Sunday, April 27, 2014

Climbing Mount Everest: Beethoven's Op. 130 & the Grosse Fuge

The Daedalus Quartet (photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco)
When the Daedalus Quartet ends the final concert of Market Square Concerts' current season Tuesday night at 8pm at Market Square Church - you can read more about the rest of the program here - with Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat, Op.130 (with the original finale), what exactly does that mean?

Life-long classical music aficionados bandy about terms like “Late Beethoven” or “The Late Quartets” (without mentioning the composer's name but automatically implying it's Beethoven) and especially “Grosse Fuge” with such reverence it seems we're intent on mystifying a whole new generation of concert-goers (what is a “foo-geh” and why is it gross?).

(Quickly, Grosse Fuge means "Grand Fugue" in the sense of its expansiveness. A fugue is a procedure in which musical ideas unfold linearly with imitation between the... uhm... you know what? Just listen to it...)

On the other hand, how many of us who know only how to stick the key in the ignition understand what a mechanic is telling us when our car is making a noise that sounds like this (followed by a poor, onomatopoeic impersonation of something heard from under the hood)? Or have had to suffer through your child's explanation of how to cut-and-paste something into an e-mail and find yourself as befogged as before?

Beethoven's last quartets, all composed within a two-year period, have long had a reputation of being “difficult” – not just to play, but to listen to. At the first performance of the first of them, a critic wrote it was an “incomprehensible, incoherent, vague, over-extended series of fantasias – chaos, from which flashes of genius emerged from time to time like lightening bolts from a black thunder cloud.”

When a critic in the mid-1950s or so was reviewing a new quartet by Milton Babbitt which he found utterly indecipherable, he wrote “This must be what Late Beethoven Quartets sound like to a dog.” (Much to my delight, in the mid-1970s, a friend sent me this photo (see right) on a post card from Tanglewood with the inscription on the back, “Listening to Late Beethoven Quartets.”)

While it is impossible to demystify something like Beethoven's last five string quartets, it should be said they need not be so frightening to the first time listener. Many people know them by their reputation and see that they're long, dense and pretty intense and therefore only accessible to the initiated (and even then, maybe only for a 32nd-degree concert-goer).

Yet these same would-be listeners have no problem sitting through movies lasting hours with their convoluted plots, their own intrinsic language and history (comprehensible only to the initiated), and a philosophical and perhaps allegorical theme that can provide hours of discussion (think Tolkien).

Granted, the “Late Quartets of Beethoven” are, like, this monolithic Everest of classical music – more like a single mountain with five separate peaks which, inevitably, every string quartet eventually feels compelled to scale (no pun intended).

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Ever since Caesar divided Gaul into three parts, writers about music have talked of a composer's output in terms of Early, Middle and Late – especially Beethoven, but even Schubert who, after all, died at the age of 31 (had he lived longer, would we call his Late Quartets and Sonatas “Late” or merely “the first mature works of his Middle Period”? Elliott Carter, who didn't find his voice until he was 50, was writing what were called “Late works” when he was in his 70s: the fact he was still composing when he died just shy of 104 gives rise to the idea of calling the pieces he wrote after he turned 90 the “Post-Late Works,” but I digress...)

This is something that many “novice” music-lovers and even avid concert-goers sometimes do not realize: that not all Beethoven sounds the same. In fact, few composers do, usually going through “style changes” from their “youthful apprenticeship” to their “maturity” to the “wisdom of old-age” (especially confusing when applied to a 30-year-old Schubert). Even Beethoven, after all, was only 56 when he died, which is not, even today, something we would consider “old” (unless you're still under 30).

Now, I'll be getting into some of the details of this – how Beethoven's “late style” came about – at my pre-concert talk (which begins at 7:15 in the church sanctuary) – but for the blog, here are some video posts of the quartet-in-question with a few background comments.

Suffice it to say Beethoven's “Late Period” grew out of a difficult time in his life: in 1809, the deafness which had been threatening since before he was 30 finally kicked in with more increasing pain and frustration; in 1812, around the time he composed his joyous 7th Symphony, he was apparently in love, given the single letter addressed to a woman known only as “The Immortal Belovéd” but the following year it became obvious such happiness was not to be his. Then in 1815 began the long drawn-out crisis over the custody of his nephew. Between 1813 and 1818, he practically ceased composing.

