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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
Claire Seymour
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
25 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistomology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), p. 3.
12 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
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
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.
43 Ibid., p. 158.
2
Paul Bunyan
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
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
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
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:
Example 1
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
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
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
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
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
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
‘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
mis pour
Oui
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 :
(Iphigénie)
Vous ne répondez point | mon fils || mon propre fils
(Phèdre)
(Contemplations)
(Contemplations)
(Verlaine)
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.)
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.)
(Sagesse.)
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
6 5
Dans les épithalames | les forêts de piques |
4 3
et les cavales | dans l’arène.
III
(Chansons d’amant)
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 :
et pour :
(10
) J’ai bien aussi des châteaux par douzaines
Et sur la mer deux ou trois cents navires.
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 :
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 :
Il l’envoyait au bois
Cueillire la noisille (noisette)…
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.
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 ?
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 ?
Oh ! si vous y venez
Venez-y bien parée,
O beau rossignolet,
Oh ! si vous y venez
Venez-y bien parée.
Oh ! la couleur violette