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Benjamin

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The Operas of Benjamin Britten Expression and Evasion
Aldeburgh Studies in Music 1st Edition Claire Seymour
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Claire Seymour
ISBN(s): 9780851158655, 085115865X
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.69 MB
Year: 2004
Language: english
The Operas of
Benjamin Britten:
Expression and Evasion

Claire Seymour

THE BOYDELL PRESS


The Operas of Benjamin Britten
Expression and Evasion
This page intentionally left blank
The Operas of Benjamin Britten
Expression and Evasion

Claire Seymour

THE BOYDELL PRESS


© Claire Seymour 2004

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation


no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2004


The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 0 85115 865 X

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd


PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this book is available


from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Seymour, Claire, 1970–
The operas of Benjamin Britten : expression and evasion / Claire Seymour.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0–85115–865–X (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Britten, Benjamin, 1913–1976. Operas. 2. Operas – Analysis, appreciation.
I. Title.
ML410.B853S49 2004
782.1'092 – dc22 2004000719

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk


Printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Permissions viii
Abbreviations ix

1 Introduction 1
2 Paul Bunyan 18
3 Peter Grimes 41
4 The Rape of Lucretia 75
5 Albert Herring 98
6 The Little Sweep 118
7 Billy Budd 132
8 Gloriana 160
9 The Turn of the Screw 181
10 Noye’s Fludde 212
11 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 224
12 The Church Parables 243
13 Owen Wingrave 275
14 Death in Venice 296
15 Conclusion 323

Bibliography 341
Index 353
For Michael Irwin

And the life of choice begins.


Voice of Paul Bunyan, ‘Bunyan’s Farewell’, Act 2, Scene 2
Acknowledgements

This study began life as a Ph.D. thesis and my first debt of thanks is therefore due
to tutors, colleagues and friends at the University of Kent, particularly Michael
Irwin who supervised the project – and the MA dissertation which preceded it –
from inception to completion, and who was a constant source of inspiration,
guidance and encouragement.
I was aided throughout my research by the efficient support of the staff at the
Britten–Pears Library. My many visits to the Library were immensely pleasurable
and rewarding, and I should like in particular to thank Helen Risden, Judith Le
Grove, Jenny Doctor and Nicholas Clark for their generous assistance.
Similarly, Anna Trussler at the Ronald Duncan Literary Institute and the
archive staff at King’s College Cambridge were unfailingly supportive and
professional.
I am grateful to those academics, musicians and writers who made time to
share their knowledge and experiences with me, including Christopher Wintle,
Edward Cowie, Thomas Hemsley, Philip Langridge, Michael Holroyd,
Humphrey Carpenter and Norman Platt.
Finally, I would like to thank the numerous friends with whom I have from
time to time discussed aspects of the text, and whose encouragement and support
has been invaluable.

The quotations from the letters and writings of Benjamin Britten are copyright
the Trustees of the Britten–Pears Foundation and may not be further reproduced
without the written permission of the Trustees.
The quotations from the letters of Peter Pears are copyright the executors the
late Sir Peter Pears and may not be further reproduced without their written
permission.
Quotations from source materials held at the Britten–Pears Library written by
Myfanwy Piper, William Plomer, Montagu Slater, E. M. Forster and Ronald
Duncan are reproduced courtesy of the Britten–Pears Library.
The quotations from the letters and writings of Ronald Duncan are reproduced
by kind permission of the Ronald Duncan Literary Estate.
Quotations from the letters and writings of E. M. Forster are reproduced by
kind permission of The Society of Authors as agent for the Provost and Scholars of
King’s College Cambridge.
Quotations from the operas themselves are by kind permission of Faber and
Faber, and Boosey and Hawkes. Details are given below.

vii
This page intentionally left blank
Permissions

Peter Grimes
© Copyright 1945 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd
The Rape of Lucretia
© Copyright 1946, 1947 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
Albert Herring
Text © Copyright 1947 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
Music © Copyright 1948 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
The Little Sweep
© Copyright 1950 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
Billy Budd
© Copyright 1951 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
Gloriana
© Copyright 1953 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
The Turn of the Screw
© Copyright 1955 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
Noye’s Fludde
© Copyright 1958 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
© Copyright 1960 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd
Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd

Curlew River
© 1966, 1983 by Faber Music Ltd
The Burning Fiery Furnace
© 1966, 1983 by Faber Music Ltd
The Prodigal Son
© 1968, 1986 by Faber Music Ltd
Owen Wingrave
© 1970, 1973 by Faber Music Ltd
Death in Venice
© 1973, 1974, 1975 by Faber Music Ltd
Paul Bunyan
© 1974, 1978 by Faber Music Ltd

ix
Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used:


BPL Britten–Pears Library, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
DH David Herbert (ed.), The Operas of Benjamin Britten: The Complete
Librettos Illustrated with Designs of the First Productions. London: The
Herbert Press, 1989, revised edition.
EMF E. M. Forster Papers, Modern Archive Centre, King’s College, Univer-
sity of Cambridge.
HC Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography. London: Faber &
Faber, 1992.
LL Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed (eds.), Letters from a Life: The Selected
Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976, 2 vols. London:
Faber & Faber, 1991.
RD Ronald Duncan Papers: The New Collection, University of Plymouth.

x
1
Introduction

I understand Ben so well and his fear that he can’t. If he is only wanting a career
(and I know that is not it), and a career that I know would be very short, then he
need not change. But if he wants to survive, to be played with love later on, even
during the later years of his life, he must search for a more personal, more inter-
esting idiom. Colin McPhee1

Music says, ‘Love me’. It does not say ‘Obey me’; it does not even say ‘This is
true’. Love me or Love with me. That is why the performer is the centre of this
act of Love: he is the instrument of it . . . In making/creating music an act of Love
is also undertaken. Music is the Beloved. Singer is the Lover. Peter Pears2
This book examines the ways in which the operas of Benjamin Britten may illus-
trate his search for ‘a more interesting idiom’, a search which was driven by his
desire for an appropriate public ‘voice’ which might embody, communicate, and
perhaps resolve, his private concerns and anxieties. The above quotations raise
several issues which may enhance our understanding of Britten’s music and
methodology, such as the delicate balance between private and public communi-
cation, the tension between art as self-expression and art as moral resolution, and
the notion of the latent sexuality of music, particularly song.
At the heart of my investigation lies the question, ‘Can, or should, music serve
as a redemptive model for life?’ By analysing the libretto texts and musical scores
of Britten’s operas from Paul Bunyan (1941) to Death in Venice (1973), the three
Church Parables, and several of the ‘children’s operas’, I seek to identify the
creative links between his music and biographical events or psychological factors,
in order to uncover the personal narrative encoded within the operatic narrative,
and to demonstrate that, for Britten, opera was the natural medium through
which to explore and express his private concerns. I shall evaluate the artistic
value of the unfolding autobiographical narrative in Britten’s operas, and
examine the presence of a homosexual dynamic in both the verbal and musical
texts. By studying the practical and creative procedures involved in the process of

1 Letter to Elizabeth Mayer, postmarked 10 July 1941, quoted in Philip Brett, ‘Eros and Orien-
talism in Britten’s Operas’, in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary Thomas, Queering the
Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p.
237.
2 From ‘The Responsibility of the Singer’, found among Pears’s papers after his death and
quoted in Christopher Headington, Peter Pears (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 306–7.
2 INTRODUCTION

composition, I shall attempt to identify the congruencies and antagonisms


between text and score, and to assess the relative ‘status’ of word and music. By so
doing I hope to demonstrate that in his operas Britten fused musical and verbal
expression into a highly personal language in his search for a ‘more interesting
idiom’, but that ultimately this language, interpreted and communicated princi-
pally by his lover, Peter Pears, may have propelled him only so far in his quest for
personal integrity and artistic fulfilment.
During the 1930s, guided by his first librettist and ‘mentor’, W. H. Auden, the
young Benjamin Britten had already begun to explore his feelings of disaffection,
alienation and oppression in works such as the song-cycles On This Island and
Our Hunting Fathers, in which political and sexual tensions subtly intermingled.
In 1939, following the example of Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Britten
travelled with Pears to America, in search of the personal and creative freedom
which, as a Conscientious Objector and homosexual, he probably feared would be
denied him in Britain. In the libretto of the 1941 ‘American’ operetta, Paul
Bunyan, Auden described this American Eden:
It is a forest full of innocent beasts. There are none who blush at the memory of an
ancient folly, none who hide beneath dyed fabrics a malicious heart.3
Auden urged Britten to embrace his political and sexual beliefs more honestly and
openly, his advice culminating in an oft-quoted letter to the composer:
As you know I think you [are] the white hope of music; for this reason I am
more critical of you than of anybody else, and I think I know something about
the dangers that beset you as a man and as an artist because they are my own.
Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and
Chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention.
Bohemian chaos alone ends in a mad jumble of beautiful scraps; Bourgeois
convention alone ends in large unfeeling corpses . . .
For middle class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the
second. Your attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and
innocent, is a symptom of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and
evasion of the attractions and demands of disorder that is responsible for your
attacks of ill-health, i.e. sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.
Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people
who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do, e.g. Elizabeth, Peter
(Please show this to P to whom all this is also addressed). Up to a certain point
this is fine for you, but beware. You see, Benjy dear, you are always tempted to
make things too easy for yourself in this way, i.e. to build yourself a warm nest of
love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable
talented little boy.
If you are to develop into your full stature, you will have to think, to suffer,
and to make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present,

3 David Herbert (ed.), The Operas of Benjamin Britten (London: The Herbert Press, 1989). All
quotations from the librettos are from this edition, subsequently referred to as DH.
INTRODUCTION 3

and against every conscious value that you have; ie. you will have to be able to
say what you never yet have had the right to say – God, I’m a shit.
This is all expressed very muddle-headedly, but try and not misunderstand it,
and believe that it is only my love and admiration for you that makes me say it.4
This advice was brutally honest but Britten, though disillusioned with the Amer-
ican ‘forest of freedom’ which had proved less creatively liberating than he had
hoped, was not yet ready to live his life according to Auden’s liberal directive. In
order to escape from the immediacy of Auden’s presence, which he now found
domineering and suffocating, Britten returned with Pears to England in 1942.
However, the poet’s words of warning may have been less easy to evade or ignore.
Moreover, Colin McPhee’s letter to Elizabeth Mayer, quoted above, reveals that
Auden was not alone in identifying potential tensions and problems that, if
repressed or avoided, might inhibit Britten’s musical and personal development.
In the following chapters I shall suggest that, beginning with the composition of
Peter Grimes in 1945, Britten embarked upon a life-long operatic exploration of
the very problems which Auden had anticipated and articulated following their
American collaboration. Unable to openly confront these issues in his life, Britten
dramatised them in his music, searching for a metaphoric utopia, a magical space,
place or language where his sexuality and identity could be powerfully redefined.
His art thus became a ‘haven’, as he sublimated and transferred his emotional
tensions from the real world to the creative world of his imagination. The
inherent ambiguity of opera, where ‘meaning’ might be either enhanced or
obscured by the interaction of text and music, provided Britten with a protective
screen behind which he was able to return obsessively to the fruitless gratification
of his desire for the unattainable, indefinable and illegitimate.
From 1941 until his death in 1976, Britten was almost continually occupied
with operatic composition, completing ten operas, three church parables (Curlew
River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son), the ballad opera (The
Beggar’s Opera), two children’s operas (The Little Sweep and Noye’s Fludde), as
well as numerous smaller stage works and dramatic pieces. Before he had
composed his first opera Britten had already been widely acclaimed as a composer
of song. What prompted him after the success of Peter Grimes 1945 to commit
himself so fully to opera? A song is essentially a self-contained experience where
the composer responds to a pre-existing and unaltered poetic idea. In contrast,
the composer of opera is more intimately involved in the text, which he interprets
and re-presents and the musical score is the embodiment of this personal involve-
ment. Indeed, an opera libretto may positively require such interaction before it
can be fully realised in dramatic terms.
Britten was not working alone but collaborated with a series of librettists –
W. H. Auden, Montagu Slater, Ronald Duncan, Eric Crozier, E. M. Forster,
William Plomer, Myfanwy Piper and Peter Pears – who influenced the form and

4 Auden to Britten, 31 January 1942, quoted in Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed (eds.), Letters
from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976, vol. 2 (London:
Faber & Faber, 1991), pp. 1015–16. This edition is subsequently referred to as LL.
4 INTRODUCTION

content of his operas in varying fashions and to different degrees. His personal
and professional relationships with these librettists, as well as the extent of their
influence in determining the correlation between the libretto text and the original
source text, is therefore of crucial importance. Which is more ‘load-bearing’, the
words or the music? The analyses of individual librettos in subsequent chapters
pay considerable attention to the dynamics of the complex web connecting the
original writer, and the source text, with the librettist and the composer. There is
much emphasis on the words and how they are formulated, since the examination
of the libretto drafts at various stages of composition reveals how the ‘meaning’
was to some extent off-loaded from the words onto the music during the process
of composition. Indeed, in performance the words themselves may actually be
indistinguishable, their effect or importance being musically or dramatically
experienced rather than technically understood. The audience’s aesthetic experi-
ence of opera is in some ways ‘beyond words’, intensely physical and theatrical
rather than intellectual, as instinctive and conceptual communication replaces
literal expression and reception.
In this context, it is interesting to note that from the earliest stages of his career
Britten was profoundly interested in the ‘theatrical’ aspects of performance and
reception, striving always for a totally unified conception. In his essay ‘Designing
for Britten’, John Piper describes his work with Britten and the Group Theatre
during the 1930s:
A clearly announced, and accepted, aim of the Group was the achievement of a
stage unity stemming from a close collaboration of the author (preferably a
poet), the designer (usually a painter), the composer (if any) and the producer
and cast, regardless as far as possible of individual prestige and personality. The
unity wasn’t always achieved, sometimes it wasn’t even evident, let alone
obvious, but it was an ideal . . . I believe it remained a stage-ideal for Britten all
his life, and is traceable in all his works involving collaborators.5
Piper continues by quoting Britten’s Foreword to The Rape of Lucretia sympo-
sium (London: Bodley Head, 1948):
‘The composer and poet should at all stages be working in the closest contact
from the most preliminary stages right up to the first night.’ He very soon came
to realise (if he hadn’t already) that this close contact also applied to the
composer and his producer and designer. As far as I am concerned, in the
Britten operas that I designed, from The Rape of Lucretia onwards, this
passionate insistence of his on the unity of the parts – that is, of all collaborating
participants – only increased, through the 27 years that followed to Death in
Venice. He came more and more to demand (always in the gentlest possible
way) advance information. If you said ‘I’ve done these sketches’, he might say:
‘That’s wonderful, that’s marvellous, that’s just how I hoped it would look.’ But
then, having done that, he would go much further and say: ‘What’s going to
happen at the end of Act 1, when that turns round, you know, or this goes off the

5 John Piper, ‘Designing for Britten’, in DH, pp. 5–7.


INTRODUCTION 5

scene, what are we going to get next, because I can’t compose music until I know
exactly what’s going to happen.
This desire for equality and unity may have contributed to Britten’s desire to
create a closed and exclusive working environment, such as he established at
Aldeburgh, where he could retain control over all various and potentially contra-
dictory elements of production.
While the unity of the operatic experience may have been Britten’s ultimate
goal, the starting point was frequently dramatic or literary. The source texts which
Britten selected are surprisingly wide-ranging and erudite given his professed lack
of confidence in his ability to deal with words. Hans Keller told Alan Blyth: ‘I
think he felt in some way guilty about verbalising.’6
However, Ronald Duncan understood how essential words were to Britten’s
creative process:
He once told me that he never had a purely musical thought unrelated to a
verbal context. In other words his method of composition was to face himself
with a verbal problem and the musical answer emerged simultaneously. . .
. . . and only on one occasion did he complain to me that he was having any
difficulty: that was with the Second String Quartet.
‘That’s because it’s got no words,’ I said. His frown was partial admission.7
A superficial examination of Britten’s librettos reveals the obvious existence of
a number of recurring themes – ‘innocence’, pacifism, social oppression, death –
and symbols – the sea, the ‘outsider’, the ‘artist’. This is striking given the variety
and diversity of the source texts chosen for operatic setting and would suggest that
the chosen texts were in some way in harmony with the sensibilities of the
composer, that they stimulated his imagination and allowed his personality to
blend with the source. Writing in Opera (vol. 1, no. 2) in April 1950, about a
broadcast of Peter Grimes in Toronto, Britten himself declared: ‘If the work has
overtones or undercurrents, let them appear by themselves and do not emphasise
them.’8 However, this statement contradicts his actual practice of manipulating or
emphasising those existing features of the sources which were in accordance with
his own aims, a procedure which was often complicated by the personal agenda of
the collaborating librettist. The recurrence of particular thematic ideas and
symbols may be either inadvertent or intentional; such motifs may arise in
response to the composer’s subconscious tendencies or may be applied in a more
schematic manner. Symbols such as the sea may be archetypal but their power is
intensified by their personal significance to the composer, and it is perhaps
impossible to ascertain whether they reveal anything of value about Britten the
man or whether they simply offered him greater musical potential. One signifi-
cant feature of the source texts is that there is frequently a disturbing conflict