Instead, he was writing trifles, publishing works previously unpublished (wreaking havoc with the relationship between chronology and opus numbers) and studying the music of Bach and Handel, two composers from a hundred years earlier whose music had largely been forgotten. From them, he learned more about counterpoint (especially the writing of fugues) than he ever did as a student in the 1790s. Fugue-writing became a new feature of the music he would compose from 1818 on.

It was a Piano Sonata that unlocked the creative block he'd been suffering – the Hammerklavier with its grander dimensions through expanding both the sense of traditional form and harmony, its renewed vigor and virtuosity and especially its complex fugal writing in the finale. Almost everything he wrote took on these same characteristics (if not always the fugues) – more sonatas, the immense Missa solemnis, the 9th Symphony (the famous “Choral” Symphony) and finally, these last five string quartets, all written between 1818 and 1826.

Beethoven (1823)
Most people wonder at the image of the Deaf Beethoven writing music at all – and many would disparage these last works (which many of his contemporaries found incomprehensible) as the result of his deafness (since he couldn't hear what he was writing, how could he tell what made sense and what were mistakes?). On the other hand, while many composers do not need to “hear” their music externally to hear it inside their head and transcribe it from there, one could argue that his deafness turned his creativity inward and he found a whole new way of expressing himself that was unlike anything being written by anybody else – and for a long time after him.

So, now – these quartets.

After the “middle” quartets – the three Op.59 quartets dedicated to Count Razumovsky, and the two separate works called the “Harp” from 1809 and the “Serioso” from the following year (though it wasn't published until 1815) – Beethoven did not think about writing more quartets until May of 1822 when he started sketching a new work which, unfortunately, his publisher showed little interest in.

That November, he heard from a Russian aristocrat, Prince Nikolai Golitsin who was a fine amateur cellist married to an accomplished pianist. Unlike his counterpart, Count Razumovsky, a music-lover who employed his own quartet, Golitsin played the cello in his. Golitsin wrote to Beethoven and asked him to write one, two or three quartets for him - and to name his fee.

Because of more pressing matters with the Missa solemnis and the 9th Symphony, Beethoven didn't return to his earlier sketches and couldn't begin writing the E-flat Major Quartet that became Op.127, the first of the last quartets, until the summer of 1824. He finished it the following February.

It was premiered the next month to a largely befuddled audience (not to mention players who admitted not knowing what to make of this piece). Subsequent performances fared little better.

Beethoven went ahead and wrote the next quartet – this was the A Minor Quartet which was later published as Op. 132. During this period of time, Beethoven had been quite ill, bedridden with an “intestinal inflammation” which interrupted its composition in the Spring of 1825. He celebrated his recovery with the famous Heiliger Dankgesang, the slow movement he called “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” that is the emotional core of the piece. He completed this quartet in July.

The next month he began work on a third quartet for Golitsin and finished it by November – this one in B-flat Major which would become Op. 130. This is the quartet the Daedalus Quartet will perform Tuesday night.

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If people had trouble comprehending what he was doing in these first two quartets he completed, even looking at the mass of this new one was enough to inspire fears and doubts. It was long, it had six movements and it ended with a monstrously difficult thing labeled “Grosse Fuge” or Grand Fugue ("somewhat free, somewhat academic" is one way of translating the subtitle) - by itself, it accounted for about one third of the quartet's entire length.

Keep in mind, since Haydn's day, a symphony or a string quartet might average about a half-hour long and was in four movements: the first movement was the main focus with its dramatic sonata form; followed by two shorter movements in contrasting slow and fast tempos, usually in a lighter mood; and then a finale that was originally almost an after-thought and generally (even in dramatic or minor-key works) a happy ending.

Beethoven had already started pushing the focus of the entire piece into the last movement, more of a summation than a curtain-closer. The last movements became longer, more dramatic and, in the case of the recently completed Ninth Symphony, not only the end-all but the be-all of a work now over an hour in length.

Here are clips of the individual movements (with different performers as I could find). First of all, my apologies if any of these start with loud blasting ads (please feel free to “skip,” under the circumstances).

1st Mvmt, Adagio ma non troppo / Allegro: Brentano Quartet


After a slow, searching and somewhat vague introduction, the fast main part of the movement begins with a flurry of notes, but keeps stopping and starting, going back to the introduction. This contrast takes on more and more significance (remember this when we get to the Grosse Fuge) as the movement develops so that that introduction isn't really a typical “intro” that just raises the curtain.

This is as good a place to point out that earlier, quartets were often works featuring the first violinist “accompanied” by three other string players, the cello playing the bass line and the 2nd violin and viola filling in the inner harmony. Haydn and Mozart had already begun changing this with their later works but it was Beethoven who began fully integrating the ensemble as a quartet-of-equals.

