Three Types of Song Cycles: the Variety of Britten's
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Three Types of Song Cycles: The Variety of Britten’s ‘Charms’ [2001] The great variety of Benjamin Britten’s ‘song-cycle’ oeuvre forms the empirical basis for identifying three types of song cycles. Criteria for defining these types are both the strength of coherence among the individual songs of the cycle and the dominat- ing features which establish coherence. In this essay the types are accordingly labelled as ‘loose’, ‘literary’ and ‘musical’ song cycles, and a substantial number of individual cohesive features constituting these types are discussed. Their defining properties are demonstrated by referring to representative examples from Britten’s works. Contribu- tions from Britten criticism to the song-cycle issue form the starting point for much of the theoretical discussion of this paper, which concludes on some general definitional considerations. “Not since the days when musician and poet were the same person has there been a great composer whose art is as profoundly bound up with words as Ben- jamin Britten’s.” (Porter 1984: 271) These words by the prestigious Austral- ian-born poet and critic Peter Porter indicate that Britten is an unavoidable ‘victim’ of Word and Music Studies and, as he was a prolific writer of songs which almost exclusively appeared in whatever kind of ‘song-cycle’ form, he is also bound to be a ‘victim’ of a conference devoted to this intermedial artform. Britten wrote song cycles in every period of his creative life and, as they have such a wide range and show such an impressive variety of formations, it is tempting to base one’s reflections on the song cycle in general on some form of ‘empirical’ assessment of Britten’s songs. If one takes as the crucial issue of song cycles the way in which they are able to achieve unity and coherence as a whole while at the same time preserving the autonomy and separateness of the indi- vidual songs, it seems justified to begin one’s investigation by trying to identify the various cohesive features and devices that can be found in the cycles. It is a further ‘empirical’ element of this research to collect statements by critics of Britten’s works about the song-cycle issue. Yet it is of interest to observe that the various careful book-length studies on Britten deal with the song cycles as 236 Three Types of Song Cycles song cycles only in passing, although they occasionally contain very perceptive remarks on the issue. Following these research lines it is possible to arrive at three general types or categories of song cycles to be described and illustrated in this essay. The discussion of these types will be conducted, at least in part, in the light of Cyrus Hamlin’s seminal definitional considerations to be found in the proceedings of the 1997 Graz conference on Word and Music Studies (see 1999), and the paper will find its conclusion by presenting some further defini- tional observations of my own. The main body of Britten’s songs consists of 17 song collections (see Ap- pendix below)1. This number does not include two groups of Britten songs: the folk-song arrangements, which came out in several collections, carefully se- lected by Britten himself, but which – though written in typical Britten style – cannot be considered original works; and the five Canticles, which in many ways are similar to the song cycles, both in length and general approach; yet they have to be left out of consideration as they are all based on single texts and not on sequences of separate poems2. All the 17 collections are written for a single voice (mostly a high voice, having Peter Pears in mind), and 13 of them have a single accompanying instru- ment, in most cases the piano; a guitar is used in Songs from the Chinese (1957), and a harp in Britten’s last cycle, A Birthday Hansel (1975), based on texts by Robert Burns. Four of the cycles have an orchestral accompaniment, includ- ing Britten’s then scandalous first cycle of 1936, Our Hunting Fathers (created in collaboration with W. H. Auden), which is also the only work which was named a cycle by Britten: he calls it Symphonic Cycle; no other collection was given a genre description by the composer himself. The titles sometimes refer 1 This list does not include ambiguous cases of ‘song cycles’ such as the Owen settings in the War Requiem, for which, as a song cycle in its own right, Donald Mitchell recently has found eloquent words (it “authentically represents Britten’s final orchestral song-cycle”; “Violent Climates”: 196). Yet it is so intricately linked up with the rest of the requiem (a fact which Mitchell equally ac- knowledges, cf. ibid.: 207f.) that it defies comparison with the main body of Britten’s cycles as here discussed. Similarly, the Spring Symphony is outside the scope of the present investigation. (“Com- mentators have called the Spring Symphony a cantata, a song-cycle, and a latent opera. In truth, the work is all and none of these”; Ashby: 224.) Finally, the juvenile Quatre chansons françaises (1928), written by the fourteen-year-old Britten, are left out of consideration for their lack of artistic inde- pendence (although they have recently found their advocate in Christopher Mark; cf. 25-27). 2 Yet Graham Johnson calls Canticle I, based on a poem by Francis Quarles, “a sort of continuous song-cycle”; “Voice and Piano”: 292..