6 Alan Blyth, Remembering Britten (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1981), p. 88.
7 Ronald Duncan, Working with Britten: A Personal Memoir (Devon: The Rebel Press, 1981),
pp. 103–4.
8 Quoted in Blyth, Remembering Britten, p. 15.
6 INTRODUCTION

between diametrically opposed forces – peace and violence, love and ostracism,
youth and age, innocence and experience, art and life – which suggests that these
texts were potential sites of schizophrenic anxiety which might feed Britten’s own
neuroticism. The source texts appear to possess inherent tensions or ambiguities
which Britten dramatised both textually and musically, formulating a harmonic
and structural method which embodied, supplemented and, paradoxically, occa-
sionally contradicted the dichotomies in the text. In this way, the opera libretto
may mark out a path which the music does or does not follow, and the tension
between the two may increase the overall ‘expressiveness’ of the work.
The complex issue of the nature of musical expression or ‘meaning’ is
irresolvable, as the non-referential nature of music renders it impossible to deter-
mine the precise or literal ‘meaning’ of a musical event. However, there is no
doubt that, within defined cultural and artistic parameters, listeners are condi-
tioned to invest musical sounds with extra-musical significance. Philosophers
and musicologists, struggling to account for music’s intangible yet undoubtedly
affective power, have, broadly speaking, adopted one of three positions: firstly,
that music is powerless to express anything beyond its own abstract content;
secondly, that musical form is congruent with psychological form and thus music
is able to communicate directly with the universal mind by avoiding the referen-
tial and representative restraints of linguistic communication; or, thirdly, that
music has an associative power, which may be innate, or alternatively may be
defined or strengthened by patterns of repetition within cultural contexts.
In each of these cases, musical expression is defined in terms of ‘meaning’. It
may be more profitable to replace this definition with the notion of ‘expressivity’,
understood as an instinctive or physical phenomenon which has an emotional
rather than intellectual effect. In this way, the immediacy and non-referentiality
of music might be its most powerful attributes. Undefinable and uncontainable, it
may represent and communicate tensions which words are forbidden or struggle
to convey. Some musicologists, including Elizabeth Wood, Susan McClary, Gary
C. Thomas and Philip Brett have explored this hypothesis and have interpreted
specific instances of compositional ‘irregularities’ as evidence of both an indi-
vidual composer’s rebellion against oppression and marginalisation, and of the
‘deviant’ nature of musical discourse itself.9 However, these musicologists have
tended to select single compositions which stand up to their investigative
methods and have seldom applied their theories more widely across a composer’s
whole oeuvre. The presence of an unconventional or radical gesture within a
single work will not greatly increase our understanding of a composer’s expressive
aims or methods. More valuable is an examination of how a composer manipu-
lates the existing musical system, over an extended period of time, creating an
effective medium for personal discourse. In this way ‘expression’ is replaced by
‘self-expression’ and a composer who wishes to articulate personal concerns can

9 See for example, Ruth Solie (ed.), Musicology and Difference (California: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1993); Susan McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, Sexuality (Minneap-
olis, 1993); Brett, Wood, Thomas, Queering the Pitch.
INTRODUCTION 7

formulate a subjective framework and a system of metaphor which gains ‘mean-


ing’ through repetition, particularly if the musical elements are allied to textual
details. In contrast to the minoritising tendencies of some of the above musicolo-
gists, I aim to demonstrate the way in which Britten’s operatic discourse both
dramatises his personal dialectic and embraces more universal concerns.
The analyses of Brett, McClary and so forth have often focused upon those
aspects of music that lie beyond the parameters of the score. In particular, they
have identified links between timbre and gender. For example, in ‘Of Patriarchs
. . . and Matriarchs Too’,10 Susan McClary attempts to locate a ‘feminist’ timbre in
the works of female composers such as Hildegard von Bingen. She asks whether
musical sound is arbitrary or whether timbre is in some way implicated in the
‘meaning’ of the work. In the latter case, this meaning could only be fully revealed
in performance, and thus the role of the performer, as interpreter and communi-
cator, would be crucial. In his provocative diary of personal recollections and
ideas – The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire –
Wayne Koestenbaum goes further in defining the relationship between timbre
and sexuality. He describes research conducted by J.-K. Huysmans which investi-
gated whether homosexuality could affect the quality of the vocal sound, and
which concluded: ‘sodomy changes the voice, which becomes almost identical in
all of them [the subjects selected for his experiment]. After several days’ study in
that world, from nothing but the sound of the voices of people I did not know, I
could infallibly predict their tastes.’11 These ideas are interesting in the context of
Britten’s operas, for in each work the dramatically significant part was designed
for and performed by a specific voice, that of Britten’s lover, Peter Pears.
Thomas Hemsley observed12 that Britten had a profound respect for the
human voice and was instinctively able to shape his musical lines to emphasise the
particular attributes of an individual singer’s vocal technique and colour. He
declared that Britten had ‘the best sensitivity for timbre of any musician’, and was
uniquely aware of the infinite variety of timbre and colour which it was possible to
identify in a vocally produced note. In this way, parts conceived for Pears would
be deliberately shaped, in consultation with the singer, to suit the peculiar quality
of his voice. Similarly, Jon Vickers has commented upon Pears’s lack of a ‘break’
or passagio around the pitch E, the point in the tenor’s register where a change of
timbre usually occurs. Vickers remarks that Britten exploited the smoothness of
Pears’s voice in this range, frequently centring melody and harmony about this
pitch or tonality at moments of dramatic importance.13 In this way, an individual
pitch might assume an extra-musical significance, which may be further rein-
forced by harmony and timbre. Once more Koestenbaum’s comments are
thought-provoking. He writes:
10 Susan McClary, ‘Of Patriarchs . . . and Matriarchs, Too’, Musical Times, vol. 135, no. 1816,
June 1994, 364–9.
11 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire
(London: GMP Publishers, 1993), p. 14.
12 In a private interview with the author, 2 April 1996.
13 Jon Vickers, ‘Jon Vickers on Peter Grimes’, Opera, August 1984, 835–43.
8 INTRODUCTION

The break between registers . . . is the place within one voice where the split
between male and female occurs. The failure to disguise the gendered break is
fatal to the art of ‘natural’ voice production . . . The register line, like the colour
line, the gender line, or the hetero/homo line, can be crossed only if the trans-
gressor pretends that no journey has taken place. By coming out gays provoke
seismic shudders in the System-of-the-Line, just as, by revealing the register
break, a singer exposes the fault lines inside a body that pretends to be only
masculine or feminine.14
Another peculiar quality of Pears’s tone was his reputedly unreliable pitch-
centring. Responding to my suggestion that Pears’s idiosyncratic timbre could
lead to a sense of ‘out-of-tuneness’, Hemsley explained this by recalling research
which he had undertaken with Professor Meyer Eppler during the 1950s into the
way the pitch or colour of a sung note might vary according to harmonic context.
It is this which Hemsley believes accounts for the tension between the vocal line
and accompaniment which might be perceived as poor intonation. Hemsley
described Britten’s technique of initially establishing the harmonic colour of the
music through the vocal line which would only later be complemented by the
accompaniment. Whereas modern singers customarily accommodate their pitch
to the orchestra, Pears did not soften the tension between melody and accompa-
niment; instead he emphasised this conflict for dramatic ends.
Some observers have noted that Pears’s tone quality was surprisingly similar to
that of Britten’s mother, Edith Britten, who was a talented mezzo-soprano.
Recalling how the young Britten used to accompany her during music-making
evenings at the family home, Basil Reeves described: ‘His mother’s voice and Peter
Pears’s voice were fantastically similar . . . That’s the first thing I noticed . . . the
same voice [Britten] couldn’t miss it. And I told this to Beth, and she said, “My
God, yes!” ’15 Britten’s sister, Beth, also remembered this incident: ‘There was
something about Peter’s voice which gave Ben what he needed. A close friend of
Ben’s who had known my mother well and heard her voice, remarked to me
recently, that Peter’s voice was very like my mother’s.’16 Hemsley suggests that
Pears’s physique and register were not naturally those of a tenor but that his voice,
which lacked an upper range, lay more comfortably within the baritone range.
This suggests that both Britten and Pears deliberately cultivated a specific vocal
colour for musical or dramatic purposes, and sheds interesting light on the fact
that the part of Peter Grimes was originally intended to be sung by a baritone.
Furthermore, Lucie Manén, who became Pears’s vocal tutor in 1965, told
Hemsley that Pears ‘had a much more heroic voice than he ever allowed himself to
use, but it was a psychological thing – he didn’t want to sing like that. He could
have sung much heavier roles, but he didn’t want to.’17 Were Britten and Pears
deliberately striving for an ‘ideal’ timbre, one which was possibly related to
14 Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, pp. 166–7.
15 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 122
(subsequently referred to as HC).
16 Beth Britten, My Brother Benjamin (Buckinghamshire: The Kensal Press, 1986), p. 109.
17 HC, p. 471.
INTRODUCTION 9

Britten’s subconscious recollection of his mother’s voice? Such a search for an


‘ideal’ might be made permanent through the ‘definitive’ Decca recordings made
by Britten, Pears and the English Opera Group. Interestingly, Hemsley remem-
bered that when Pears returned from his first course of lessons with Manén,
Britten was overwhelmed by the changes in Pears’s vocal technique and quality
and expressed his desire to rerecord all his works ‘the way Pears sang now’.18
It is certainly true that Pears acquired a sense of ‘ownership’ of certain roles in
Britten’s operas, and this was enhanced by the composer’s reluctance to see any
one else take Pears’s parts. Keith Grant, who was the manager at Covent Garden,
remembers: ‘He grew up reconciled to different interpretations, except perhaps in
the case of Pears’s roles, where he was bound always to hear his friend’s voice,
technique and interpretive powers, simply because the parts had been written
with Pears’s attitudes in mind.’19 Britten’s occasional hostility and prejudice was
experienced by other singers, including Robert Tear, who as a young tenor was
conscious that he was being ‘groomed’ as Pears’s successor. When Tear later felt
the need to disentangle himself from the Aldeburgh circle in order to establish his
own musical identity, he consequently found himself condemned and shunned
by the Britten clique.20 More recently, singers have been able to temper Pears’s
hold on these parts; Philip Langridge, one of the foremost Britten interpreters
today, writes: ‘Now that P.P. is no longer with us, Ben’s music has become like any
other composer’s music, and can be performed by anyone with the ability to sing
sensitively.’21
The careers of Britten and Pears were intricately entwined and co-dependent.
Pears’s voice was an unceasing inspiration to Britten; as early as 1944, he wrote:
‘I’m writing some lovely things for you to sing – I write every note with your heav-
enly voice in my head.’22 At the end of his career Pears told Alan Blyth: ‘He made
my career, by all the wonderful works he wrote for me. On the other hand, he said
he would not have achieved anything without me.’23 Pears achieved little operatic
success outside the roles created for him by Britten and sang in few operas by
other composers. Inevitably, there was occasionally some antagonism between
singer and composer – for example, when Pears’s determination to sing a partic-
ular role conflicted with Britten’s insistence that he should sing another. Pears was
reluctant to take the part of Essex in Gloriana, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
he insisted on singing Flute/Thisbe, rather than Britten’s preferred Lysander. It is
perhaps significant that the dramatic tension in these two works is less effective
than in Britten’s other operas, and it raises the question of whether Pears’s voice,
and its potency, was ‘inner’ or ‘outer’. Did Pears serve Britten by dramatising the
possibilities encoded in his music or did he act as his alter ego, literally singing ‘for
him’? Is he the body which inspires or the voice which communicates? Either way,
18 Hemsley, HC, p. 471.
19 Blyth, Remembering Britten, p. 141.
20 HC, p. 507.
21 Private letter to the author, 20 April 1995.
22 Britten to Pears, 11 February 1944, LL, vol. 2, p. 1187.
23 Blyth, Remembering Britten, p. 23.
10 INTRODUCTION

the relationship between singer and composer was intense and must have at times
been claustrophobic. The burden of expressive responsibility which fell upon
Pears, combined with the sexual tension between creator and performer, must
have contributed to the strained air of unease, even neuroticism, which is reputed
to have characterised Aldeburgh at this time. Each musical performance served to
confirm and consummate their personal and professional dependency, rein-
forcing the latent sexuality in the discourse between singer, composer and
listener. As Koestenbaum writes:
The listener’s inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her
own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior. Her voice enters me, makes me a
‘me’, an interior, by virtue of the fact that I have been entered. The singer,
through osmosis, passes through the self’s porous membrane, and discredits the
fiction that bodies are separate, boundaried packages. The singer destroys the
division between her body and our own, for her sound enters our system.24
The act of singing thus becomes a sexual act in which the distinction between the
active and passive partner, or the singer and audience, is confused. The tension
arising from this situation is particularly powerful when, as in the case of Britten
and Pears, the composer who creates his music for the singer, then finds himself the
recipient of his own gift of love. It would appear that for Britten, Pears’s presence
alone was sufficient, even essential, to fill the ‘psycho-tension’ of a carefully
constructed operatic role. If Britten’s music could encode the ‘unspeakable’ elements
in the drama, then Pears could effectively communicate the ‘unspoken words’.
‘Silence’ – verbal, musical, spatial – is indeed at the heart of Britten’s expressive
method. His operas proliferate with mute or semi-articulate characters who are
unable to give voice to their anxieties or relieve their psychological distress. In
these cases the music must bear the dramatic burden. For example, the only utter-
ance of the mute apprentice in Peter Grimes is a symbolic scream, descending
from a highly pitched C (a pitch often representing purity or innocence in
Britten’s music), which accompanies his accidental fall down the side of the cliff,
and symbolises his metaphorical ‘fall’ at the hands of Grimes. It is in the orchestral
interludes that the relationship between Grimes and his apprentice is more fully
disclosed, as in the passacaglia where the repetitive structure matches the obses-
sive circling of Grimes’s mind, and where the boy is finally given a ‘voice’, in the
form of the viola melody. Grimes himself is only semi-articulate: despite his
sporadic visionary outbursts it is his inability to adequately express his desires
which leads to his defeat at the hands of the Borough. In Billy Budd Britten
exploits the presence in Melville’s text of an ‘unspeakable’ element which is
specifically associated with Claggart but which is also manifest in Billy’s stutter
and which ultimately prevents him from speaking out and saving himself from
death. The hidden exchange between Budd and Vere is represented by the ‘inter-
view chords’, a harmonic sequence which seems to offer the listener an explica-
tion of events and motives but which in fact evades all attempts at conclusive

24 Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, p. 43.


