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Your Unpublished Thesis, Submitted for a Degree at Williams College and Administered by the Williams College Libraries, Will Be Made Available for Research Use WILLIAMS COLLEGE LIBRARIES COPYRIGHT ASSIGNMENT AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR A STUDENT THESIS Your unpublished thesis, submitted for a degree at Williams College and administered by the Williams College Libraries, will be made available for research use. You may, through this form, provide instructions regarding copyright, access, dissemination and reproduction of your thesis. The College has the right in all cases to maintain and preserve theses both in hardcopy and electronic format, and to make such copies as the Libraries require for their research and archival functions. _ The faculty advisor/s to the student writing the thesis claims joint authorship in this work. _ I/we have included in this thesis copyrighted material for which !/we have not received permission from the copyright holder/s. If you do not secure copyright permissions by the time your thesis is submitted, you will still be allowed to submit. However, if the necessary copyright permissions are not received, e-posting of your thesis may be affected. Copyrighted material may include images (tables, drawings, photographs, figures, maps, graphs, etc.), sound files, video material, data sets, and large portions of text. I. COPYRIGHT An author by law owns the copyright to his/her work, whether or not a copyright symbol and date are placed on the piece. Please choose one of the options below with respect to the copyright in your thesis. _ I/we choose not to retain the copyright to the thesis, and hereby assign the copyright to Williams College. Selecting this option will assign copyright to the College. If the author/swishes later to publish the work, he/she/they will need to obtain permission to do so from the Libraries, which will be granted except in unusual circumstances. The Libraries will be free in this case to also grant permission to another researcher to publish some or all of the thesis. If you have chosen this option, you do not need to complete the next section and can proceed to the signature line. JL' I/we choose to retain the copyright to the thesis for a period of _h_Q years, or until my/our death/s, whichever is the earlier, at which time the copyright shall be assigned to Williams College without need of further action by me/us or by my/our heirs, successors, or representatives of my/our estate/s. Selecting this option allows the author/s the flexibility of retaining his/her/their copyright for a period of years or for life. Signature Redacted Signature Redacted Signature Redacted Death and Purity as Prominent Themes in Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra, 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 Peter Pears, his longtime partner and renowned tenor, 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 A Birthday Hansel, featuring Pears and harpist Osian Ellis.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-soprano and orchestra Phaedra (Op. 93).3 This theme was also present in Death in Venice, the last opera 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 Gloriana'; 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 operas. 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 Janet Baker. Britten’s decision to set Phaedra, of all narratives, for Baker is likely due to a compilation of factors. He had heard Baker perform Hector Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été at the 1975 Aldeburgh 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 Aldeburgh Festival on June 16, 1976. As a singer, she was known for her skill in performing Baroque operas, such as Handel’s Giulio Cesare and, importantly, Britten’s own The Rape of Lucretia. 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. Kathleen Ferrier 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 Jean Racine’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 Donald Mitchell, 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.
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