motif. He intended to highlight the occurrences of this motif so the audience would be able to perceive when these occurrences stopped. If the motif is a constant reminder that death is “no catastrophe” to Phaedra, then the consistent iterations throughout the final Adagio can be seen as Phaedra motivating herself to tell the truth to Theseus so that she can

17 “The Sacred Gong,” accessed February 4, 2015, http://www.gongmaster.org/gong.html. finally let herself die and achieve inner peace. This would explain why the motif does not occur again after she dies: the day “resumes its purity.”

In addition to the “death motif,” Britten alludes to Phaedra’s overall unhappiness and desire for death in other ways throughout the work. The passages that Britten chose to set are the climactic moments of Lowell’s play that feature

Phaedra. In most of these selections, minus her brief moment of reflection on a happier time in the Prologue, she is depressed at her fallen moral state and manic with her passions for Hippolytus. She longs for death at every turn, even asking

Hippolytus to kill her during the Presto when she calls for his “sword’s spasmodic final inch.” When he refuses and she learns that Theseus is still alive, she cannot bear the shame of pretending to love Theseus when Hippolytus knows the truth. At this point in Lowell’s play, Oenone lies to Theseus (at Phaedra’s reluctant consent) and claims that Hippolytus raped Phaedra, and Hippolytus dies due to Theseus’ plea to

Poseidon for punishment. This chunk of the story is omitted from Britten’s Phaedra, as none of these scenes in the play feature Phaedra as more than a secondary character. The long orchestral interlude that opens the Adagio section could be meant to encapsulate all that transpires in Phaedra’s mind during these scenes, showing that at this point she has given herself up to death and is merely biding her time until an opportunity arises to end her life. She knows Hippolytus will not return her love, and there is no hope of redemption for her actions.

Musically, Britten paints Phaedra’s unhappiness through his use of dissonance throughout the work. Excluding the Prologue and the end of the Adagio, most of

Phaedra’s music is devoid of a clear tonal center. Her melodic line is dissonant both on its own and in relation to the orchestration, especially in the Presto where she reaches a peak of emotional disparity and desperation. Dissonance within tonal music usually signifies a moment of passing strife, rarely lasting too long as composers tend to set pieces in a minor mode if they wish to express sorrow over a long span of time.

However, Britten’s decision to use dissonance instead of the minor mode is indicative of a different level of sadness in Phaedra’s case, more insanity and inner turmoil than pure melancholy. The work opens solidly within the key of A major, where a melodic figure henceforth referred to as “Theseus’ theme” is presented for the first time in the violin parts. (See Example 3.) This theme recurs, as does A major, any time that

Theseus is referenced in the work, even if only for a measure such as when she says

“I go to meet my husband;” the harpsichord has a one-measure iteration of the theme in A major, and then at Rehearsal 19 goes back to the blank key signature that dominates the recitative sections. Example 3. Britten, Phaedra (London: Faber Music Ltd., 1977), “Theseus’ theme”.

Attainment of Purity

Phaedra’s sense of purity is gradually achieved towards the end of the Adagio, portrayed through a gradual conversion to C major that is finally achieved by the end of the piece. C♮s and G♮s begin to appear in Phaedra’s melodic line after Rehearsal

23. Then, when Theseus’ theme is repeated after Rehearsal 25, Britten utilizes C♮ and

G♮ to indicate a pulling away from Theseus, highlighting the tonal shift towards C major. (See Example 4.) Example 4. Britten, Phaedra (London: Faber Music Ltd., 1977), Rehearsal 25.