INTRODUCTION 11

definition. In Death in Venice Aschenbach is a writer who, though endowed with a


comprehensive command of words, cannot create. Tadzio is literally mute, and is
characterised by an erotic, oriental musical motif. Verbal exchange between man
and boy is impossible, thus emphasising the gap between the artist who creates
beauty and the boy who is the corporeal embodiment of that beauty.
Aschenbach’s passion can only be expressed through music, but the all-
embracing and circular nature of his opening twelve-tone melody suggests that
the promise of freedom which this music proffers is illusory: Aschenbach will not
be able to escape from his desires and the medium which appears to offer him
freedom and liberty paradoxically contains the seeds of his destruction.
Britten appears to have had faith in the power of music to take over when words
fail. In the absence of words, music may explain and justify why characters act as
they do. However, there are moments when there is a sudden silencing of the
musical discourse and Britten employs the unaccompanied spoken word, such as
the concluding words of Balstrode in Peter Grimes and Elizabeth’s dying recollec-
tions in Gloriana. These instances may represent the ‘failure’ of music’s power to
redeem or mitigate the textual violence or tension at a particular stage in Britten’s
on-going dramatic and personal narrative. The musical narrative, the potential
healing power of which has perhaps been momentarily suggested within the indi-
vidual work – as in the passacaglia in Peter Grimes or the lute song in Gloriana –
must be temporarily silenced, to be resumed in subsequent compositions.
The literal silences in Britten’s operas are often supported by figurative silences
or ‘absences’ represented by recurring symbols, such as the locked room, or
empty space. These include Grimes’s hut which the mob find unoccupied, the
empty shop in Albert Herring from which Albert has fled, Captain Vere’s chamber
in Billy Budd where the unseen interview between Vere and Billy takes place, and
the ‘haunted’ room in Owen Wingrave where Owen meets his death. These
absences are reminiscent of the homosexual ‘closet’ and are potent sites for an
examination of the conflicts between the known and the unknown, the explicit
and implicit, and for the dramatisation of the ‘open secret’, which is integral to the
tensions surrounding homosexual identity.
Exploiting music’s ability to speak without words, Britten was able to infuse his
musical discourse with a homosexual dynamic. The act of hiding one’s true
nature might make life difficult and unsatisfying, and destroy one’s sense of
identity, but the revelation of one’s sexuality in musical terms could enable the
composer to restore his identity, while at the same time protecting himself from
the inevitable social hostility which would accompany more explicit disclosure. In
Epistomology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposes that remaining
‘closeted’ is a way of revealing much about speech acts in general; by ‘not saying’
the individual is in fact making a specific speech act, an act of silence.25 In this way,
‘closetedness’ is the opposition of what is said and what is not said, and silence
may be as informative as speech; similarly, music may speak in the place of words.

25 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistomology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), p. 3.
12 INTRODUCTION

Similarly, Koestenbaum considers the relationship between homosexuality,


silence and ‘voice’, describing opera as the medium through which the homo-
sexual, marginalised and silenced by a society which classifies him as sick and
diseased, can regain his voice:
Our ability to speak for ourselves has been fore-shortened; we turn to opera
because we need to breathe again, to regain a right we imagine is godgiven – the
right to open.26
If you speak a secret. you lose it; it becomes public. But if you sing the secret, you
magically manage to keep it private, for singing is a barricade of codes.27
He explores the notion of vocal ‘crisis’, which may indicate physical injuries
sustained by the voice but can also imply an articulative crisis:
in her [the singer’s] interruption, hear the imagined nature of homosexuality as
a rip in meaning, in coherence, in cultural systems, in vocal consistency. Homo-
sexuality isn’t intrinsically an interruption; but society has characterised it as a
break and a schism, and gay people, who are molded in the image of crisis and
emergency, who are associated with ‘crisis’ . . . may begin to identify with crisis
and to hear the interrupted voice as our echo.28
In this way, the fragmentation of melody, harmony, textual syntax and vocal
production in a scene such as Grimes’s ‘mad’ soliloquy is a typical representation
of the interruptions in performance which serve as ciphers for the disruptions and
schisms which homosexuality provokes within both the social system and the
individual. Paradoxically, those characters who do speak out suffer the same fate
as those who remain silent. Thus, Lucretia, Miles and Owen Wingrave all find that
their ‘bravery’ is rewarded with death, and the identification of public confession
with self-sacrifice is intensified by their fates.
In her article ‘Lesbian Fugue: Ethyl Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts’,29 Elizabeth
Wood investigates issues which might illuminate Britten’s case. She suggests that
as a socially oppressed lesbian composer, Smyth was forced to seek an alternative
way to reveal the truth about her life in her operas. Both her libretto texts and her
‘Memoirs’ are characterised by an obsessive repetition of phrases and stories, and
Wood considers Smyth’s music to be an attempt to shape the chaos and disorder
of her existence into a coherent and meaningful form, to manage her anxieties and
to create a structure in which she could establish a stable identity. In the face of
cultural and social repression, Smyth lacked an acceptable format within which to
express the nature of her forbidden desire. Consequently, Wood believes that
Smyth manipulated the plots of her apparently heterosexual librettos to conceal
and camouflage their autobiographical relevance, while at the same time allowing
the musical scores to insinuate or reveal those elements which the texts attempted
to hide. Encoding her lesbian desire in the instrumental music, Smyth

26 Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, p. 16.


27 Ibid., p. 157.
28 Ibid., p. 128.
29 In Solie, Musicology and Difference, pp. 164–83.
INTRODUCTION 13

simultaneously revealed and concealed her sexual experience, and Wood


concludes that we need a new interpretative strategy in order to read both text and
music satisfactorily.
I hope to demonstrate that, like Smyth, Britten encoded in his musical scores
the ‘unspeakable’ elements of his literary and personal narratives. In his operas, a
pre-existing text would be carefully transformed and set to music; ideally the text
and music might work together, the text bringing specificity to the music, and the
music acting as a ‘subtext’, an interlinear version of the libretto which simulta-
neously comments on, reinforces and contradicts the verbal text. However,
frequently the dramatic and musical endings of Britten’s operas are non-
congruent. Despite its abstract nature, music generates its own tensions which
must be resolved, and Britten is sometimes able to exploit this compulsory
musical resolution to suggest a conciliatory conclusion regardless of the inconclu-
siveness of the dramatic text, particularly when dramatic closure has occurred
without psychological resolution. Yet there is a danger that this ‘controlled’ ambi-
guity may degenerate into inconsistency or sheer vagueness. ‘Contrived’ dramatic
closure may appear to be upheld by a more satisfying musical closure, but
although the musical finality of any Britten opera is adequate in terms of its own
structure, it may never completely overcome the inconsistencies in Britten’s
presentation of character and drama, nor the audience’s discomfort at the conclu-
sion. Furthermore, occasionally purely musical tensions may be left unresolved,
thereby ensuring that the dialectic is continued beyond the parameters of the
individual opera, and is re-examined either in subsequent operas or separate
instrumental or chamber works. In this way, ideas which spring initially from the
written word are explored through the sung word, with musical support, before
being transferred to a purely musical context, as Britten searches for resolution
beyond the restrictions of language.
Smyth and Britten both appear to equivocate between an acceptance of the
‘disorder’ of their personal lives and a naive desire for coherence. Their experi-
ence as sexually repressed individuals contrasts with that of other, heterosexual,
composers who have similarly attempted to achieve the resolution and closure
which is absent from their personal lives, through their art. For example, Leos
Janácek’s infatuation with Kamila Stösslová, which began when he was
sixty-three years old and she only twenty-five, combined with the rediscovery of a
historically accurate national folk idiom, probably contributed to the
revitalisation of his creative impulses and the profound transformation of his
compositional style and aesthetic. The result was a series of operas written during
the last ten years of his life that are an unambiguous celebration of his uncon-
summated passion. In contrast, it appears to be impossible for the homosexual
composer to glorify his or her sexuality in opera. For Koestenbaum, opera is
merely a substitute for the sexual frustration and spiritual failure of reality. He
writes: ‘Opera has always suited those who have failed at love.’30

30 Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, p. 118.


14 INTRODUCTION

Conversely, Sam Abel, in Opera in the Flesh, refutes the suggestion that opera is
a protective closet or an unreal space where the homosexual can hide from hatred
and stave off inevitable dissolution and death:
Opera, in its glorious paradoxical tangle of undifferentiated desire, provides a
fruitful outlet for both minoritising and universalising impulses . . . Opera
offers a world of unique emotional intensity, free from the rules and inhibitions
of ‘normal’ society . . . The illicit desire of opera, socially sanctioned by elite
patronage and government subsidy, becomes a way, not to substitute for failed
love, but instead to legitimise our ‘deviant’ desire and to reinforce our brilliantly
diverse and freewheeling sexual lives.31
Despite this, Abel is unable to find any convincing examples of positive represen-
tation of homosexuality in opera.32
Can art, and more specifically opera, serve as a ‘therapeutic model’ for life? In
what way might the examination of these issues enhance our understanding of
Britten’s operas and help us to evaluate their artistic value? Among some of the
early commentators on Britten’s music there appears to have been a deliberate
avoidance of discussion of the sexual elements in Britten’s operas. Even quite
recently, Donald Mitchell, the composer’s life-long friend, colleague and
publisher, has disputed the significance of the homosexual dynamic in Britten’s
work, advising the listener to retain:
a useful sense of proportion: and above all, not to attribute to the composer an
intent which I think he did not have. He did not, in my view, write Grimes as a
protest against, or even as a reflection of, the prevailing attitudes to homosexu-
ality in England up to the 1950s and 1960s. Others whose seriousness I respect,
take a different view . . .
I shall regret it if we succeed in convincing ourselves that Britten’s persistent
interest in the relationship between non-conformist attitudes and the social
antagonism they arouse should be attributed solely to his homosexuality. It is
not Britten’s sexual constitution that we have dramatised or musicalized before
us, but the dramatization in an extra-ordinary variety of forms of one of the
great human topics which is under perpetual debate: the pressures and persua-
sion to conform on those who assert different values and attitudes from those
held by society at large.33
Mitchell assumes that music is ‘expressive’ but denies that Britten’s music is pecu-
liarly expressive of the condition of an ostracised minority, i.e. the homosexual

31 Sam Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance (Colorado: Westview Press,
1996), pp. 63–4.
32 Citing Wagner as a possible example, Abel proposes that: ‘Above all, it is Wagner’s blatant
evocation of sexual transgression in his music-dramas that labels his work as queer . . . more
than any other work, it is the rampant sexual ambiguity of Parsifal that makes Wagner an
inevitable locus of transgressive sexuality.’ However, he acknowledges: ‘Of course no one is
supposed to mention this desire openly . . . Wagner’s world in Parsifal evokes on its surface a
“normal” heterosexuality’ (Abel, Opera in the Flesh, pp. 68–9).
33 Donald Mitchell, Cradles of the New – Writings on Music 1951–91, ed. Mervyn Cooke
(London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 312.
INTRODUCTION 15

community. His reluctance to allow that Britten’s homosexuality may in some


way find expression in the composer’s music is typical of the critical attitude of
those commentators who, following Mitchell’s own example, have consistently
ignored this aspect of Britten’s life and work. A contrasting view is proposed by
Hans Keller. Defending Britten against accusations that the presentation of
homosexuality, paedophilia and pacifism in his operas weakens their artistic value
Keller, whose eulogistic 1952 publication with Mitchell, Benjamin Britten: A
Commentary on His Works from a Group of Specialists, was partly responsible for
provoking a critical backlash, writes:
Even Britten’s homosexuality was drawn in in order to explain both such
odd-women-in as Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes or Lucretia herself, or indeed his
musical preoccupation with boys . . . though such critical whisper was not
without malice and usually sprang from ill-repressed homosexuality on the part
of the observers who simply could not bear the sound of the music of a straight-
forwardly homosexual genius.34
Keller’s comment is extraordinary for, alone among critics at this time, he appears
to unambiguously identify in Britten’s music the presence of specifically homo-
sexual elements, and to imply that Britten’s homosexuality may in fact have
conferred upon him unique creative advantages, advantages which are in no way
related to a political purpose: ‘his psychosexual organisation placed him in the
privileged position of discovering and musically defining new truths, which,
otherwise, might not have been accessible to him at all’.35
The incompatibility of these opposing interpretations has been exacerbated by
Britten’s own evasiveness and his inclination to avoid all discussion that went
beyond purely musical resources and techniques. Some recent commentators
have condemned his unwillingness to commit himself openly to the homosexual
‘cause’. For example, the writer Colin Innes has remarked: ‘The theme and
tragedy of Peter Grimes is homosexuality and, as such, the treatment is quite
moving if a bit watery.’36 More especially Philip Brett, whose 1977 article ‘Britten
and Grimes’37 was one of the first to openly confront the issue of homosexuality in
Britten’s work, writes: ‘What was the point of all those coded messages about
homosexual oppression and pederasty if they prompted only further denial of
their meaning, further entrenchment of the universalism and transcendentalism
that make Western classical music a weak substitute for religion in capitalist
society and divorce it from meaning?’38 Brett believes that Britten was in a unique
position to positively alter both the portrayal of the homosexual in art and his
actual experience in life, and thus he condemns Britten’s refusal to promote a
political, homosexual agenda in his work. Brett considers that Britten evaded his
responsibilities thereby achieving artistic, material and social success, while

34 Hans Keller, ‘Introduction’, DH, p. xxv.


35 DH, p. xxvi.
36 Quoted in Philip Brett, ‘Britten’s Dream’, in Solie, Musicology and Difference, p. 264.
37 Brett, ‘Britten and Grimes’, Musical Times, vol. 118, 1977, 995–1000.
38 Brett, ‘Musicality, Essentialism and the Closet’, in Queering the Pitch, pp. 9–26.
16 INTRODUCTION

avoiding the persecution and rejection which would have been inevitable had he
adopted a more confrontational stance in his life and art. His judgment echoes
that of Auden who also believed that Britten had chosen success at the expense of
psychological truth: ‘It was what seemed Ben’s lack of daring, his desire to be the
Establishment that irritated Wystan most; the playing it safe, settling for amia-
bility as a guard against his queerity, but insisting on the innocence of adolescence
as if this was a courageous attitude.’39 Brett suggests that the price which Britten
paid for this self-repression was a life-long fear of ‘oppression’, which he
perceived as an ever-present threat, and more seriously, the internalisation of this
oppression and guilt. Furthermore, he deems that by disguising and diluting his
subject matter Britten risked obscuring his theme, so that it was indistinguishable
or confusing for his audience.
Brett appears to believe that the art’s primary purpose is to function as moral
propaganda; consequently, he finds Britten’s ‘discretion model’ of reduced
artistic value. His hypothesis is reminiscent of Freud’s theories of the sublimation
by the artist of his repressed desires in his art. Freud believed that whereas the
neurotic repeats his obsessions unaltered, the artist continually seeks new solu-
tions, and in this way, the artist may be able to productively transfer potentially
disruptive and destructive forces into a socially acceptable artistic medium.
However, he may subsequently discover that his art is not a ‘copy’ of reality, and
that the solutions which he achieves in artistic terms are ultimately an unsatisfac-
tory substitute for resolution in life. Brett apparently agrees with Freud that it is
possible to organise one’s personal anxieties into an ordered work of art which
provides creator and audience with explicit political or moral directions which
may be acted upon. However, the homosexual composer and writer, Ned Rorem,
contradicts this view: ‘Art can make political statements, but it cannot have polit-
ical effect. Art is not moral, it is something else. It cannot change us, but it can
reinforce our convictions and help us get through life.’40 Despite his apparent
faith in opera’s redemptive power, Koestenbaum acknowledges that ultimately
music cannot liberate the individual who is burdened with guilt and self-
loathing:
Homosexuality is a way of singing. I can’t be gay, I can only ‘sing’ it . . . The
singer and the homosexual each appear to be a closed-off cabinet of urges. But
the body that sings and the body that calls itself homosexual are not as sealed as
we think. Nor are they as free.41
Voice aims to purify and transcend; homosexuality is the dirt that singing, a
detergent, must scour. In this sense, voice and homosexuality are adversaries:
voice is evolutionary, homosexuality is devolutionary; voice is transcendent,
homosexuality is grounded.42
Queers have placed a trust in coming out, a process of vocalisation. Coming

39 Leonard Kirsten, in HC, p. 396.


40 In conversation with Leonard D. Mass in Queering the Pitch, pp. 85–114.
41 Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, p. 156.
42 Ibid., p. 169.
INTRODUCTION 17

out, we define voice as openness, self-knowledge, clarity. And yet mystery does
not end when coming out begins.43
It is this ‘mystery’ which is the essence of Britten’s art. The unsettling ambiguity of
his operas need not be interpreted as creative or moral failure; indeed, the practice
of maintaining many contradictory elements in permanent suspension may be
artistically and personally advantageous.

