The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 71
A. ALVAREZ: The New Poetry (1962)
Auden’s poetry, often intellectually demanding, like ‘Epilogue’ from Our Hunting Fathers, is not always easy to comprehend. Such poems might seem unsuitable for song-setting, but there has always been a tradition of setting ‘philosophical’ verse, what the Germans call Gedankenlyrik, to music: for example, Goethe’s ‘Grenzen der Menschheit’ (Schubert, Wolf and Berg) and Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’. Indeed, Britten’s collaboration with Auden bears some comparison to Schubert’s with his friend Johann Mayrhofer, whose poems could also be intellectually challenging. There was, however, also a demotic side to Auden’s poetry, which the ballads printed here illustrate well. Auden remains one of the most composed of mid-twentieth-century poets, and Britten alone set him over twenty times.
Auden’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War, during which he drove ambulances and also wrote propaganda pieces on behalf of the Republican Government, did much to encourage his pacifist stance during the Second World War. His decision to leave England, which was partially due to religious conviction (in October 1940 he resumed the religious belief he had held during his childhood, and described himself as an ‘Anglo-Catholic though not too spiky’), was so controversial that his sojourn in America was debated in the House of Commons on 13 June 1940.
Auden’s involvement with documentary film is an important facet of his genius. He worked in 1935 for six months with the General Post Office Film Unit and produced a song – ‘O lurcher-loving collier’ – for the film Coal Face, which, begun in 1935, was eventually released in 1939. This was possibly the most ambitious of all their film projects, and the commentary was actually sung as recitative rather than spoken. A verse commentary for Night Mail followed in 1936. Auden also played the part of Father Christmas in Calendar of the Year (1936) and wrote commentaries for Beside the Seaside (1937), The Way to the Sea (1937) and The Londoners (1939). Britten, who first met Auden on 4 July 1935, composed music for Coal Face, Night Mail, The Way to the Sea and God’s Chillun.
Their collaboration, of course, was not limited to the cinema – they worked together in the theatre (The Ascent of F6 – see ‘Funeral blues’) and at the BBC (Hadrian’s Wall). Then in 1936 came Our Hunting Fathers, an orchestral song cycle of virtuosic power. Auden considered Britten to be ‘the white hope of music’, while Britten was quite simply in awe of Auden’s towering intellect (cf. a diary entry in January 1936: ‘having a bad inferiority complex in company of brains like Basil Wright, Wystan Auden & William Coldstream […]’). One of the things they shared was an intense compassion for all creatures, both humans and animals – a feeling which illuminates the Auden pieces in Our Hunting Fathers and those by Weelkes and Ravenscroft. 1938 saw the publication of On This Island, Britten’s setting of five Auden poems from a new collection of his verse called Look, Stranger!, a title he changed to On This Island for the American edition. Two of the poems from this volume were dedicated to Britten: ‘Night covers up the rigid land’ and ‘Underneath the abject willow’, which has been interpreted by some critics as an attempt by Auden to persuade Britten to be less timid in affairs of the heart. The Cabaret Songs were written between 1937 and 1939, while their sole operatic collaboration, Paul Bunyan, dates from 1941.
Though poet and composer became good friends, they were ill matched in other ways, and Auden particularly disliked Britten’s need for respectability. This hard-hitting letter that Auden wrote Britten on 31 January 1942 effectively ended their close friendship and artistic collaboration:
[…] There is a lot I want to talk to you about, but I must try and say a little of it by letter. I have been thinking a great deal about you and your work during the past year. As you know I think you [are] the white hope of music; for this very 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.
Every artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other. The best pair of opposites I can think of in music are Wagner and Strauss. (Technical skill always comes from the bourgeois side of one’s nature.)
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 [Auden crosses this word out] demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, ie 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. Elisabeth, 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, Bengy 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 really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have; i.e. you will have to be able to say what you never yet had 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. […]
The texts printed here are taken from the Faber edition of Auden’s Collected Poems (1976), edited by Edward Mendelson. Auden continued to polish and refine his verse after it had been set by Britten, which explains the occasional differences between set text and published poem. Interpretations of difficult poems can be found in John Fuller’s excellent W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Faber and Faber, 1998). Auden can be heard reciting a number of these poems on CD in the Voice of the Poet series published by Random House.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Coal Face (1935)
O lurcher-loving collier1
O lurcher-loving collier, black as night,
Follow your love across the smokeless hill;
Your lamp is out, the cages all are still;
Course2 for her heart and do not miss,
For Sunday soon is past and, Kate, fly not so fast,
For Monday comes when none may kiss:
Be marble to his soot, and to his black be white.