On the words “Medea’s poison,” Phaedra chants on the pitch C4. That triggers a key change to C major, where the theme from the beginning of the Adagio (Rehearsal 21) is repeated, this time loosely based on C major tonalities. Phaedra’s line also reflects this switch to C major, as the vocal part chants on nearly all pitches of a C major triad, ascending to the next pitch after the “death motif” makes an appearance at the end of each chant line. The ascent misses only E4 and ends on a G5 when Phaedra exclaims “purity.” The orchestration has a huge, partially rolled C major chord on the downbeat of the following measure. The chord is nearly identical to the final chord of

Gustav Mahler’s Das von der Erde (C major with an added sixth), except Britten adds a ninth as well. As Christopher Palmer describes it, the end highlights the “limit to our earthy sight; Phaedra goes on, but we cannot see her.”18

This final key change to C major and the ascending triad that Phaedra sings at the end are directly indicative of her purity being restored. As Theseus’ theme begins to disintegrate with the addition of the C♮ and G♮, Phaedra’s relationship with him is crumbling down around her: she admits that she loved Hippolytus and is trying to clear his name before she dies. She is clearing her conscience bit by bit, and as a result the orchestration becomes more “pure” as the piece continues. C major is a pure key signature, in that there are no sharps or flats. Britten used this to denote purity in The Rape of Lucretia, where the piece ends in C major after Lucretia ends her life.19 Thus, this technique was not foreign to Britten, and he used it in Phaedra for the same dramatic function.

The postlude orchestration that begins at Rehearsal 29 is essentially a recapitulation of all of the major themes that have been presented over the course of the cantata. (See Example 6.) However, the C1-C2 octave chord is still sustained by string basses from the C major cadence in the measure prior. This continuous C1-C2 drone can be sustained by virtue of the nature of string instruments, compared to a piano reduction where the pianist will likely have to restrike the chord a handful of times in order to have it sustain at an audible level throughout the whole postlude.

This drone is essential in continuing the image of Phaedra’s newly acquired purity in death. If we take the phrase “seeing your whole life flash before your eyes” as a

18 Christopher Palmer. The Britten Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 410. 19 Peter Evans, “Phaedra, Op. 93; Welcome Ode, Op. 95 by Benjamin Britten,” Music & Letters 59/2 (Apr., 1798): 232-33. literal phenomena in this situation, the sustained C1-C2 chord under the brief recapitulations makes sense. Scientifically, it has been found that in patients who are unconscious as a result of life-threatening experiences, “life flashing before their eyes” is one of the recorded responses observed, among other types of responses.20 As

Phaedra’s soul is leaving her body, Britten sets up the orchestration so a near death experience is portrayed. The audience is exposed to the six themes that were the most prominent throughout the work: Theseus’ theme; the timpani melody (in Hippolytus’ key of D); and four snippets of various parts of the Presto section, including the percussion ostinato from Rehearsal 8.

20 Enrico Facco and Christian Agrillo, "Near-death Experiences between Science and Prejudice," Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012, 1-7, accessed April 6, 2015, www.frontiersin.org. Example 6. Britten, Phaedra (London: Faber Music Ltd., 1992), Rehearsal 29.

The dynamic stays at piano or softer, and each theme is presented either by a solo instrument or with the ensemble muted (or with the use of Ruthe switches, in the case of the timpani).21 The way the postlude begins and ends with the drone C1-C2

21 Ruthe is a birch brush that produces a unique sound when used with percussion instruments. By using a brush on the timpani, the sound would be dulled as compared to felt-covered or wooden mallets, which are commonly used with the instrument. chord, with the other six themes quietly blending with each other and fading away, allows the audience to visualize Phaedra’s consciousness quickly revisiting the events that unfolded during the cantata before moving on and finding solace in the drone.

The drone itself fades away with a decrescendo, marking Phaedra’s consciousness fading into the blackness and peace of death.

Britten was often thought to have portrayed women unsympathetically in his works. As Ellen McDonald writes, Britten “confines his women to traditional roles and stereotypes, often identifying them with the society that restricts or even destroys his main characters. At the root of this problem is the tendency not to portray women as whole human beings… They remain either oppressors (powerful but destructive) or oppressed (sympathetic but powerless).” 22 Interestingly, Britten broke this mold with his final female character: Phaedra does not fit into either the role of the “oppressor” or that of the “oppressed,” at least not cleanly. Perhaps it is because he respected

Janet Baker and wanted to write a piece with a character she could portray well.