To return to McPhee’s advice that Britten should attempt to formulate a ‘more


interesting idiom’, I hope to demonstrate in the subsequent chapters that Britten
did indeed develop a method of opera composition which encompassed the entire
creative process from choice of source text to first performance. In his operas,
intellectual, political and social aspects interact with personal and sexual
elements. Part of opera’s allure may have been its status as a hybrid art form, one
that protected Britten from the need to declare his allegiances and enabled him to
maintain his belief in the potential offered by various, potentially antagonistic
strands. Opera allowed him to hover between definitions, sustaining a series of
polarities – public and private, male and female, youth and age, role-playing and
sincerity, secrecy and disclosure, music and language. Ultimately the listener must
decide whether the dualities and ambiguities which are present in Britten’s operas
are a positive creative force or are merely a negative outcome of the composer’s
refusal or inability to separate the conflicts of his dramas from his personal
dilemmas. I shall attempt to show that through opera Britten endeavoured to
transfer and transmute the problems of his life into art. He trusted his music to
‘speak out’ but at the same time refused to bring the ‘real’ subject into sharp focus,
and the resulting approximations and hints, twisted and encoded messages, both
tantalise and exasperate.

43 Ibid., p. 158.
2
Paul Bunyan

Once in a while the odd thing happens,


Once in a while the dream comes true,
And the whole pattern of life is altered,
Once in a while the moon turns blue. W. H. Auden, Paul Bunyan
I’ve seen & am seeing Auden a lot, & our immediate future is locked with his, it
seems. Benjamin Britten1

When Benjamin Britten met W. H. Auden for the first time, on 5 July 1935, the
young composer was immediately awed by the charismatic poet who, seven years
Britten’s senior, was already a renowned writer, intellectual, left-wing spokesman
and homosexual. Soon after returning to England to take up a teaching post in
1930, after two years in Germany, Auden had become involved with Rupert
Doone’s Group Theatre, and in 1935 began writing for the GPO Film Unit. When
he heard the incidental music that Britten had written for the song ‘O
lurcher-loving collier’ for the film Coal Face, Auden was convinced that he had
found the composer to complete the ‘group’ of writers, poets, directors and
designers who were collaborating on various projects at this time. He praised
Britten’s: ‘extra-ordinary musical sensitivity in relation to the English language.
One had always been told that English was an impossible tongue to set or sing . . .
Here at last was a composer who set the language without undue distortion.’2
Britten was similarly filled with admiration for the poet; he wrote to Marjorie
Fass, 30 December 1935: ‘I haven’t had time to read much of the Auden yet – but I
feel that most of it is definitely going to be for me – knowing him as I do, & feeling
quite a lot in sympathy with his ideals. I am working with him on various projects
outside films – it is a treat to have someone of his calibre to think with!’3 However,
he was somewhat oppressed by Auden’s intellectual dominance, recording in his
diary: ‘Spend day with Coldstream and Auden . . . I always feel very young and
stupid with these brains – I mostly sit silent when they hold forth about subjects in
general. What brains!’4 Auden’s guiding influence was immediately evident. Until
this time Britten had shown little public interest in politics; now, introduced into

1 3 September 1939, to Barbara Britten; LL, vol. 2, p. 696.


2 HC, p. 67.
3 LL, vol. 1, p. 391.
4 17 September 1935; ibid., pp. 380–1.
PAUL BUNYAN 19

a circle of intellectuals and artists that included among others Basil Wright,
Rupert Doone, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, he adopted a more
left-wing position and even began to criticise music from a political standpoint.
For example, after a performance of Elgar’s First Symphony at the 1935 Prome-
nade concert season, Britten remarked, ‘I swear that only in Imperialistic England
could such a work be tolerated.’5
However, Auden’s encouragement that he should openly embrace political
radicalism, and should acknowledge his own homosexuality, left Britten exposed
and vulnerable to attack from without and within, and probably provoked feel-
ings of self-doubt and guilt. At this stage, Britten’s ethics were too conventional
for him to come to terms with what he saw as a ‘deviation’; and even Auden, who
in public blazoned the ideas of the man free from social and sexual repression,
expressed in private the belief that his sexuality was an inner disorder which was
symptomatic of a deeper failure of intimacy and trust.
In The New Statesman, 15 October 1932, Auden had declared: ‘It would be
presumptuous of me to pretend to know what the proletariat think of Commu-
nism; but its increasing attraction for the bourgeois lies in its demand for self
surrender for those individuals who, isolated, feel themselves emotionally at sea.’6
By 1939 there was a growing feeling among Britten’s contemporaries that Europe
was no place for an artist to live, and that a brighter future lay in the New World, a
fresh continent where the possibility of recovering a lost world of childhood inno-
cence and freedom from persecution beckoned. In many cases, political and
sexual factors mingled, and Britten’s own feelings on this matter were probably
strengthened by his homosexuality, which heightened his awareness of intoler-
ance and alienation.7 The ‘stranger’ or ‘outsider’ is a figure who reappears in many
Auden poems, such as ‘The Watershed’ and ‘Look, stranger’ (the latter set by
Britten in the song-cycle On This Island). Likewise, Britten’s subsequent operatic
works were frequently to explore the struggle between the individual and the
mass, between self-integrity and the desire to belong to, and be accepted by, the
social group. An increasing sense of personal and political ‘isolation’ may have
contributed to Britten’s decision to leave England and embark upon a new life in
America, a feeling strengthened by the disillusioned departure of Auden and

5 HC, pp. 68–9.


6 Edward Mendelson (ed.), The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings
1927–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 314–15.
7 Britten’s diary entries from the late 1930s hint at the guilt and anxiety which his sexuality
provoked. For example, he described his friendship with the thirteen-year-old Piers
Dunkerley: ‘He is a nice thing and I am very fond of him – thank heaven not sexually, but I
am getting to such a condition that I am lost without some children (of either sex) near me’
(LL, vol. 1, p. 403). The diary entry for 3 July 1937 recounts a visit with Isherwood to the
Jermyn Street Turkish Baths, a well-known meeting place for homosexuals, and suggests
that Britten was indeed coming to terms with his sexuality: ‘get slightly drunk, & then at
mid-night go to Jermyn St. & have a Turkish Bath. Very pleasant sensations – completely
sensuous, but very healthy. It is extraordinary to find one’s resistance to anything gradually
weakening’ (LL, vol. 1, p. 18).
20 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Isherwood three months previously. Yet when Britten, accompanied by Peters


Pears, sailed from Southampton for North America on 29 April 1939, his motives
and hopes were probably various, somewhat confused and ambiguous. Undoubt-
edly the acclaim that his musical mentor, Frank Bridge, had received after his
American visit of 1923, and the success of Pears’s tour in 1937, encouraged Britten
to make his own voyage. Moreover, as he explained to Lord Harewood in a BBC
interview, 1960: ‘I was very much influenced by Auden . . . He went to America, I
think it was ’38, early ’39, and I went soon after. I think it wouldn’t be too much
oversimplifying the situation to say that many of us young people at that time felt
that Europe was more or less finished . . . I went to America and felt that I would
make my future there.’8

Thirty-five years separate the first and second performances of Paul Bunyan, and
this ‘absence’, in score and on the stage, has given rise to much curiosity and spec-
ulation about Britten’s earliest opera. Premièred in May 1941 in Brander
Matthews Hall, Columbia University, by the Columbia Theatre Associates, this
‘choral operetta’ on the quintessentially American theme of the legend of the
pioneer lumberman, Paul Bunyan (perhaps intended by composer and librettist,
W. H. Auden, as a naïve offering of their artistic credentials for American citizen-
ship), was subsequently ‘suppressed’ by Britten. It remained unheard and unseen
until 1974 – attracting much speculative comment concerning its status as a ‘trial
run’ for Britten’s later, successful operas. Following Auden’s death the preceding
year, the composer was persuaded to unearth this youthful work from the
oblivion where it had languished, and to revise several excerpts for performance at
the 1974 Aldeburgh Festival. The success of these excerpts encouraged Britten to
undertake more extensive revisions: the fully revised version was broadcast in a
concert performance by the BBC in February 1976, and staged at the Aldeburgh
Festival later that year.
The critical reception which Paul Bunyan received in 1941 was rather hostile:
although the composer’s technical deftness and skill in handling a variety of
musical forms and idioms were admired, the operetta was judged to be weak in
terms of the overall structure and theme. Contemporary critics disparaged
Auden’s characterisation and plot, Virgil Thomson writing in New York Herald
Tribune on 6 May 1941:
What any composer thinks he can do with a text like ‘Paul Bunyan’ is beyond
me. It offers no characters and no plot. It is presumably, therefore, an allegory
or a morality; and as either it is, I assure you, utterly obscure and tenuous. In
addition, its language is not the direct speech of dramatic poetry. It is deliberate
parody . . . Every sentence is indirect and therefore unsuited to musical decla-
mation. Every dramatic moment has the afflatus taken out of it before the
composer can get it over to the audience . . . it never did get going, and I never
did figure out the theme.9

8 LL, vol. 1, p. 619.


9 LL, vol. 2, p. 916.
PAUL BUNYAN 21

Writing in New York Times, Olin Downes echoed some of Thomson’s criticisms:
the libretto . . . seems to wander from one to another idea, without conviction or
cohesion. In the plot, as in the score, is a little of everything, a little symbolism
and uplift, a bit of socialism and of modern satire, and gags and jokes of a Holly-
wood sort, or of rather cheap musical comedy . . . the operetta does not have a
convincing flavor of inevitable conglomeration. It seems a rather poor sort of a
bid for success, and possibly the beguilement of Americans.10
Downes did, however, find more than Thomson to praise in the musical score:
Mr. Britten . . . is a very clever young man, who can provide something in any
style or taste desired by the patron. He scores with astonishing expertness and
fluency. He has a melodic vein which is perfectly plausible . . . He shows what
could be done by a composer whose purpose was deeper and more consistent
than Mr. Britten’s appears to be. The flexibility and modernity of the technical
treatment were refreshing. That they are derivative does not alter this salient
and striking fact . . . He knows how to set a text, how to orchestrate in an
economical and telling fashion; how to underscore dialogue with orchestral
commentary . . . Then the music begins to fail, the set numbers to become
wearisome and the listeners to tire of ingenuities which are seen before the
evening is over as platitudes and notion-counter devices of salesmanship.
While it may be extreme to suggest that there are no characters and no plot, the
charge that the libretto is incoherent may be justified. Paul Bunyan grows from
the music for film and theatre which Britten composed for Auden during the
1930s, and it is true that Paul Bunyan lacks the obsessive focus characteristic of
Britten’s later operas. It is essentially a ‘choric opera’ whose ‘message’ is rooted in
collective rather individual expression; indeed, the depiction of the ‘chorus as
protagonist’ looks forward to the dramatic representation of the power of the
choric community in Peter Grimes and Albert Herring.11
The operetta is constructed as a series of episodes rather than as a cumulative
drama. Britten uses one predominant motive to unite the fragmentary structure –
the simple, limpid, swinging gesture in C major which is sung in unison by the chorus
of Old Trees at the start of the Prologue. [Example 1] This lilting phrase evokes the
calm, seamless state of eternity which existed before man’s arrival on earth. The
repetition of this motif in E major at Fig. 1 establishes a tonal juxtaposition which will
be employed both melodically and harmonically throughout the opera (and
which assumes musico-dramatic significance throughout Britten’s works);
furthermore, it highlights the tension between the major/minor third interval
which is also an important motif. For example, the geese’s melody at Fig. 10 grows
from their opening chain (Fig. 5) of alternating major and minor thirds: the geese
are a step nearer to ‘consciousness’ and their melody presages man’s arrival:

10 New York Times, 5 May 1941; LL, vol. 2, p. 915.


11 In a programme note, the authors themselves downgraded the importance of the ‘soloists’,
describing the work as an operetta without ‘star roles’ (see Donald Mitchell, ‘The Origins,
Evolution and Metamorphosis of Paul Bunyan: Auden’s and Britten’s “American” Opera’,
in W. H. Auden, Paul Bunyan (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 121).
22 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Example 1

A man is a form of life


That dreams in order to act
And acts in order to dream.
The community is building a new world, discovering personal freedom,
learning to value the individual’s choices, to tolerate ‘difference’ and to protect
the ‘outsider’ against the words and pressures of the community. The Young
Trees, are bored and impatient for the growth towards consciousness. They are
dismissed by the Old Trees as ‘silly’, ‘crazy’ and ‘sick’; but as the Prologue
progresses, the modulation to E major (Figs. 13 and 16) implies that the Old Trees
must learn to accept the changes which they feel are being forced upon them:
CHORUS OF OLD TREES:
But once in a while the odd thing happens,
Once in a while the dream comes true,
And the whole pattern of life is altered,
Once in a while the moon turns blue.
SEMI-CHORUS OF OLD TREES:
We can’t pretend we like it, that it’s what we’d choose,
But what’s the point in fussing when one can’t refuse.
In this way, Britten uses a feature of the opera’s tonal and structural organisation
to translate into music the emotions of the text.12
Britten’s ability to transform a musical phrase (and thus its expressive or
emotional associations) by altering only a few small details, such as instrumenta-
tion, tempo and dynamics is illustrated at the end of the Old Trees’ third verse.
The pianissimo, plodding, scalic descent, ‘We like life to be slow’, is radically trans-
lated into a more rapid, marcato accompaniment for pizzicato strings, harp and
piano. As the scalic descent is converted into an emphatic vocal rise articulating

12 In the ‘Litany’ at the end of Act 2, the choral melody is formed from chains of thirds, and a
harmonic progression from A major to C major perfectly balances – musically and dramati-
cally – the move from C major to E major in the Prologue.
PAUL BUNYAN 23

the Young Trees’ agitated cries, ‘We do NOT want life to be slow’, so the dynamic
increases, culminating in the declaration, ‘We want to see things and go places’
(which is further emphasised by the use of syncopation in the accompaniment).
Britten’s command of both text-setting and musical characterisation is
displayed in this scene – for example, the elongated rhythm for the Young Tree’s
fortissimo cries ‘We’re bored’. Although he sometimes sets Auden’s complex
textual rhythms in direct imitation of ordinary speech, he does not avoid unnat-
ural stresses if the prosody or the emotional situation so demand. In this way, he
transforms the intonation and rhythm of speech into a ‘stylised’ melody of
memorable musical phrases which complements and conveys the meaning of the
text. A good example of this is the song of the two wild geese: the lengthening of
the final syllable of their phrase (Fig. 6) enhances the musical characterisation, for
this gesture recalls the geese’s opening wordless melody, and further contributes
to the overall cohesiveness of this section, as the chains of major and minor thirds
are harmonically and melodically related to the opening bars of the Prologue.
Thus, by developing a rudimentary musical feature, Britten suggests the ‘interme-
diary’ position of the geese, between the ‘preconscious’ trees and ‘conscious’ man,
and so prepares for man’s transformatory arrival.
Another aspect of the opera to be attacked by the early critics was Auden’s
characterisation of the eponymous ‘hero’, who was perceived to experience no
cumulative interaction or traditional development, but rather to be a static, and
therefore ‘undramatic’ definition of a ‘pure’ state of mind. Paul Bunyan has
grown to such a size that his appearance on stage is impractical. He is more than
just an adventurous individual who has conquered and opened up new country
without violence or bloodshed; rather he has become an embodiment or incarna-
tion of mankind’s spirit of conquest. Presented as a disembodied voice, his melo-
dramatic spoken text inevitably creates problems of musical and dramatic
integration.
Auden’s libretto lacks satisfactory links between its essentially self-contained
scenes, and this to some extent inhibits the development of narrative and char-
acter. Weaknesses in a spoken drama may, however, benefit an opera libretto
which can be arranged as ‘set-pieces’: the music can heighten the emotional
immediacy and rhetoric when continuity is missing in the drama. Britten’s music
for Paul Bunyan is divided throughout into clearly defined ‘numbers’. While
structural repetitions enhance the musical cohesion (for example, the return of
the Western Union Boy’s music at the end of Act 2 symmetrically balances the
opening act), Britten rejects Wagnerian ‘permanent melody’ for the classical
practice of separate musical numbers which crystallise and hold the emotion of
the drama at chosen moments, and exploit the contrasts of the text. This is
emphasised by the eclecticism of musical styles, which include the English ballad
form, jazz and blues, Italian grand opera, the musical comedy of Gilbert and
Sullivan, and the music theatre works of Brecht and Weill.
Stylistic juxtaposition may occur within a single number. In ‘The Fight’ in Act
2, Britten is not content with a mere replica of the Broadway idiom but contrasts
the ‘love theme’ of Slim and Tiny, which is derived from their earlier solo
24 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

numbers, with an intense Stravinskian ostinato pattern. Auden’s text draws atten-
tion to the opposition of material:
TINY: That I may be left alone
With my true love close to my heart.
(Thunder and shouts off.)
SLIM: Tiny.
TINY: Yes, dear.
SLIM: Did you hear a funny noise?
TINY: I did, but I don’t care.
This variety is endemic to the theme of the opera for it suggests that the raw
newness of America is essentially a miscellany of European fragments, an idea
which is reinforced by details such as the European origins of the lumberjacks.
The works composed by Britten in collaboration with Auden during their
early years in America embraced popular forms and pastiche. Indeed, even before
his departure for America Britten’s musical language had assimilated some
elements of the American popular idiom. In a letter to Enid and Montagu Slater,
29 December 1938, he declared, ‘I am now definitely into my ‘American’ period,
& nothing can stop me. I hum the tunes & mutter the words all day, & all my
ideas now seem to be that way too.’13 Similarly, he indicated his intention to
formulate an ‘authentic’ American voice in a letter to Ralph Hawkes, 7 December
1939: ‘PAUL BUNYAN is progressing well . . . It is very witty but nevertheless
serious in the fundamental idea. I have sketched one or two tunes already, a little
bit more serious than the Hedli tunes14 but very direct and simple, which is the
kind of style I propose to use throughout the work.’15 The Cabaret Songs,
composed in the style of classic American popular song, are predecessors of many
of the set pieces and Broadway-style choruses found in Paul Bunyan. The richly
chromatic melody and exaggerated vocal gestures of ‘Funeral Blues’ (which was
adapted from the number ‘Stop all the clocks’, written in June 1937 for Auden
and Isherwood’s play, The Ascent of F6), is a pastiche of the stoical lamentations
and flamboyant imagery of a blues lyric. It looks forward to the ‘Quartet of the
Defeated’ in Paul Bunyan, which tells of the hopes and perils involved when
forging civilisation from chaos, and whose bass rhythm is more funereal than
jazz-like:
TENOR SOLO:
Gold in the North came the blizzard to say,
I left my sweetheart at the break of day,
The gold ran out and my love grew grey.
You don’t know all, sir, you don’t know all.
The eclectic idioms of the Cabaret Songs and Paul Bunyan encompass both
humorous, light-hearted entertainment and more serious political and sexual