(Berkeley)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Night Mail, for voice and instrumental ensemble (1935/6)
Night Mail1
I
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock2, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon her gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms,
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails,
Thro’ Southern Uplands with Northern mails.
Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro’ the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep dogs cannot turn her course;
They
slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
II
Dawn freshens. The climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands,
Notes from overseas to the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official or the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
IV
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s3:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8 (1936)1
Prologue
They are our past and our future; the poles between which our desire unceasingly is discharged.
A desire in which love and hatred so perfectly oppose themselves that we cannot voluntarily move; but await the extraordinary compulsion of the deluge and the earthquake.2
Their finish has inspired the limits of all arts and ascetic movements.
Their affections and indifferences have been a guide to all reformers and tyrants.
Their appearances amid our dreams of machinery have brought a vision of nude and fabulous epochs.
O pride so hostile to our charity.
But what their pride has retained we may by charity more generously recover.
Our hunting fathers
[Epilogue]
Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion’s intolerant look,
Behind the quarry’s dying glare,
Love raging for the personal glory
That reason’s gift would add,
The liberal appetite and power,
The rightness of a god.
Who nurtured in that fine tradition
Predicted the result,
Guessed love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt,
That human ligaments could so
His southern gestures modify1
And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally,
And be anonymous?
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Two Ballads (1937/1937)
Song
[Underneath the abject willow]1
Underneath an abject willow,
Lover, sulk no more:
Act from thought should quickly follow.
What is thinking for?
Your unique and moping station
Proves you cold;
Stand up and fold
Your map of desolation.
Bells that toll across the meadows
From the sombre spire
Toll for these unloving shadows
Love does not require.
All that lives may love; why longer
Bow to loss
With arms across?
Strike and you shall conquer.
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.2
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: On This Island (1937/1938)
When On This Island was premiered by Sophie Wyss and the composer in the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House on 19 November 1937, the audience found the music, according to Britten’s entry in his diary, ‘far too obvious and amenable for contemporary music’. He did not, however, comment on their reaction to Auden’s poems, which, as song texts, are difficult and arcane. Though Britten had already set contemporary poetry – Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves and Auden himself in Our Hunting Fathers (1936) – On This Island represented his first real encounter with ‘New Poetry’. Peter Pears’s description of ‘Let the florid music praise’ is also an apt summation of the whole work: ‘One of Britten’s finest and a salutary challenge to a whole generation of English songs.’ However difficult and disparate the five poems might at first appear, they are all (apart from ‘Seascape’) linked by a common theme: relationships – and Britten’s work is dedicated, significantly, to Christopher Isherwood, Auden’s lover over a period of years.
Let the florid music praise
[Song]1
Let the florid music praise,
The flute and the trumpet,
Beauty’s conquest of your face:
In that land of flesh and bone,
Where from citadels on high
Her imperial standards fly,
Let the hot sun
Shine on, shine on.
O but the unloved have had power,
The weeping and striking,
Always: time will bring their hour;
Their secretive children walk
Through your vigilance of breath
To unpardonable Death,
And my vows break
Before his look.
Autumn song
[Now the leaves are falling fast]1
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse’s flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours left and right
Daunt us from our true delight;
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.
Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.
Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.
Cold, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.
On this island
[Seascape]1
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a rive
r
The swaying sound of the sea.
Here at the small field’s ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the sucking surf,
And the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
Nocturne1
Now through night’s caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip,
Capes of China slide away
From her fingers into day
And the Americas incline
Coasts towards her shadow line.
Now the ragged vagrants creep
Into crooked holes to sleep:
Just and unjust, worst and best,
Change their places as they rest:
Awkward lovers lie in fields
Where disdainful beauty yields:
While the splendid and the proud
Naked stand before the crowd
And the losing gambler gains
And the beggar entertains:
May sleep’s healing power extend
Through these hours to our friend.
Unpursued by hostile force,
Traction engine, bull or horse
Or revolting succubus;
Calmly till the morning break
Let him lie, then gently wake.
His Excellency
[As it is, plenty]1