Serenade & Night Flight: Britten & Dallapiccola

In one of the pithy essays from his masterpiece collection, Labyrinths, Jose Luis Borges writes of "Kafka and his Precursors." In typical Borgesian fashion, a connective thread is woven from Aristotle to Browning to Kierkegaard, with pit-stops along the way. Borges says that our connection to the present (ie: Kafka) directly informs our interpretation of the past (ie: Browning) rather than the chicken-and-egg assumption that the past affects how we interpret the present. Therefore, "every writer creates his own precursors" and therefore performs the Borgesian task of making connections across time and space in the labyrinthine world in which we find ourselves.

Last weekend I had the privilege of performing Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the fabulous hornist, Joe Levinsky, and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, led by one of the country's outstanding conductor's, Elizabeth Schulze. The Maryland Symphony was founded over a quarter of a century ago by the British conductor and horn player, Barry Tuckwell. Fitting that Tuckwell was a champion of the Serenade, and is the soloist in one of the definitive recordings of the work, which also features its other creators: Britten himself is the conductor, and the tenor is his partner & collaborator, Peter Pears.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Music and Social Conscience--inspired by the conflation of January's historic Inauguration, concerts I was preparing to conduct and programs I was preparing to propose--and referenced Britten and his output. His life and music are themes to which I regularly return: besides being the greatest composer of the English language and one of the giants of 20th c. music, he was the source of my DMA dissertation, and the raison-d'etre behind much of my work in the UK, and is simply one of my favorite composers. I find Britten's music to be more relevant now than ever, and all of these signifiers inform the fact that the Virginia Chorale will be devoting a portion of each of our next five seasons to surveying Britten's choral works in our Britten Project, culminating in a centennial concert for his birthday in 2013, which just happens to be the name day of the Patron Saint of Music, St. Cecilia (Nov 22).

Anyway, Britten's Serenade is the quintessential example of this composer's gift for creating a song-cycle from a poetic anthology. Britten is unique among vocal composers in amassing a body of song-cycles both on individual poets (Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Hardy, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Blake, et al) and on original "librettos" of anthologized poets (three of his five orchestral song-cycles, Our Hunting Fathers, Serenade, and Nocturne, use this device of multi-voiced lyrics as their source).

One of the most dog-eared books in my own collection is "Britten's Poets: An anthology of the poems he set to music." It is nearly 400 pages of nothing but the poems themselves. One of the indices lists the poets Britten set, and it includes nearly 100 different poets in a half-dozen different languages. I should also add that Pears was Britten's literary equal, if not the more well-read of the two, and his assistance in choosing and ordering the poetic sequences has been under-appreciated.

Britten finished the Serenade, op. 31, in the spring of 1943, before he turned 30. It was his first major opus to be premiered following his and Pears' return to the UK from self-imposed, conscientious-objector exile in the US. His status as a C.O. affected his life on several levels (he had to appeal to the tribunal, and was granted his exempt status only after a second appearance; his friend and colleague, the composer Michael Tippett, served time when his application for C.O. status was rejected). It also deepened his lifelong commitment to pacifism & non-violence, and furthered the conviction that the creative artist contribute to society.

At the time, Britten was just beginning work on his first opera, Peter Grimes, whose success would establish his fame and further his reputation as the leading composer of his generation. Britten and Pears both identified with Grimes' themes of isolation, outcast, and exile--as artists, as conscientious objectors, and as homosexual men. These themes--also incarnate as innocence and experience, youth and age, virtue and corruption, individual and the people--would populate his operas and infuse his song cycles for the remaining three decades of his astounding career.

The Serenade is framed by a prologue and epilogue with the horn playing natural harmonics, recalling the (innocent?) days when the instrument was associated with hunting calls. In between, 6 poems (spanning several centuries of British verse) take up nocturnal themes from dusk and twilight to dreams, nightmares, and visions. Britten creates a distinct sound-world for each, informed by the poetry itself. The first setting, Charles Cotton's crepuscular evocation of the sunset, uses the poetic images of the shape-shifting twilight as material for a dialogue between the tenor and horn. The second song, "Nocturne" is a setting of Tennyson's Ireland-inspired lyric "The splendour falls on Castle walls" and features an infectious recurring exchange between the tenor and horn, evoking the echoes resounding from the majestic mountainous setting. Britten was a prodigy, a "natural," and this is nowhere more evident than in the architecturally balanced form of his major works. The central movements of the Serenade are linked by a shared motive, first heard in the horn in the "Elegy" (Blake's "The sick rose) and taken up by the tenor in the anonymous "Dirge." The Elegy features the most extended horn solo, and exploits the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument (Britten praised the original dedicatee, Dennis Brain, as having the facility of a clarinettist). The Blake poem, ostensibly about the "invisible worm" that poisons the Rose from the inside out, is a metaphor for any kind of sickness (syphilis or cancer ) sin, and/or evil itself--whether the specter of fascism, totalitarianism, or the "benign" evil of conformity or repression. Interestingly, Britten uses a 12-tone row for the "invisible worm" in the horn melody. Never a disciple of Schoenberg's school, he did admire Alban Berg's more lyrical use of 12-tone techniques, and the grafting of the chromatic tone-row within tonal contexts. The Elegy's intensity is matched by the relentless toll of the Dirge, which assigns the tenor 8 consecutive verses of morality-play inspired verse in excruciating tessiturra. While Britten downplayed the importance of the Serenade in his letters ("nothing important, but quite pleasant, I'd like to think") participants on both sides of the stage are apt to take a different view from the central movements. The Dirge is relieved by the exquisite setting of Ben Jonson's paean to Diana, goddess of the moon, in the "Hymn." The horn takes off and the tenor hopes to keep up in this exemplary setting of Britten's mastery of yet another form, the scherzo. Following the "excellently bright" song to the moon, the horn exits to prepare for the offstage epilogue, and the tenor intones Keats haunting sonnet to sleep "O soft embalmer of the still midnight." Britten's mastery of vocal shading, string scoring, liquid harmonies and dramatic shape--encapsulated in a single movement--is nowhere on better display than here.