13 LL, vol. 1, p. 603.


14 The Cabaret Songs composed for the soprano, Hedli Anderson.
15 LL, vol. 2, p. 740.
PAUL BUNYAN 25

references. For example, Auden’s libretto contains much contemporary satire –


such as the revolutionary politics of the Young Trees:
CHORUS OF OLD TREES:
Reds.
CHORUS OF YOUNG TREES:
We are bored with standing still,
We want to see things and go places.
CHORUS OF OLD TREES:
Such nonsense. It’s only a phase.
They’re sick. They’re crazy.
This contrasts with the ‘Cooks’ Duet’ which comically parodies the affected style
of Italian grand opera.16 The text comments on the vulgarities of the advertising
culture which plays on man’s physical and commercial insecurities, and on the
vacuity of the glamourised dream-life represented by Hollywood and magazines:
SAM SHARKEY: The Best People are crazy about soups!
BEN BENNY: Beans are all the rage among the Higher Income
Groups!
Britten mimics the hypnotic quality of advertising slogans and clichés by his
use of drone-like intoning on a single pitch, a device which recurs in the ‘Litany’
where men, women and animals join together to ask for salvation, and the
animals are given the task of cataloguing a series of ‘Audenesque’ social ills:
FIDO, MOPPET and POPPET:
From a Pressure Group that says I am the Constitution,
From those who say Patriotism and mean Persecution,
From a Tolerance that is really inertia and delusion
CHORUS:
Save animals and men.
The realities of the present are thus contrasted with Paul Bunyan’s prophetic
dreams of man’s contented natural state, and in this way the satire contradicts the
epic, for Paul Bunyan brings man to a world he cannot enjoy.17
Although it is a ‘youthful’ work, there are many elements in Paul Bunyan that
would later become characteristic of Britten’s technique, such as the supremely
assured handling of an eclectic range of musical idioms and styles, and the richly
melodic vocal style. The skilful writing for large chorus and the imaginative
approach to orchestral textures and instrumental groupings (for example,
Inkslinger’s music is characterised by the absence of strings in the

16 This duet looks forward to the rustics’ music in Act 3 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
17 Peter Evans observes that the Litany epitomises a major problem resulting from the stylistic
and expressive eclecticism of Auden’s and Britten’s opera: the refrain – ‘Save animals and
men’ – ‘is of an unaffected, even touching, melodic simplicity, whereas the conceit of setting
a catalogue of abominations of modern life as a litany intoned by the three animals invites
titters that are difficult to reconcile with the sombre mood of valediction’ (Peter Evans, The
Music of Benjamin Britten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 103).
26 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

accompaniment) demonstrate Britten’s effortless technical facility and superb


dramatic awareness. Moreover, the innovative use of Far Eastern sonorities, tonal-
ities and textures – the pseudo-gamelan ensemble and layering of the Prologue –
look forward to the more extensive use of such techniques in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Death in Venice, The Prince of the Pagodas, and the church para-
bles.18 Most individual is the distinctive ‘harmonic voice’ which combines tradi-
tional tonal writing with more dissonant, astringent harmonies (for example, in
the ‘Mocking of Hel Helson’ the choral monotones strike obliquely against the
harmony thereby emphasising Helson’s position ‘outside’ the community).
More important, perhaps, than these musical features is the nascent appear-
ance of several dramatic themes and issues which would preoccupy Britten in
subsequent years. Auden professed to believe that ‘Opera . . . cannot present char-
acter in the novelist’s sense of the word, namely, people who are potentially good
and bad, active and passive, for music is immediate actuality and neither potenti-
ality nor passivity can live in its presence’.19 Auden’s conviction that the opera
libretto was a genre in which psychological complexity and self-deception were
impossible is, as I shall demonstrate in the following chapters, emphatically chal-
lenged by each of Britten’s subsequent librettos. Auden did believe, however, that
music could portray the relation of immediate and simultaneous states to one
another, and this is exemplified in Paul Bunyan by ‘Inkslinger’s Song’, where
Johnny reflects upon the precarious equilibrium between the simplicity of nature
and the sophistication of human culture. The form and melodic style of the song
is reminiscent of the Cabaret Songs but Britten employs a more complex
harmonic palette that boldly contrasts with the strict diatonicism of the narrator’s
preceding ballad interludes. The shifting modulations and chromaticism of the
accompaniment underline the intellectual sophistication of Inkslinger’s specula-
tions; the forlorn orchestral cadence of the opening bars (xylophone and celeste
supported by woodwind and harp) colours the number and is taken up by the
voice, which steadily grows in intensity from a subdued recitative style in the
opening verse into the expansive melody of the third stanza. The refrain which
concludes each strophe – ‘But I guess that a guy’s gotta eat’ – is harmonised by the
motif from the opening bars of the song. This motif is transformed at Fig. 6 into
the major mode and, accompanied by a radiant instrumental texture spanning
three octaves, expresses a Utopian vision which suggests that Inkslinger’s personal
predicament is transcended by the universal dilemma of the creative individual’s
responsibility and ‘usefulness’ to society. At this point Auden articulates the social
conscience of the 1930s:
INKSLINGER:
Oh, but where are those beautiful places
Where what you begin you complete,

18 For a full consideration of ‘orientalism’ in Britten’s music, see Mervyn Cooke, Britten and
the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (Woodbridge: The Boydell
Press, 1998).
19 W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), p. 470.
PAUL BUNYAN 27

Where the joy shines out of men’s faces,


And all get sufficient to eat?
‘Inkslinger’s Song’ is remarkable for its complexity of feeling, as the protagonist
strives for the ambiguous, the unattainable, the unknowable. Johnny Inkslinger is
a man of ‘superior intellect’ who possesses a speculative and critical intelligence:
in some ways he foreshadows Britten’s subsequent tortured ‘heroes’ – Peter
Grimes, Albert Herring, Billy Budd, Nick Bottom, Owen Wingrave, Gustave von
Aschenbach – in that we sense a richer experience painfully eluding his grasp.
Inkslinger’s ‘Regret’ (No. 16) encapsulates the poignancy of his impotence and
self-knowledge [Example 2]. The chamber scoring is very controlled: as solo
oboe, clarinet and bassoon trace rising and falling scales in C minor, Inkslinger’s
vocal line returns repeatedly to the pitch C, a single dissonance embodying the
pain of his ‘failure’.
All the little brooks of live
Run down towards each other
Somewhere every valley ends
And loneliness is over
Some meet early, some meet late,
Some like me have long to wait.
The simultaneous sounding of E n and E b in the final bar perhaps indicates the
strain between man’s eternal hope and his indomitable will to strive against
adversity and misfortune; as Paul Bunyan reassures Johnny:
PAUL BUNYAN: I know what you want. It’s harder than you think and not so
pleasant. But you shall have it and shan’t have to wait much longer, Good night,
Johnny.
‘Bunyan’s Goodnight (iii)’ (No. 17) which follows the ‘Regret’, was added by
Britten during revisions to the score in 1974:
Now let the complex spirit dissolve in the darkness
Where the Actual and the Possible are mysteriously exchanged.
For the saint must descend into Hell; that his order may be tested by its
disorder
The hero return to the humble womb; that his will may be pacified and
refreshed.
Dear children, trust the night and have faith in tomorrow,
That these hours of ambiguity and indecision may be also the hours of
healing.
Donald Mitchell explains that Auden’s unaccompanied text had originally
followed a ‘Lullaby of Dream Shadows’; Britten excised this ‘dream sequence’ in
1974 and recomposed the passage for voice and orchestra. Perhaps we may see in
the hero’s ‘return to the humble womb’ a foreshadowing of Peter Grimes’s
resigned return to the safe depths of ‘calm water’; indeed, the static C major string
chord, with flattened seventh recalls the harmonic and instrumental colour asso-
ciated with Grimes from his first appearance in the Prologue of Peter Grimes.
28 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Example 2
PAUL BUNYAN 29

Likewise, the ‘hours of ambiguity and indecision’ which may also be ‘the hours of
healing’ look forward to Captain Vere’s struggle with the mists of conscience and
his ultimate vision of the ‘far-shining sail’. In Britten’s final opera, Death in
Venice, Aschenbach was to discover the inescapable truth of the line, ‘For the saint
must descend into Hell; that his order may be tested by disorder’.
‘Bunyan’s Goodnight (iii)’ effects a symmetrical, harmonic closure to the Act
[Example 3]. Britten instructs that the final bar of the Act should be repeated
‘many times with dim. but no rall.’. Thus a pure, still major third, C–E, marked
pppp, is destabilised in perpetuity by a ‘lively’ violin solo, whose leaping melody,
G # –E–D # , intimates the E major tonality which had challenged the preternatural
C major at the opening of Prologue. The conflict between Nature’s instinctive
acceptance and man’s questing intellect will continue.

Example 3

Britten’s musical intensification and lucid instrumental textures endow


Inkslinger with a human profile and conscience which elevate him to the central
role in the opera.20 However, his search for self-knowledge is intimated to a lesser
extent in Slim’s Song (No. 12):

20 Mitchell notes that in the 1941 performance, Inkslinger’s song was heard after the ‘Exit of
the Lumberjacks’, near the end of Act 1, with the result that it was separated from his
‘Regret’; Mitchell surmises that this was primarily a production decision, designed to space
out the solo numbers on a more even basis throughout the work. However, when Bunyan
30 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

In fair days and in foul


Round the world and back,
I must hunt my shadow
And the self I lack.
One winter evening as I sat
By my camp fire alone,
I heard a whisper from the flame,
The voice was like my own:
‘O get you up and get you gone,
North, South or East or West,
This emptiness cannot answer
The heart in your breast
‘O ride till woods or houses
Provide the narrow place
Where you can force your fate to turn
And meet you face to face.’
In fair days and in foul
Round the world and back,
I must hunt my shadow
And the self I lack.
Slim’s sense of his ‘other self’, a voice from which he turns but which he ultimately
must face, perhaps foreshadows the torments suffered by Britten’s later protago-
nists – Peter Grimes, Captain Vere, Gloriana and Aschenbach – who, similarly
‘divided’, must heed and assimilate the voices of their ‘other selves’ in order to
achieve self-reconciliation.
In Paul Bunyan, Inkslinger’s ‘other self’ is represented by Hel Helson, the stri-
dent, arrogant Foreman who cannot recognise that he will never be ‘great’, and
who resents being superseded by the farmers. He has no proper ‘aria’, although in
the ‘Mocking of Hel Helson’ he brashly puts forward ‘slogan-like’ estimates of
himself – Helson the Brave, the Fair, the Wise, the Good and the Strong. Helson is
taunted by the farmers, just as Peter Grimes is persecuted by the Borough.
Possessing brawn but no brains, Helson is dangerous only when his awareness of
lacking intelligence turns to suspicion and hatred of those who possess it.
Helson’s viciousness when threatened by others, or when faced with his own sense
of inadequacy and failure, looks ahead to the spite and cruelty of Peter Grimes,
Tarquin, Claggart and Oberon.
Believing himself to be misunderstood and undervalued, Helson launches a
violent attack on Paul Bunyan. Their confrontation is juxtaposed with a love duet
between Slim, the country boy who has learned to dream, and Tiny, Paul
Bunyan’s daughter.21 In a comic operetta which emphasises the power of

was revised in 1974, Britten returned to the original sequence as composed, thus reuniting
Inkslinger’s ‘Song’ and ‘Regret’ in Act 2.
21 This number anticipates the relaxed lyricism of the music Britten would compose for Sid
PAUL BUNYAN 31

communal effort and endeavour, it is natural that Helson does not suffer Grimes’s
tragic fate; awakening with a sore head and a stiff chin, he is reconciled with
Bunyan:
PAUL BUNYAN: I’m sorry, Hel, I had to do it.
I’m your friend, if you but knew it.
HELSON: Good heavens! What a fool I’ve been!
PAUL BUNYAN: Let bygones be bygones. Forget the past.
We can now be friends at last.
Each of us has found a brother.
You and I both need each other.
The more sinister face of communal pressure and oppression would be drama-
tised in Britten’s later operas.
To what extent is Paul Bunyan a ‘serious’ opera? How seriously should we take
the covert ‘messages’ – political, social and personal – that we suspect reside in
Auden’s libretto? The popular idiom is always distanced, which may imply the
creators’ own reluctance to fully commit themselves. It was the inconsistency and
seeming lack of commitment that the critics vilified and, indeed, it is difficult
either to discuss any one element of Paul Bunyan in isolation, or to convincingly
talk about ‘the whole’.
‘Inkslinger’s Love Song’, discarded by Britten when the opera was revived in
1974, illustrates this difficulty. It perfectly demonstrates Auden’s lexicographical
dexterity and mastery of the ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’ idiom; indeed, Inkslinger’s first
words are, ‘Think of a language and I’ll write you a dictionary’:
CHORUS: But how do you think we should address her
What can we of to impress her?
INKSLINGER: You must sing her a love song.
CHORUS: That’s too hard and takes too long.
INKSLINGER: Nonsense. It’s quite easy, and the longer it is, the more
she’ll like it. Use the longest words you can think of. Like this.
In this emergency
Of so much urgency,
What can I do
Except wax lyrical?
Don’t look satirical;
I have empirical
Proof I love you.
Like statisticians, I
Distrust magicians, I
Think them a crew,
That is, collectively;
Speaking objectively

and Nancy in Albert Herring; similarly, the welcoming of Helson back into the community is
reminiscent of Albert’s reacceptance by the Loxford worthies following his night of drunken
excesses.
32 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

If not effectively,
I feel protectively
Mad about you.
Such effortless and exuberant flippancy, reminiscent of Auden’s lyrics for ‘Tell Me
the Truth About Love’ (Cabaret Songs), may be deceptive. Despite his professed
satisfaction with his emotional life, in his private journals Auden analysed his
homosexuality as a disorder whose cure he could never find, believing that this
own path to love was blocked by the psychological detritus of his childhood: ‘the
bugger got too much mother love, so sheers off women altogether, the whorer too
little, so must always have another’.22 Such apparent self-knowledge may have
been of little comfort; Donald Mitchell suggest that ‘Tell Me the Truth About
Love’ reveals Auden’s preoccupation with his ignorance of love, a term capable of
infinite definition – the concluding words are ‘Will it alter my life altogether? O
tell me the truth about love.’23
There are other moments in Paul Bunyan which seem to have a affecting
personal significance, most especially the Act 1 chorus of Old Trees, ‘But once in a
while an odd thing happens’. Recalling the phrase ‘the moon turns blue’, Britten
once remarked to Donald Mitchell, ‘That was Peter’,24 and indeed a letter from
Pears to Britten, 9 January 1940, declares, ‘as long as I am with you, you can stay
away till the moon turns blue’. At this point in Paul Bunyan (Fig. 13) Britten
employs a musical technique which is closely related to Balinese gamelan tech-
niques; and it is no accident that the operetta was written in 1940 at a time when
Britten was in close contact with the composer and ethnomusicologist Colin
McPhee. In ‘Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-land’,25 Donald Mitchell
remarks that the importation of an exotic technique into Paul Bunyan was prob-
ably an attempt to find and ‘alien and unexpected’ musical idiom to match the
‘exceptional dramatic moment (a blue moon)’. Perhaps this passage is an early
sign that the assimilation of oriental techniques and colours into Britten’s music
may have carried some musico-dramatic ‘meaning’. Man will be born at the next
blue moon, and the whole pattern of life will be altered.
The search for love is perhaps the most ‘subtle’ theme in Paul Bunyan.
Although Auden had earlier protested that his crooked sexuality made love
impossible for him, he later realised that his homosexuality did not necessarily
have to isolate him, and that love was a matter of choice. In a world where in a
material sense almost anything is possible, modern man faces a boundless moral
choice; how is he to know what is the right action?:
VOICE OF PAUL BUNYAN:
The pattern is already clear
That machinery imposes

22 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 59.