Phaedra is a character that is easily viewed as an “oppressor” in the course of the play, as she destroys both Theseus and Hippolytus because she cannot control her sexual desires. Britten chooses only to communicate the parts of the story that make her a sympathetic character, one who deeply desires a love that she knows she should not, and will never, possess. The way she is portrayed, Phaedra more closely resembles Lucretia as a character than she does the Phaedra in Lowell’s play: Britten takes a “monster” and humanizes her. This similarity to Lucretia could stem from his weakness at the end of his life, and be reduced down to yet another aspect that he

22 Ellen McDonald, "Women in Benjamin Britten's Operas," The Opera Quarterly 4/3 (1986): 83, accessed November 23, 2014, http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/. took from The Rape of Lucretia to make composing Phaedra less challenging. The part of Lucretia was written for Kathleen Ferrier, an English contralto of whom

Britten thought very highly, and since he also thought highly of Baker it is reasonable to assume that he chose to write another sympathetic character for her as well.

The overarching themes of death, redemption and purity abound in Phaedra;

Britten poured his firmly established beliefs into this fifteen-minute piece. Phaedra,

“in all her madness,” is presented sympathetically as a woman who is tormented by an improper and unrequited love and who dies in order to save her soul. Britten painstakingly contrived every aspect of this work, from choosing a character and genre that best fit Janet Baker’s singing style to the text painting that he employed to best portray Phaedra’s mental state. This is more remarkable when his weakened state is taken into account, as he had to modify his compositional processes but did not compromise his genius. Phaedra was one of his final compositions; the product of a whole life’s worth of experience and renewed sadness. But, by giving Phaedra a peaceful release through death and promise of restored purity for her sins, he composed a sense of promise and hope of redemption, making death seem desirable and palatable, perhaps even to himself. Britten himself died on December 4, 1976, just shy of six months after Phaedra premiered. We can only hope that, in death, he finally achieved a similar peace to the one that Phaedra achieved in this late work. Bibliography

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Britten, Benjamin, and Robert Lowell. Phaedra: Dramatic Cantata for Mezzo- Soprano and Small Orchestra: Op. 93. London: Faber Music, 1977.

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Evans, Peter, “Phaedra, Op. 93; Welcome Ode, Op. 95 by Benjamin Britten”. Music & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Apr., 1978): 232-233.

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Facco, Enrico, and Christian Agrillo. "Near-death Experiences between Science and Prejudice." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012, 1-7. Accessed April 6, 2015. www.frontiersin.org.

Howard, Patricia. "Reviewed Work: A Birthday Hansel Op. 92; Harp Suite Op. 83; Canticle V; Second Lute Song from Gloriana'; Two Scottish Folk Songs by Britten, Pears, Ellis." The Musical Times 117, no. 1604 (1976): 831. Accessed April 6, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/960191.

Lowell, Robert, and Saskia Hamilton. The Letters of Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Lowell, Robert, and Jean Racine. Phaedra: A Verse Translation of Racine's Phèdre. London, Great Britain: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961.

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McDonald, Ellen. "Women in Benjamin Britten's Operas." The Opera Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1986): 83-101. Accessed November 23, 2014. http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/. Neighbour, O.W. "Erwartung." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 30 Jan. 2015. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O901462.

Palmer, Christopher. The Britten Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Powell, Neil. Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music. London: Hutchinson, 2013.

Stapleton, Michael. The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology. New York: P. Bedrick Books, 1986.

The Gong Master. “The Sacred Gong.” Accessed February 4, 2015. http://www.gongmaster.org/gong.html.

Timms, Colin, et al. "Cantata." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed January 30, 2015. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04748pg1.

Willier, Stephen A. "Mad scene." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed January 30, 2015. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O007756.