Immediately following the 2 memorable performances of the Britten (on 2/14 & 2/15), I headed up to NYC for a concert version of Luigi Dallapiccola's first opera, the one-act version of Antoine Saint-Exupery's (The Little Prince) novel, "Night Flight." Dallapiccola (1904-1975) is the greatest Italian composer of the 20th century, and one of the great voices of social conscience--"music of commitment" was his own term for his works. A victim of racial and political prejudice as a youth in the first world war, he was acutely sensitive to the precarious position of the individual in a totalitarian regime. His wife, Laura, was Jewish, and Mussolini's race laws forced the couple into hiding in the mid-30's, just as Dallapiccola was finding his voice.

Like Britten, he admired Berg and along with the Austrian composer, is the greatest exponent of lyrical melody within dodecaphony (12-tone, fully chromatic, atonal music, in a nut-shell). The opening theme of 'Volo di Notte' is a cantabile (singing) 12-tone row for a solo viola over a luminous series of B-major triads. The theme is associated with light and the stars, and returns near the end of the opera when the lost pilot is flying over the sea, ascending to the stars (and his imminent death).

The story is ostensibly about the "night flights" in South America and across the Atlantic to Europe just as WWII was clouding that continent. The pilot, Fabien, is lost as storms surround his flight, the operators on the ground are powerless to help, and the imperious commander, Riviere, is weighed down by his insistence on continuing the night flights, even as he loses one of his pilots. Like much great art, Volo di Notte works on several levels. Dallapiccola was impressed by the figure of Riviere--a man of great will power, vision, and strength, who is looking to the future, and balancing the responsibilities of the tasks (and lives) under his command. Riviere is also a complex and difficult character, who appears implacable in the face of his pilot's fate, is quick to put his subordinates in their places, eschews intimacy and love, and even the semblance of interpersonal relationships. I have the privilege of portraying the Radio-telegrapher who communicates the status of the strengthening storms (an obvious metaphor for 1937). Fascinatingly, in the Saint-Exupery novel, the storms are likened to a "worm in fruit...ripe to rottenness" --a Borgesian reference to Blake's elegy, and another (if unconscious) link between these two great 20th century composers.

About 2/3'rd of the way through the opera (the "vanishing point"--follow Borgesian trail to previous entry on Roberto Bolaño, inquiring readers) the Radio-telegrapher finally makes contact with Fabien, and from that point until the pilot's disappearance, the telegrapher assumes the voice and character of the pilot, in a music that is as violent as the storms and as transcendent as an outer-body experience of soaring to the stars. This great scene ends with Fabien's beatific vision of the stars, accompanied by the original theme (this time sung wordless by a soprano). Dallapiccola uses a wide range of declamatory techniques (again, indebted to Schoenberg and Berg, but wholly original) and calls for 4 different types of declamation: spoken text without pitch or specific rhythm, spoken text with assigned rhythmic values, a rhythmic declamation that is "as if without sound" and a Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang ("speak-singing") that is rhythmic and approximates pitch somewhere between speech and song. All of these techniques are used independently and in combination in this moving scene.

Dallapiccola would go on to write his two greatest works immediately following 'Volo di Notte.' Following Mussolini's tightening of the political reins, the composer realized "only by means of music would I be able to express my indignation" and wrote a set of choral pieces called "Canti di prigionia" (Songs of prisoners) and his greatest one-act opera, "Il Prigionero" (the Prisoner). Both involve specific characters and stories universalized by Dallapiccola's assimilation of dramatic form and musical technique. One of those techniques is to combine the cantabile-informed 12-tone rows with hints of gregorian chant (the Dies Irae--day of judgment), a technique that serves the dual purpose of grounding the music tonally & aurally, yet at a deeper level signifies the multi-layered, Borgesian aspect of art that transforms the particular into the universal. His music is difficult (and fitting for its subject matter), as relevant as ever, and representative of what great music of commitment can be.