23 When Auden did eventually find love with Chester Kallman in May 1939, he was inspired to
write ‘Calypso’ which became the fourth of Britten’s Cabaret Songs.
24 HC, p. 150.
25 Tempo, 146, 1983, 13–24.
PAUL BUNYAN 33

On you as the frontier closes,


Gone the natural disciplines
And the life of choice begins . . .
As at freedom’s puzzled feet
Yawn the gulfs of self-defeat;
All but heroes are unnerved
When life and love must be deserved.
The libretto is most obviously concerned with this at the end:
VOICE OF PAUL BUNYAN:
Every day America’s destroyed and re-created,
America is what you do,
America is I and you,
America is what you choose to make it.
Auden may have addressed these lines to Britten, as a reply to his frequent
complaints that America was not living up to its promise: ‘America seems to be
letting us down in every way . . . She is so narrow, so self-satisfied, so chauvinistic,
so superficial, so reactionary, & above all so ugly . . . This country is dead, because
it hasn’t been lived in, because it hasn’t been worked on . . . Everything comes too
easily – success, wealth, luxury. They have no standards; no culture –’.26 In this
context, Inkslinger may be seen as an ‘outsider’ who initially refuses to partake in
the American way of life, yet who eventually submits and is rewarded with a share
in the American Dream. Auden’s conclusion to Paul Bunyan may have been
intended to alter Britten’s attitude to America, and to bring about his ‘rebirth’
both as an American and as someone who was comfortable with his own sexu-
ality. In this way, the overtly allegorical structure encloses more personal feelings.
In representing the move from an uncivilised to a civilised society, Auden is
encouraging Britten to progress from ‘raw’ feeling to a manifestation of that
feeling. Thus, Paul Bunyan reiterates the theme of Our Hunting Fathers:
Saw in the lion’s intolerant look,
Behind the quarry’s dying glare,
Love raging for that personal glory
That reason’s gift would add.
The earlier work’s proposal that love and hate are part of the same basic animal
instinct is echoed in the ‘Hymn’ in Act 2 of Paul Bunyan, ‘O great day of
discovery’:
VOICE OF PAUL BUNYAN:
Often thoughts of hate conceal
Love we are ashamed to feel;
In the climax of a fight
Lost affection comes to light.
Auden may be urging Britten to free himself from the sexual guilt which

26 LL, vol. 2, p. 800.


34 THE OPERAS OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN

‘imprisons’ him.27 At this point in the opera the ‘love theme’ of Slim and Tiny is
recapitulated, suggesting that any ‘New World’ must be based on personal acts of
love, as the collective experience is exchanged for unique human relationships:
Lost, lost is the world I knew
And I am lost, dear heart, in you.
In Paul Bunyan man’s search for individualism and personal love is further
explored through the depiction of man’s relationship with the animal world. Fido,
the dog, and Moppet and Poppet, the cats, are incorporated into the libretto
ostensibly to allow the introduction of female voices (high soprano and two mezzo
sopranos respectively) into an otherwise male-dominated opera. However, in the
‘Cats’ Creed’ the theme of man’s necessary choices is brought to the fore:
Let Man the romantic in vision espy
A far better world than his own in the sky
As a tyrant or beauty express a vain wish
To be mild as a beaver or chaste as a fish . . .
But the cat is an Aristotelian and proud
Preferring hard fact to intangible cloud;
Like the troll in Peer Gynt, both in hunting and love,
The cat has one creed: ‘To thyself be enough’
Such sentiments are reminiscent of Auden’s verse ‘Underneath an Abject Willow’,
set by Britten in 1937, which similarly compares the instinctive life of natural
phenomena with the human life of conscious choice:
Geese in flocks above you flying,
Their direction know,
Icy brooks beneath you flowing,
To their ocean go.
Dark and dull is your distraction:
Walk then, come,
No longer numb
Into your satisfaction.28

27 Such ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ was to torment a chain of Britten’s protagonists – Peter Grimes,
Lucretia, Captain Vere, Claggart, Gloriana, Owen Wingrave and Aschenbach.
28 Similar ideas were expressed in another Britten setting of Auden’s verse of the 1930s, ‘Fish in
the Unruffled Lakes’:
Fish in the unruffled lakes
Their swarming colours wear,
Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have,
And the great lion walks
Through his innocent grove;
Lion, fish and swan
Act, and are gone
Upon Time’s toppling wave.
We, till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Pourquoi détacher chaque membre de phrase ? Est-ce que

Je viens dans son temple adorer l’Éternel

mis pour

Je viens adorer l’Éternel dans son temple

ne forme pas une phrase « indéchirable », au triple point de vue


grammatical, rythmique et sémantique ? Et le

Oui

ici purement proclitique et lié au verbe dont il renforce le sens, « oui


— je — viens », par quel moyen lui donnerons-nous une valeur, s’il
reste seul, séparé de l’acte qu’il affirme ? En somme ce vers n’est
qu’un seul mot, —

Oui — je — viens — dans — son — temple — adorer —


l’Éternel

car il est un vers, et s’il n’était pas un seul mot, il ne serait pas un
vers.
Et voilà ce qui est le vers : un mot.
Dans ce mot de six, huit, douze syllabes, la césure n’est que
l’accent inhérent à un mot. L’accent reste fixe ou se déplace selon
des règles qui n’ont jamais été étudiées, mais que le poète applique
inconsciemment. Dans l’alexandrin ancien, l’accent est toujours en
principe à la sixième syllabe ; et, si cet accent principal doit être
déplacé, si l’affirmation de la pensée exige un temps fort avant ou
après la sixième syllabe, cette sixième syllabe garde néanmoins un
accent second. Dans le vers classique, ce déplacement n’est pas très
rare :

Mais vous || qui me parlez | d’une voix menaçante

(Iphigénie)
Vous ne répondez point | mon fils || mon propre fils

(Phèdre)

Il est très fréquent dans le vers romantique,

Ils marchaient à côté | l’un de l’autre || des danses

Penchés || et s’y versant | dans l’ombre goutte à goutte

(Contemplations)

qui admet jusqu’à deux ou trois accents indépendants de l’accent


principal :

Qui || des vents ou des cœurs | et le plus sûr || Les vents.

(Contemplations)

De tous les éléments du vers français, la césure fixe est le plus


caduc et le moins regrettable ; il faut au moins un temps fort sur un
mot, sur un mot de douze syllabes, il en faut plusieurs ; sur un mot à
voyelles variables, comme le vers, il est insensé d’exiger un accent
fixe.

Beauté des femmes || leur faiblesse || et ces mains pâles

(Verlaine)

Ce vers admirable n’a, à la sixième syllabe, aucun accent ni fort


ni moyen ; il n’a même que onze syllabes. Le vers de Victor Hugo,
qui lui a servi de patron, a bien ses douze syllabes et, en dehors des
deux césures après quatre et neuf, un accent très léger, mais que la
diction peut fortifier, sur la syllabe traditionnelle :

Chair de la femme || argile | idéale || ô merveille.


Jusqu’ici, quoique par des principes différents, nous sommes
d’accord avec M. Kahn : le vers est un ; il ne comporte pas de césure
fixe ; le rythme doit tendre à faire coïncider ses temps forts avec les
temps forts de la pensée.
Il est plus facile encore, sans doute, de s’entendre sur la
numération.
Depuis le XVIIe siècle, la plupart des vers français contenant des e
muets sont faux. Reprenons Racine :

11
. Il sort. Quelle nouvelle a frappé mon oreille.
11
. Au moment où je parle, oh, mortelle pensée.
11
. Et des crimes, peut-être inconnus aux enfers.
10
. Malheureuse ! voilà comme tu m’as perdue.

(Phèdre.)

10
. Celles même du Parthe et du Scythe indompté.
9. Toute pleine du feu de tant de saints prophètes.

(Esther.)

Mais Racine écrivait pour les oreilles ; son vers est


remarquablement plein ; la faute de l’e muet est rare dans son
œuvre ; il voulait douze syllabes et savait les trouver. D’ailleurs de
son temps, l’e féminin parlait peut-être encore un peu, surtout dans
la déclamation.
Victor Hugo :

10
. Ils luttent ; l’ombre emplit lentement leurs yeux d’ange.
9. Elle se sentit mère une seconde fois.
9. Sa mère l’aime, et rit ; elle le trouve beau.
9. La belle laine d’or que le safran jaunit.
10
. Les femmes, les songeurs, les sages, les amants.

(Contemplations.)

Le vers de dix syllabes se rencontre à chaque pas parmi les


alexandrins de Hugo ; celui de neuf syllabes, çà et là ; de même chez
Verlaine :

9. Telle la vieille mer sous le jeune soleil.


10
. Sagesse d’un Louis Racine, je t’envie.
10
. Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle cathédrale.
10
. Des étoiles de sang sur des cuirasses d’or.

(Sagesse.)

Mais ce qui donne à son alexandrin un ton si nouveau, c’est qu’il


est presque toujours incomplet ; dans la si belle prière C’est la fête
du blé, si on laisse de côté la dernière strophe volontairement écrite
en vers pleins, sur seize vers il y en a deux de dix syllabes, cinq de
douze, et neuf de onze ; dans la pièce XVI (Sagesse) sur douze vers,
il n’y en a que trois de réguliers.
L’alexandrin traditionnel n’est qu’une superstition.
M. Kahn dit, de l’e muet : « Une autre différence entre la sonorité
du vers régulier et du vers nouveau découle de la façon différente
dont on y évalue les e muets. Le vers régulier compte l’e à valeur
entière, quoiqu’il ne s’y prononce pas tout à fait, sauf à la fin d’un
vers. Pour nous qui considérons, non la finale rimée, mais les divers
éléments assonancés et allitérés qui constituent le vers, nous
n’avons aucune raison de ne pas le considérer comme final de
chaque élément et de le scander alors comme à la fin d’un vers
régulier. Qu’on veuille bien remarquer que, sauf le cas d’élision, cet
élément, l’e muet, ne disparaît jamais même à la fin du vers ; on
l’entend fort peu, mais on l’entend. »
Il a fallu citer ce passage pour montrer combien l’analyse des
sons est difficile puisqu’un poète tel que M. Kahn, aussi savant et
aussi réfléchi, y échoue complètement. L’e muet à la fin du vers,
« on l’entend fort peu, mais on l’entend ». En effet, — et on l’entend
même, nous l’avons expliqué plus haut, quand il n’est pas figuré ; on
l’entend dans mol, dans seuil, dans trésor, dans impair, dans nef,
dans jamais, dans désir, etc., — mots identiques pour la
prononciation finale à : molle, feuille, encore, impaire, greffe, ivraie,
désire, etc. Si, selon le système de M. Kahn, on décompose le vers
en éléments, chaque élément terminé par une muette perdra une
syllabe. Il n’y a point de prononciation intermédiaire, quant au son,
entre eu et e (nul) ; les différences sont d’intensité, en hauteur ou
en durée. L’e muet, qu’il faut appeler féminin, se prononce après ou
avant certains groupes de consonnes contenant une liquide ou une
sifflante : les prêtres frivoles, — et encore à condition que la
récitation soit oratoire et non familière. Nul dans : lettre, il est
marqué dans : lettre patente. Quelques autres exceptions sont
admissibles, par exemple pour les monosyllabes, de, ne, je, etc., —
mais seulement s’ils précèdent ou suivent une voyelle atone ; si deux
de ces monosyllabes se suivent l’une des muettes disparaît : je le
veux.
Il en est de notre e muet actuel comme de celui qu’on rencontre
en certains mots de l’ancien français, virgene, angele, aposteles,
aneme, vierge, ange, apôtre, âme, dont la valeur était purement
étymologique et qui ne se prononçait jamais, tandis que l’e féminin
qui ne se prononçait pas à la fin du vers ou à la césure se prononçait
en position :

1 2 3 45 6
Sains Andrieu li Aposteles | li ot raison aprise

(Chanson d’Antioche)
1 2 3 4
Filz, la toe aneme | seit el ciel absolude

(Chanson de Saint Alexis)

Toute cette partie de sa rythmique, que M. Kahn emprunte à


l’ancienne versification, est donc erronée ; mais cette erreur, dans le
vers libre, n’est pas essentielle. S’il nous est égal que les alexandrins
de Verlaine n’aient que onze syllabes, nous accepterons volontiers
qu’un vers que M. Kahn compte pour vingt-et-une ou même peut-
être vingt-deux syllabes (dont quelques-unes très faibles) n’en ait en
réalité que dix-huit :

6 5
Dans les épithalames | les forêts de piques |
4 3
et les cavales | dans l’arène.

Il est même, les muettes rayées, fort curieusement combiné, ce


vers, avec ses groupes en nombres décroissants, six, cinq, quatre,
trois, et bien conforme aux principes que le poète s’est à lui-même
posés.
M. Henri de Régnier, malgré qu’il aime les mourantes muettes,
oublie aussi leur existence, parfois, car est-il bien sûr qu’en
écrivant :

Qu’ils portent en grappes aux pans de leur robe écarlate

il ait voulu un vers de quatorze syllabes ? Dans la pièce V du Fol


Automne [196] , les vers, nominalement de treize syllabes (presque
tous) n’en ont que douze et souvent moins. Cela ne choque pourtant
aucune oreille musicale, puisque nous sommes, depuis plusieurs
siècles, accoutumés à ces brisures du rythme. Mais le vers de M. de
Régnier, même s’il a un air de « vers libre », demeure, avec des
innovations purement musicales, le vers syllabique : après Verlaine,
nul liseur de vers ne peut chez lui se trouver dépaysé. Il en advient
tout différemment chez M. Vielé-Griffin et chez M. Kahn ; l’un semble
être parti du vers romantique familier, à rejet et à césure variable
pour aboutir à un système complexe de rythmes entrecroisés ;
l’autre, M. Kahn, imagina le système que nous avons indiqué et dont
nous avons critiqué le principe. Admettons-le, cependant, mais
pourvu qu’il s’agisse des vers de M. Kahn, et seuls, car il serait
malhonnête de juger une œuvre d’après les règles qui n’ont pas
guidé son élaboration.
[196] Poèmes anciens et romanesques.

III

Il s’agit donc de savoir comment M. Kahn groupe les périodes de


pensée musicale qu’il appelle les éléments du vers.
Nous avons déjà le vers à nombre décroissant. En voici un à trois
éléments égaux :

Les allégresses | ô sœurs si pâles | s’appellent et meurent.

Un autre, formé encore de trois éléments, six, quatre et quatre,


ce qui donne l’impression d’un alexandrin à deux accents prolongé
comme par un geste qui se maintient.

Les Tigres si lointains | qu’ils en sont doux | aux bras


d’Assur.

