Benjamin Britten 1913 –1976 Winter Words Op.52 (Hardy ) 1 At Day-close in November 1.33 2 Midnight on the Great Western (or The Journeying Boy) 4.35 3 Wagtail and Baby (A Satire) 1.59 4 The Little Old Table 1.21 5 The Choirmaster’s Burial (or The Tenor Man’s Story) 3.59 6 Proud Songsters (Thrushes, Finches and Nightingales) 1.00 7 At the Railway Station, Upway (or The Convict and Boy with the Violin) 2.51 8 Before Life and After 3.15 Michelangelo Sonnets Op.22 9 Sonnet XVI: Si come nella penna e nell’inchiostro 1.49 10 Sonnet XXXI: A che piu debb’io mai l’intensa voglia 1.21 11 Sonnet XXX: Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi un dolce lume 3.18 12 Sonnet LV: Tu sa’ ch’io so, signior mie, che tu sai 1.40 13 Sonnet XXXVIII: Rendete a gli occhi miei, o fonte o fiume 1.58 14 Sonnet XXXII: S’un casto amor, s’una pieta superna 1.22 15 Sonnet XXIV: Spirto ben nato, in cui so specchia e vede 4.26 Six Hölderlin Fragments Op.61 16 Menschenbeifall 1.26 17 Die Heimat 2.02 18 Sokrates und Alcibiades 1.55 19 Die Jugend 1.51 20 Hälfte des Lebens 2.23 21 Die Linien des Lebens 2.56 2 Who are these Children? Op.84 (Soutar ) (Four English Songs) 22 No.3 Nightmare 2.52 23 No.6 Slaughter 1.43 24 No.9 Who are these Children? 2.12 25 No. 11 The Children 4.33 Songs from the Chinese Op.58 26 The Big Chariot ( The Book of Songs ) 1.50 27 The Old Lute ( Po Chü-i ) 2.19 28 The Autumn Wind ( Wu-ti ) 1.14 29 The Herd-Boy ( Lu Yu ) 1.15 30 Depression ( Po Chü-i ) 1.25 31 Dance Song ( The Book of Songs ) 1.02 70.15 Ian Bostridge tenor Sir Antonio Pappano piano Xuefei Yang guitar (Songs from the Chinese) Ian Bostridge and Sir Antonio Pappano in rehearsal Songs of peace and fury As a young man Benjamin Britten was anxious to distance himself from the pastoral-Romantic vein of earlier generations of British song composers, from Vaughan Williams to Butterworth, Gurney and Finzi. (He remarked wryly in 1935 that ‘the best way to make me like Elgar is to listen to him after Vaughan Williams’.) When a critic once asked him from whom he had learned to set English poetry to music, Britten wrongfooted him by citing Purcell rather than the expected ‘Pastoral School’ of composers. Indeed, it was his declared aim to ‘try to restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell’. His tally of over 100 English songs, mostly written for his partner Peter Pears, proclaims him as Purcell’s equal in distilling, colourfully and economically, the essence of a poem in music. But as an early enthusiast for Mahler, Berg and Shostakovich, Britten was no insular nationalist. Uniquely among British composers he created song masterpieces in French ( Les Illuminations ) and Russian ( The Poet’s Echo , written for Galina Vishnevskaya), plus the Italian and German cycles on this CD. Britten composed Winter Words in 1953, between his controversial coronation opera Gloriana (deemed by some too gloomy, even too pornographic, for the occasion) and The Turn of the Screw . He and Pears gave the premiere in Harewood House on 8 October that year, as part of the Leeds Festival. Britten had long been drawn to the earthiness, bitter humour and dark, gnarled lyricism of Thomas Hardy’s poetry. The precarious innocence of childhood – a leitmotiv in Britten’s work – and an aching sense of transience are the dominant themes of these ‘lyrics and ballads’, perhaps the most profoundly personal of all his cycles. Piano textures are typically sparse and pungent in songs that range from the delicate, diaphanous miniatures ‘Wagtail and Baby’ and ‘The Little Old Table’ (its creaking evoked by both voice and piano) to the mordant episodic ballad ‘The Choirmaster’s Burial’, with its brilliant characterisation of the pompous, insensitive vicar and half-concealed echoes (in the piano) of the choirmaster’s favourite hymn, ‘Mount Ephraim’. In the vividly onomatopoeic ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, the train’s shrill whistle sounds softly and ominously in the coda as the lonely child journeys towards his unknown destination. The song’s theme of innocence on the brink of experience, or corruption, pre-echoes The Turn of the Screw , which Britten was already planning in the autumn of 1953. Most moving of all is the final ‘Before Life and After’, beginning in eerie tranquillity and ending with the despairing repeated question ‘How long, how long?’ – a cry of existential anguish unparalleled in Britten’s songs. Britten completed his Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in Amityville, Long Island, in October 1940, during his three-year self- imposed exile in the United States. It was the first work he dedicated to Peter Pears, who gave over 100 performances with the composer. Fragmentary evidence, though, suggests that Britten planned the cycle as early as 1938, perhaps initially prompted by a relationship other than that with Pears. Although the Michelangelo sonnets, inspired by the poet’s young lover Tommaso dei Cavalieri, have often been seen as an avowal of love for Pears, their predominant mood is restless and self-questioning: longing is unappeased, desire thwarted. Only two of his chosen sonnets, the third (sonnet XXX) and the last (XXIV), seem to hold the promise of love fulfilled. The others all dwell on the lover’s uncertainty, rejection and despair. Avid to free his music from what he regarded as inhibiting ‘Englishness’, the young Britten absorbed a wide range of European styles. In the sonnets the model, naturally, is the Italian bel canto tradition, culminating in Verdi ( the prime influence on Peter Grimes and the War Requiem ), reinterpreted in terms of his own mid-20th-century harmonic idiom. Britten here counterpoints generous melodic spans with rhythmically incisive accompaniments based on variants of just one or two pithy germinal motifs. Perhaps the most haunting of the songs – and strangely prophetic of ‘Before Life and After’ in Winter Words – is ‘Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi’ (sonnet XXX), whose limpid, arching vocal lines above sostenuto piano chords are made piquant by the ‘Lydian’ sharpened fourth of the scale. 5 Returning to a foreign language for the first time since the Michelangelo Sonnets, Britten composed the Six Hölderlin Fragments in 1958 as a 50th birthday present for his friend Prince Ludwig (‘Lu’) of Hesse, a cousin of Lord Harewood who had married Margaret (‘Peg’) Campbell Geddes, daughter of the former Liberal cabinet minister. The prince himself had introduced Britten to the mentally unstable German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), a maker of myths whose verses are pervaded by an idealised vision of ancient Greece. As in the Songs from the Chinese composed the previous year, middle age, and a nostalgia for youth and beauty, are recurrent themes. Amid much ascetic writing, the second song, ‘Die Heimat’, is a flowing, romantic barcarolle of tortured beauty. In the following ‘Sokrates and Alcibiades’ the bare, declamatory opening flowers into lyricism as the philosopher gazes upon the youth (at the words ‘dein Aug’ auf ihn?’). The piano’s glowing, concordant triads in the final part of the song surely symbolise the beauty and ‘rightness’ of their love. ‘Die Jugend’, set as a skewed, syncopated waltz, is a delicate scherzo, complete with tapping drums, while the autumnal ‘Hälfte des Lebens’ rises from brooding inwardness (the voice’s falling chromatic lines over deep-toned triplets distantly evoke Schumann) to windswept panic. In the final ‘Die Linien des Lebens’ the poet’s ‘lines of life’ are musically paralleled in the dreamlike contrapuntal weave of the piano (the canonic writing here is characteristic of the whole cycle), with the voice echoing the piano in doubled note-values. From the mid-1950s onwards Peter Pears often teamed up with the guitarist Julian Bream for recitals of folk songs and Elizabethan lute songs. In 1957, as a tribute to their collaboration, Britten composed his guitar-accompanied Songs from the Chinese , settings of six epigrammatic poems translated by Arthur Waley. While there are no specific orientalisms, the ornamental flourishes, especially in the first song, give the music a faintly exotic air. The poems are bittersweet, sometimes ironic reflections on ageing and mortality. On one level the second song, ‘The Old Lute’, is a joke at Bream’s expense. On another it is an extraordinarily bleak, hypnotic song, Britten’s counterpart to Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’ from Winterreise . At the end the guitar delicately imitates the new-fangled flute and zither that have consigned the old lute to oblivion. In the soughing melancholy of ‘The Autumn Wind’ Britten seems to half-remember ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’ from Mahler’s Chinese-inspired Das Lied von der Erde , a favourite work of his. ‘Depression’, with its mournful glissandos, is Britten at his most minimalistic. The final ‘Dance Song’ initially suggests riotous jollity (the unicorn traditionally symbolises chastity), though the repeated final cries of ‘Alas’ suggest something closer to despair, in keeping with the fatalistic tone of the whole cycle. Britten composed his penultimate song collection Who are these Children? (only the Burns cycle A Birthday Hansel was to follow) in the summer of 1969, though the complete work was not premiered until the 1971 Aldeburgh Festival. These settings of verses by the socialist, pacifist Scottish poet William Soutar (1898–1943) form two interwoven cycles: eight poems in Scots dialect celebrate childhood, while the four interleaved English poems, influenced by William Blake and Wilfred Owen, dwell on the horrors and pity of war.