Dix-sept syllabes bien unies peuvent faire un vers qui réponde


encore à la définition : n’être qu’un seul mot :

Dans les brassées d’épis joyeux et les tapis de fleurs


lumineuses.
Mais il est imprudent de dépasser seize syllabes (non compris les
muettes) :

Ni les épouses de tes vizirs | qui s’entr’ouvrent sous tes


regards

Encore ce vers n’est-il que l’accouplement de deux vers de 8


syllabes. Celui-ci est d’un rythme plus savant (trois, quatre, trois,
six) :

Aux margelles des puits profonds qui s’ignorent en ses


yeux inconnus.

(Chansons d’amant)

En groupe, le vers libre de M. Kahn apparaît surtout tel que libéré


de la tyrannie du nombre symétrique. Il serait puéril alors de vouloir
compter les syllabes. Nous sommes en présence d’une phrase
coupée en fragments analytiques plutôt même que rythmiques. Ces
vers sont régis par le mouvement intérieur de la pensée, et non plus
par un mouvement extérieur et imposé d’avance. L’alexandrin
s’allonge et s’accourcit selon que l’idée a besoin d’ampleur ou de
resserrement et le rejet, comme un rejeton de rosier planté en
bonne terre, pousse et verdoie selon sa vie propre : l’allitération et
les assonances internes ou finales rejoignent les deux vies et les
parent de leurs feuillages.
Ou bien ce sera un rythme dont les brisures multipliées
sembleront à merveille adoptées à une idée de légèreté et de grâce :

L’universel baiser court sur les hautes tiges


comme un menu vol de papillons,
tendresse brève, espoir long
sur la plaine humaine voltigent
coquelicots, pivoines, pavots,
l’heur est léger, longue est la peine
mais partout partent les pollens
pour de futurs étés toujours beaux.

C’est là un art agréable, mais ce mouvement est-il vraiment


nouveau dans la versification française ? N’est-ce pas refaire en libre
ébauche ce qui fut déjà strictement dessiné ? Trop strictement, peut-
on répondre, et nous voulons rendre les estampes non pas moins
nettes, mais plus claires et qu’entre les traits noirs se joue plus de
soleil, et aussi que les traits soient un peu tremblés comme,
fabriquées par la nature, les feuilles sont découpées, quoique
uniformes, selon un tel caprice, que l’on ne vit jamais deux feuilles
pareilles. Peut-être, mais il reste contre les vers libres (les vers trop
libres) de M. Kahn une objection que M. Kahn nous expose lui-
même, sans s’en douter et sans en avoir l’air, c’est que ses vers
réguliers (ou qui le semblent) sont meilleurs que les autres.
En tous il y a une grande richesse d’images, la preuve d’une
réelle force de création, des variations heureuses sur des thèmes
variés, et le souci de rendre sa pensée poétique à la fois comme
spectacle et comme musique ; les images chantent et les musiques
se dessinent. Cela est assez particulier dans la poésie
contemporaine. Mais, pour atteindre cette harmonie complexe, M.
Kahn use d’une trop grande discontinuité de rythmes, et parfois cela
blesse. Les airs commencés ne sont jamais finis. A peine s’est-on
laissé aller à un bercement, que l’on se réveille secoué par une
brusque volte du mouvement ; cette discontinuité du rythme
entraîne la discontinuité du ton : il y a tangage et il y a roulis. Quand
ces heurts nous sont épargnés, aucune des objections qui se lèvent
à l’arrivée des vers libres ne sont plus valables. Si un vers défaille et
manque d’une ou de deux syllabes, si tel autre dépasse le nombre
qui donne au poème son allure, la marche du rythme emporte ces
récalcitrants dans sa procession. C’est la foule qui entraîne d’un pas
égal le boiteux et le géant ; les disparates se fondent dans l’unité. Je
crois que l’art suprême est de donner des illusions d’harmonie. Au
lieu d’attirer l’attention sur des discontinuités même voulues et
nécessaires, il faut les voiler et les rendre invisibles au premier coup
d’œil ; que la note en discord aille par des harmoniques
imperceptibles s’absorber dans l’accord des notes fondamentales.
Voici une strophe, ou une laisse, qui fera comprendre qu’un vers
de neuf, de dix, de onze syllabes peut s’apparier, sans briser le
rythme, avec une pluralité d’alexandrins :

Ils virent les pins sévères de la mélancolie


barrer les blancheurs septentrionales.
Ils virent les nefs dorées s’amarrer à l’aval
du pont où veillent les statues de saints,
puis ils virent l’eau couler et les hommes passer,
dans les chaudes clairières, sous le soleil d’été
les fées et les lutins qui leur baisaient les seins,
et ils entendirent le cor enchanté
par les forêts en source et les fleurs des taillis.

Il faut estimer que tous les vers de cette laisse sont de même
nombre ; il ne faut plus, ici moins que jamais, compter les syllabes, il
faut les nombrer. Des deux premiers vers, le plus long, si l’on
nombrait avec une précision chimique, serait peut-être le second.
Même observation pour :

Des torses de vaincus, fixés avec des chaînes


au socle de la statue pyramidale.

et pour :

On eût dit que chantaient flûtes et violons


sur la largeur douce de la plaine.

C’est là un résultat et, en définitive, un gain.


La rime est traitée avec sagesse. L’on voit volontiers accouplées
ces sonorités identiques, hier ennemies, cuir — buires, roi — voix —
joie au mépris de la vaine habitude des yeux ; des assonances fort
délicates, telles que : ciel — hirondelle, quête — verte, guimpe —
limbe ; d’agréables rimes intérieures qui rappellent, avec beaucoup
plus d’art, les jeux des poètes latins du XIIIe siècle :

O Méditerranée, salut ; voici Protée


qui lève de tes vagues son front couronné d’algues.

Qu’elle devient discrète, la vieille rime tyrannique qui faisait


sonner son bâton sur les dalles comme un suisse de cathédrale ! Si
discrète qu’il faut la chercher, redevenue fleur, sous le feuillage des
mots.
Il ne suffit pas d’avoir de bons sentiments, un cœur doux et
d’aimer bien sa tendre amie, pour écrire de bons vers libres ; il faut
aussi beaucoup de talent et même beaucoup de science. Il est
improbable que le commun des poètes s’approprie les secrets de cet
art aussi facilement que les procédés parnassiens ; mais, quels que
soient l’avenir et la destinée de cette poétique, il reste que par
Moréas, Gustave Kahn, Vielé-Griffin, Verhaeren, Henri de Régnier
(car les recherches et les résultats furent parallèles) un vers plus
libre est possible en France et, avec ce vers, des laisses d’aspect
nouveau, et avec ces laisses, des poèmes assez différents, en ce
qu’ils ont d’acceptable et de très bon, pour justifier des espoirs qui
n’avaient paru d’abord que d’obscurs désirs.

NOTE SUR UN VERS LIBRE LATIN

Vers le neuvième siècle, en même temps que le vers latin, de


mélodique, se faisait syllabique, la prose oratoire subissait la même
transformation, les syllabes aiguës étant devenues les syllabes
fortes. La prose rythmique et la poésie syllabique ont la même
origine et sans doute le même âge.
La prose rythmique tient à la fois de la prose et du vers ; c’est ce
que nous dit l’auteur d’une ancienne Vie de Saint-Wulfram : elle tend
à quelque similitude avec la douce cadence du vers, ad quamdam
tinuli rhythmi similitudinem [197] ; elle ne se compose pas
absolument de vers, puisque ses vers ou versets n’ont pas un
nombre fixe d’accents ; elle n’est point de la prose pure, puisque
l’accent y joue un rôle sans doute prépondérant, quoique obscur. La
rime ou l’assonance achèvent de la différencier d’avec la prose
ordinaire. Ses éléments sont donc, je ne dis pas, le vers libre, mais
un vers libre.
[197] Édélestant du Méril, Latina quæ medium per
ævum carmina, etc. ; Evreux, 1847 ; p. 62.

Le début du Speculum humanæ Salvationis est un exemple de ce


vers libre latin, mais fort médiocre ; il ne tient plus que par la rime,
qui est lourde et banale ; ce sont des versets dont la nudité est
vraiment sans aucun mystère ; les accents sont difficiles à situer et le
rythme est nul : c’est loin de toute poésie. La Vie de Saint-Chef [198]
a plus de mouvement :
[198] Loc. cit. — Chef ou Cherf est Theodoricus ou
Teudericus. Dans le passage que nous citons, il s’agit
d’abord de saint Remi.

Cujus tunc temporis candidissima fama,


Famosissima claritudo,
Clarissima miraculorum coruscatio,
Non solum vicina quaeque loca,
Verum etiam totius Europae terminos
Adusque Oceani limbos
Illustrabat.

Il serait encore assez laborieux de compter les accents en ces


phrases mal déterminées ; cependant on se sent en présence de vers
évidents.
Mabillon a recueilli une curieuse pièce rythmique. C’est une
description de Vérone, écrite au temps où Pépin, fils de
Charlemagne, était roi des Lombards [199] .
[199] Mabillon, Vetera Analecta, 1675, t. I.

Magna et praeclara pollet urbs haec in Italia,


In partibus Venetiarum,
Ut docet Hidorus,
Quae Verona vocitatur olim antiquitus.
Per quadrum est compaginata,
Murificata firmiter,
Quadraginta et octo turres praefulgent per circuitum :
Ex quibus octo sunt excelsae,
Quae eminent omnibus…

Là encore l’intention rythmique est très sensible et nul ne


confondra un poème de ce ton avec de la prose pure.
Mais le véritable vers libre latin doit être cherché dans la
séquence. Selon la définition de M. Léon Gautier la séquence est une
prose divisée en périodes ou phrases musicales [200] . Or il semble
que le vers nouveau, le vers libre, peut aussi se dire tout
simplement : une période musicale ; et cette période, demeurant liée
harmoniquement à toutes les autres périodes du poème, doit
cependant pouvoir en être séparée et alors vivre d’une vie propre,
une, absolue. En un tel système le nombre des syllabes accentuées
n’est déterminé que par le pouvoir auditif d’une oreille : au delà d’un
certain nombre de syllabes, il n’y a plus de vers, parce que l’oreille
ne sait plus les placer instantanément. Tout vers pour lequel il y a
des doutes sur la place des accents n’est pas un vers ; ou est un
mauvais vers ; ou est un vers qui ne prendra sa forme et sa valeur
que lorsque cette place aura été, par l’étude ou par la diction,
nettement déterminée.
[200] Œuvres d’Adam de Saint-Victor ; 1re édition. —
Nous avons étudié la séquence avec quelque détail, mais
surtout au point de vue littéraire, dans le Latin mystique,
chapitres VII et VIII.

Les vers des séquences ne paraissent pas toujours d’excellents


vers ; c’est que la rythmique en est difficile et que, composées pour
ou sur de la musique, elles boitent sans cet appui. Il faut cependant
les comprendre et les aimer telles qu’elles sont et selon leur écriture
tronquée. Même sans la musique le Victimae pascali laudes est un
admirable poème en vers libres.
Ce vers latin, ce vers des séquences, presque sans rime, a un
nombre variable de syllabes, d’accents ; comme il diffère de l’idée
que nous pouvons nous faire d’un vers latin, français, ou
allemand [201] , il faut bien lui donner un nom nouveau et admettre
qu’à la suite du vers mélodique et en même temps que le vers
syllabique il y eut en latin un vers libre. Quoique nous ne le
comprenions pas très bien, il existe ; il fut cultivé pendant trois ou
quatre siècles ; il satisfaisait les oreilles délicates accoutumées aux
nuances du chant neumatique ; il se chantait d’abord, mais il se
lisait, puisqu’on en faisait des recueils en le séparant de sa mélodie.
Qu’un tel vers nous paraisse plus près de la prose qu’il n’y est en
vérité, cela vient sans doute de notre ignorance ; mais aujourd’hui
même et s’il s’agit de notre littérature, il semble plus facile de sentir
que de définir la nuance qui sépare tels vers libres de telle prose
rythmique.
[201] Cependant l’influence des chants populaires
allemands est possible. Voir l’Histoire de l’Ecole de Chant
de Saint-Gall, par le P. Schubiger ; Paris, 1865.

A vrai dire, M. Léon Gautier a expliqué le vers des séquences par


le parallélisme syllabique ; la séquence se compose d’une préface
d’un vers, d’une finale d’un vers, et d’un nombre illimité de vers
simples ou redoublés, vers appelés alors versiculi ou clausulæ. Mais
ceci nous donne le mécanisme de la séquence et non l’essence du
vers. D’ailleurs la prose rythmique autre que la séquence échappe à
cette définition.
Dans la séquence quand les clausulæ sont doubles, la seconde
est calquée sur la première : cela donne une strophe très
élémentaire. Quant au nombre des syllabes, d’une clausule à l’autre,
il varie de quatre ou cinq à vingt-cinq syllabes et même davantage. Il
en est de même dans la prose rythmique, où un certain parallélisme
syllabique ou d’accent se laisse aussi parfois deviner ; à cela
s’ajoutent la rime ou l’assonance, extérieures ou intérieures, parfois
l’allitération. Ce qu’il y a de permanent dans ce vers n’est pas
caractéristique du vers même ; ce qu’il comporte d’accidents ou
d’ornements pourrait plutôt servir de point de départ pour une
définition, mais esthétique et non prosodique. Donc maintenons,
quoique inexacte ou peut-être absurde, l’expression : vers libre.
Vers libre : je ne prétends ni à une assimilation ni même à une
comparaison entre le vers de l’école de Saint-Gall et le vers
d’aujourd’hui, quoique l’un comme l’autre soient obscurs. J’ai
seulement voulu montrer qu’à huit siècles de distance on retrouve,
en des circonstances peu analogues, la présence d’un vers qui
souffre mal l’analyse prosodique, et qui est essentiellement différent
de toutes les formes du vers, latines ou françaises. Si le vers des
séquentiaires fut légitime, le nôtre n’a pas des droits moindres, car
sa valeur esthétique est très souvent supérieure.
LE VERS POPULAIRE

Il y a dans les traditions littéraires un double fleuve. Le premier


coule à découvert ; le second, occulte, fut jusqu’en ces dernières
années insoupçonné. Ces deux littératures roulent sur le même fond
de sable : l’homme et ses vieux malheurs ; très souvent, ils s’en
vont, parallèles, l’un à fleur de terre, l’autre dedans, — portant au
même but, le définitif oubli, d’identiques barques.
Voici un antique sujet « à mettre en vers » : Héro et Léandre.
Ovide le broda, et Musée, et d’autres, et hier encore, sans aucun
doute, tel poète. Or, en même temps qu’Ovide, en même temps que
Musée, en même temps, sans aucun doute, que tel poète
d’aujourd’hui, — un rapsode inconnu, ignorant Ovide, Musée et tout
ce qui est écrit, puisant dans une tradition strictement orale,
chantait, lui aussi, mais pour un autre public, « Héro et Léandre ».
Allez en France, allez en Flandre, en Allemagne ou en Suède,
priez la vieille qui tricote ou la jeune fille qui bêche de vous chanter
« l’histoire de l’amoureux qui se noya en nageant vers sa belle,
l’histoire où il y a une tour et dans la tour un flambeau » : si elle
daigne ou si elle ose, la vieille ou la jeune vous chantera, version
flamande [202] :
[202] Recueil de Chansons populaires, par E. Rolland.
Paris, 1883-1890, 6 vol. in-8.
« Ils étaient deux enfants de roi, ils s’aimaient si tendrement. Ils
ne pouvaient se rejoindre. L’eau était trop profonde. Que fit-elle ?
Elle alluma trois flambeaux, le soir, quand le jour eut disparu.
— « O mon ami, viens, viens et nage vers moi ! Ainsi fit le fils du
roi, il était jeune.
« Une vieille femme le vit, bien mauvaise mégère. Elle alla
souffler les lumières et le jeune brave fut noyé. — O mère, mère
chérie, ma tête me fait si mal, laissez-moi aller me promener
quelque temps, me promener le long de la mer.
— « O fille, ma fille chérie, seule tu n’iras point là, mais éveille ta
jeune sœur, qu’elle aille se promener avec toi. — O mère, ma jeune
sœur est encore une si jeune enfant, elle cueille toutes les fleurs
qu’elle trouve sur le chemin.
« Elle cueille toutes les fleurs, elle laisse les feuilles. Alors, les
gens se plaignent et disent : voilà ce qu’ont fait les enfants du roi !
— O fille, ô ma fille chérie, seule tu n’iras point là, mais éveille ton
plus jeune frère, qu’il aille se promener avec toi.
— « O mère, mon jeune frère est encore un si jeune enfant ! Il
court après tous les oiseaux qu’il trouve sur son chemin. — La mère
alla à l’église, la fille se mit en chemin, jusqu’à ce que, au bord de
l’eau, un pêcheur, le pêcheur de son père elle trouva.
— « O pêcheur, dit-elle, pêcheur, pêcheur de mon père, pêche
donc une fois pour moi, tu en seras récompensé. — Il jeta ses filets
dans l’eau, les plombs touchaient le fond. En un instant, il pêcha le
fils du roi, il était jeune.
— « Que retira-t-elle de sa main ? Une bague d’or rouge. —
Prends, dit-elle, brave pêcheur, cette bague d’or rouge. — Alors, elle
prit son amant dans ses bras et le baisa à la bouche. — O bouche, si
tu pouvais parler, ô cœur, si tu étais en vie !
« Elle retint son amant dans ses bras et sauta avec lui dans la
mer. — Adieu, dit-elle, beau monde, vous ne me reverrez plus.
Adieu, ô mes père et mère, adieu tous mes amis, je m’en vais au
ciel. »
Une telle ballade ne provient ni des latins, ni des grecs, ni des
poètes d’académie, ni d’aucune littérature écrite ; l’art en est très
spécial, si spécial que nul poète, même un poète allemand, n’en
pourrait faire un pastiche acceptable. La ballade de Lénore si
médiocrement sentimentale chez Burger, se révèle, au contraire,
dans sa forme orale, telle qu’une admirable vision fantastique ; et le
Plongeur, — une des plus populaires des chansons connues, comme
il y a loin de celle de Schiller, qu’apprennent les écoliers, à celles que
chantent les vieilles « le soir à la chandelle » !
Une poésie non écrite doit avoir des règles de versification toutes
différentes des règles de la poésie littéraire, naguère admises sans
révolte, aujourd’hui, il est vrai, presque démodées.
Le vers populaire français est un vers syllabique. Les plus
communs comportent quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, dix syllabes :

(4) La belle Hélène


(6) Dans la mer est tombée…

(5) Il n’a pas vaillant


La fleur d’une épine…

(5) Tu n’es plus fillette


A l’âge de quinze ans…

(6) Tambour, joli tambour,


Donne-moi ta fleur de rose…

(7) Il la mène sous une ente.


Oh ! qui graine sans fleurir.
Quand ils furent sous cette ente :
— C’est ici qu’il faut mourir !

(8) Le Rossignol prend sa volée,


(7) Au château d’Amour s’en va.

(8) J’ai vu passer la belle Hélène


Qui paît ses moutons dans la plaine.

(10
) J’ai bien aussi des châteaux par douzaines
Et sur la mer deux ou trois cents navires.

C’est une question de savoir s’il ne faut pas considérer comme ne


faisant qu’un vers ou deux vers les strophes ou couplets composés
de deux ou de quatre petits vers. M. Doncieux dans ses savantes
études critiques [203] sur la chanson populaire va jusqu’à ne
considérer que comme un couplet de deux vers, la suite de quatre
vers de huit syllabes, dont deux sans rimes. Il a restitué ainsi un
curieux chant monorime de la Passion :
[203] Publiées dans Mélusine ; la dernière est de
février 1899.

La passion du doux Jésus, | qu’est moult triste et dolente,


Écoutez-la, petits et grands, | s’il vous plaît de l’entendre.

L’hiatus n’est jamais évité ; très souvent des liaisons inattendues


le suppriment :

Mon bon ami de cœur


S’en va-t-aller en guerre…

Le rejet est inconnu : la répétition le remplace, soit formée d’un


mot, soit d’un vers entier :

Beau pommier, beau pommier


Aussi chargé de fleurs,
Que mon cœur l’est d’amour…

Ces vers ne sont strictement rimés que par hasard :

Vous avez pâle mine,


Je vois à vos jolis yeux bleus
Que l’amour vous domine,

L’assonance remplace la rime.

Va me porter cette lettre


A ma mie qui est seulette…
J’ai laissé tomber mon panier,
Un beau monsieur l’a ramassé.

Montagne et langage sont des assonances ; serpe et veste ;


chèvre et mère ; souci, jalousie ; logis, famille ; mise, mille ; ville,
fille ; noces, homme ; morte, folle ; gorge, rose ; œuf, pleut, etc.
On rencontre des pièces entières sans rime, ni assonance, ainsi la
ballade qui commence ainsi :

J’ai fait l’amour sept ans,


Sept ans sans en rien dire,
O beau rossignolet,
J’ai fait l’amour sept ans,
Sept ans sans en rien dire.

On voit cependant que, dans ce cas, la répétition y supplée.


La synérèse se rencontre à chaque instant : quand une syllabe
muette gêne pour la mesure, on la laisse tomber dans la
prononciation ;

(6) Il ne faut qu’un petit vent


(6) Pour envoler les fleurs…

(8) Elle fait l’hiver, elle fait l’été


(6) Sous le pli de sa mante…

(8) Elle fait le rossignol chanter


(6) A minuit dans sa chambre
(8) Elle fait la terre reverdir
(6) Sous ses pieds, quand elle danse…
(5) Gentil coquelicot
Mesdames
(5) Gentil coquelicot
Nouveau

(Les syllabes soulignées ne comptent pas dans la mesure du


vers.)
Si le vers manque d’une syllabe on y supplée :

J’irai me plaindre
J’irai me plaindre
(6) Au duc de Bourbon (duque)

Mais de par la musique ces trois derniers petits vers n’en forment
en réalité qu’un seul de 15 syllabes :

J’irai me plaindre, j’irai me plaindre au duque de


Bourbon [204] .

[204] Voir plus haut le chapitre sur le vers libre. La


chanson populaire et la ronde justifient assurément les
vers de 13, 14, 15 syllabes et plus. Je consigne ici ce
rapprochement qui m’avait échappé tout d’abord.

Je crois que l’on peut noter, d’après les derniers vers cités, deux
rythmes particuliers dans la poésie populaire, l’un binaire, rythme de
marche, l’autre ternaire, rythme de danse :

Elle fait || l’hiver || elle fait || l’été


Dans le pli || de sa mante.

En général, le vers populaire est très fortement scandé, et garde,


même sans musique, une allure de chant :

Je voudrais || que la rose


Fût encore || au rosier…
Ma mè || re j’ai || une au || tre sœur,
Une au || tre sœur || qu’est tant jolie…

Les strophes ou couplets varient de un jusqu’à huit vers, le


refrain y joue un grand rôle, mais c’est une étude trop spéciale, trop
intimement liée à la musique des chansons pour qu’il soit possible de
l’introduire ici : au premier abord, la question paraît inextricable de
savoir si paroles et musiques sont nées ensemble, si la musique,
dans tel ou tel cas, a été faite pour les paroles, ou les paroles pour
la musique.
La poésie populaire est le pays de la licence, de toutes les
licences : on pourrait même dire que la licence est la seule vraie
règle de sa versification. Nous venons de parler de la synérèse, qui
est fondamentale : en voici bien d’autres. Vous rencontrerez des
formes verbales, — déformations exigées par l’assonance, en des
chansons monorimes, aussi étranges que : je cherchis, je me
couchis, il s’endorma, il vena :

J’ai descendu dans mon jardin


Cueillire la lavande…

Je prends mon échalette (échelle),


Mon panier sous mon bras.
M’en vais de branche en branche,
Les plus belles, je cueillas…

Il la prit par sa main blanche,


Dans son jardin la menit…

Vous avez la main teindue (teinte)


De couleur de violette…

Ce n’est pas d’un effet bien désagréable. Un tel procédé se


retrouve dans l’ancienne poésie italienne. Dante, notamment, n’écrit-
il pas, en vue de la rime : dolve pour dolse ; vui pour voi ; morisse
pour morissi ; soso pour suso ; diede pour diedi ; lome pour lume,
etc.
Pas désagréable, non plus, l’emploi de certains mots désuets ou
forgés :

Le premier mois de l’année,


Que me donnerez-vous, ma mie ?
— Une perdrisolle (perdrix),
Qui va, qui vient, qui vole
Qui vole dans les bois…

Il l’envoyait au bois
Cueillire la noisille (noisette)…

Il fait virer les ouailles


Quand elles sont dans le blé…

A toutes les virées


Demande à m’embrasser…

et dans la jolie ronde Quand Byron voulut danser :

Son chapeau fit apporter,


Son chapeau en clabot…

Certaines de ces déformations sont exquises : telle la


féminisation du mot cœur :

Dors-tu, cœure mignonne,


Dors-tu, cœure jolie ?

Des expressions qui semblent de terribles lieux communs


reviennent avec insistance ; il faut les comprendre : Dans la bouche
des filles, mon cœur volage, mon cœur en gage, mon avantage,
etc., sont toujours un euphémisme pour un mot trop clair et devenu
trop brutal, que le vieux français traitait avec moins de réserve.
Ce système, d’une simplicité toute barbare et primitive, peut
aboutir à des effets remarquables de rythme, de pas marqué, de
mouvement fortement scandé ; il est assez rare qu’une harmonie
bien notoire de diction puisse en sortir. D’ailleurs, presque tout ce
qui, de la chanson populaire, arrive au jour, se compose de
fragments informes, pleins de trous, de grossiers rafistolages ; il n’y
a, en langue française, du moins, que très peu de ces ballades
entièrement belles et sans bavures [205] . Quelques-unes sont d’une
étrange obscurité et l’on s’étonne que la mémoire les garde aussi
fidèlement. En voici une de ce genre qui est fort agréable :
[205] C’est à quoi veut remédier M. G. Doncieux en
établissant, au moyen de versions et de variantes, un
texte critique et, en somme, très vraisemblable, des
chansons populaires.

Mon père a fait faire un étang,


C’est le vent qui va frivolant,
Il est petit, il n’est pas grand,
C’est le vent qui vole, qui frivole,
C’est le vent qui va frivolant.

Il est petit, il n’est pas grand,


Trois canards blancs s’y vont baignant.

Trois canards blancs s’y vont baignant,


Le fils du roi les va chassant.

Le fils du roi les va chassant


Avec un p’tit fusil d’argent.

Avec un p’tit fusil d’argent


Tira sur celui de devant.

Tira sur celui de devant,


Visa le noir, tua le blanc.

Visa le noir, tua le blanc,


O fils du roi, qu’tu es méchant,

O fils du roi, qu’tu es méchant,


D’avoir tué mon canard blanc.

D’avoir tué mon canard blanc,


Après la plume vint le sang.

Après la plume vint le sang,


Après le sang l’or et l’argent.

Après le sang l’or et l’argent,


C’est le vent qui va frivolant.
Après le sang, l’or et l’argent,
C’est le vent qui vole, qui frivole,
C’est le vent qui va frivolant.

Celle-ci peut passer pour une des plus charmantes. Elle


appartient au cycle de La fille qui fait trois jours la morte pour son
honneur garder :

Où sont les rosiers blancs,


La belle s’y promène,
Blanche comme la neige,
Belle comme le jour,
A qui trois capitaines
Ont voulu faire l’amour.

Le plus jeune des trois


La prit par sa main blanche :
— Soupez, soupez la belle,
Ayez bon appétit,
Entre trois capitaines,
Vous passerez la nuit. —

Au milieu du souper
La belle tombe morte.
— Sonnez, sonnez trompettes,
Violonnez doucement,
Voilà, ma mie est morte,
J’en ai le cœur dolent.

— Où l’enterrerons-nous,
Cette blanche princesse ?
Au logis de son père
Il y a trois fleurs de lys,
Nous prierons Dieu pour elle ;
Qu’elle aille en paradis. —

Au milieu du convoi,
La belle se réveille,
Disant : — Courez, mon père,
Ah, courez me venger,
J’ai fait trois jours la morte,
Pour mon honneur garder.

La morale des chansons populaires est à la fois très légère et très


sombre : le peuple y apparaît comme uniquement en quête du
plaisir, et principalement de l’amour. Si l’amour est souvent tragique,
le mariage est grotesque ou terrible : tromper ses parents, voilà
l’affaire de la fille ; tromper son mari, voilà l’affaire de la femme ;
tromper son amant, tromper sa maîtresse, voilà l’affaire des amantes
et des amants. La vengeance est fréquente, fréquent le suicide. Les
passions élémentaires surgissent violentes et cyniques, comme dans
la chanson du Vieux Mari, dont sa femme attend la mort pour en
porter au marché la peau, et avec le prix s’acheter un mari neuf et
jeune. C’est partout la candeur et la férocité de la bête amoureuse.
L’impudeur y est parfois charmante et la passion superbe (Marion,
Jean Renaud). La fillette, spécialement, y apparaît à nu, tantôt se
laissant mourir de désespoir, tantôt ne disant pas non au cavalier qui
passe, pourvu qu’il ait bourse pleine, tantôt victime de sa paresse et
de sa mauvaise conduite :

Les soldats l’ont laissée


Sans chemise et sans pain…
Telle chanson, comme la Mal Mariée, révèle le pessimisme
résigné de gens qui sentent que la vie est mauvaise, et mauvaise
sans remède ; mais telle autre dit bellement la joie héroïque de
l’amour, comme la Fille dans la Tour, dont voici une version mutilée :

Le roi Louis est sur son pont,


Tenant sa fille en son giron.
Elle lui demande un timbalier
Qui n’a pas vaillant six deniers.

— Eh oui, mon père, oui je l’aurai,


Malgré ma mère qui m’a portée,
Je l’aime mieux que tous mes parents,
Vous, père et mère, qui m’aimez tant !

— Ma fille, il faut changer d’amour,


Ou bien vous irez dans la tour.
— J’aime mieux aller dans la tour
Que de jamais changer d’amour !

— Qu’on fasse venir mes estafiers,


Mes geôliers, mes guichetiers !
Qu’on mette ma fille dans la tour,
Elle n’y verra jamais le jour.

Elle est restée dans cette tour


Sept ans passés sans voir le jour.
Au bout de sa septième année,
Son père y vint la visiter.

— Eh bien, ma fille, comment vous va ?


— Ma foi, mon père, ça va bien bas.
J’ai les pieds pourris dans la terre
Et les côtés mangés des vers.

— Ma fille, il faut changer d’amour


Ou bien vous resterez dans la tour.
— J’aime mieux rester dans la tour
Que de jamais changer d’amour !

La Triste Noce, assez peu connue, est, dans sa simplicité


tragique, une des plus mémorables parmi les grandes ballades
françaises et, ce qui est fort rare, elle paraît intacte et complète :

J’ai fait l’amour sept ans,


Sept ans sans en rien dire,
O beau rossignolet,
J’ai fait l’amour sept ans
Sept ans sans en rien dire.

Mais au bout des sept ans


Voilà que je me marie,
O beau rossignolet,
Mais au bout des sept ans
Voilà que je me marie.

J’ai cueilli-z-une rose


Pour porter à ma mie,
O beau rossignolet,
J’ai cueilli-z-une rose
Pour porter à ma mie.

La rose que j’apporte.


C’est une triste nouvelle,
O beau rossignolet,
La rose que j’apporte,
C’est une triste nouvelle.

On veut me marier
Avec une autre fille,
O beau rossignolet.
On veut me marier
Avec une autre fille.
La fille que vous prenez,
Est-elle bien jolie ?
O beau rossignolet.
La fille que vous prenez
Est-elle bien jolie ?

Pas si jolie que vous


Mais elle est bien plus riche.
O beau rossignolet,
Pas si jolie que vous
Mais elle est plus riche.

La belle, si je me marie,
Viendrez-vous à la noce ?
O beau rossignolet,
La belle si je me marie
Viendrez-vous à la noce ?

Je n’irai pas à la noce


Mais j’irai-z-à la danse,
O beau rossignolet,
Je n’irai pas à la noce
Mais j’irai-z-à la danse.

Oh ! si vous y venez
Venez-y bien parée,
O beau rossignolet,
Oh ! si vous y venez
Venez-y bien parée.

Quel habit veux-je prendre


Est-ce ma robe verte ?
O beau rossignolet,
Quel habit veux-je prendre
Est-ce ma robe verte ?

Oh ! la couleur violette

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