2nd Mvmt, Presto: Cypress Quartet


“Scherzo” is Italian for “joke” and they're usually fast, short and light. This one, after such an expansive first movement, is certainly short – two minutes as it rushes past. It's also very understated, hushed throughout except for the occasional outburst and the middle section with its rapid-fire work-out for the 1st violinist. Returning to the opening as the traditional form would have, Beethoven suddenly “kicks it off the stage.”

3rd Mvmt, Andante con moto ma non troppo: Quartet Casals


While Andante is technically not a slow tempo – it means, literally, “walking” – this is the required slower contrast following the whirlwind second movement, given one of Beethoven's more equivocating tempo indications: Walking tempo with motion (but not too much). It has a sense of “comfortableness” that would put the listener at ease.

Originally, at this point in the sketching process, Beethoven was considering various ideas for a finale, none of which seemed to involve a fugue. And there were ten possible ideas he jotted down. But instead of a finale – or perhaps because the idea of the great fugal finale came to him and was not suitably prepared by what he'd written so far – he added two more movements starting with this second scherzo: actually, the equivalent of an 18th Century minuet except more of a German folk-dance, not too rough but not smooth enough to be a minuet (or waltz).

4th Mvmt, Alla danza tedesca: Allegro assai: Juilliard Quartet (please ignore the over-romanticized graphic...)


This German dance (alla tedesca, in the German style) is marked “rather fast” and with its little swells in volume and sudden shifts from slightly louder to slightly softer, gives an easy, swinging feeling, possibly a bit like a hurdy-gurdy. As Michael Steinberg notes, it can create “something close to seasickness, the kind you induce with delicious deliberateness on a merry-go-round at the fair.”

After two quite down-to-earth movements, Beethoven now adds this touching and seemingly simple-sounding slow movement which he called a cavatina, a short, uncomplicated song: 

5th Mvmt, Cavatina, Adagio molto espressivo: Guarneri Quartet


This becomes the real slow movement of the entire work, a “song” for the 1st Violin, supported by the other players. Keep in mind he had already written the “Heiliger Dankgesang” in the A Minor Quartet (which will appear later as Opus 132) so there is already a precedent for the personal emotions Beethoven expressed here, not unlike those times he would visit friends – ill or grieving – and, without ever saying a word to them, improvise at the piano for an hour and leave them comforted.

In this case, a friend of his (young Karl Holz who was 2nd Violinist in Schuppanzigh's quartet which first played these pieces) recalled the Cavatina “cost the composer tears in the writing and brought out the confession that nothing he had written [before] had so moved him.” In fact, merely recalling it, Holz added, “brought forth renewed tears.” The brief middle sections, marked beklemmt in the sense one could feel unsettled “by the air just before a thunderstorm, by a nightmare, by an agonizing wait” (again quoting Steinberg). This then returns to the opening of the Cavatina, drawing back from this brief glimpse at the edge of the abyss.

And now for the last movement. With four “middle movements” of a somewhat light, uncomplicated nature (the Cavatina taking on a more charged emotional quality), all Hell breaks loose with the start of this immense and super-intense finale. Again, like the first movement, it begins with a unison passage that now erupts into contrasting flashes ("lightening bolts," indeed) with frequent changes of mood and tempo.

The late Joseph Kerman thought this opening was like the composer hurling "all the thematic versions at the listener's head like a handful of rocks." Out of this chaos, Beethoven assembles one of the most amazing things he ever wrote.

6th Mvmt, Grosse Fuge: Brentano Quartet


Ultimately, it's as if Beethoven wasn't sure how to end it. Reversing the process that began the finale of the 9th Symphony (less the famous “terror fanfare” if the whole fugue itself isn't a “terror-fugue”), he tries a snippet of this – silence – no, maybe the slower idea – no, not that, either: then they all go back to the unison of the opening bur rather than starting (OMG) over again, it quickly works itself out into something both exalted and humorous – and ultimately resolving the drama with, at long last, a “happy” ending.

a page from Beethoven's manuscript: Grosse Fuge
But while the first audience encored the two easy-to-process scherzos (which annoyed Beethoven), most everyone was thoroughly confused by the finale and an immediate campaign began from his friends, from the performers and most of all from his publisher to replace the Fugue with something more manageable, more accessible. Six months later, after writing two more quartets - Op. 131 in C-sharp Minor (which begins with a long, slow fugue of its own) and Op. 135, the last one - he began sketching the totally new, much lighter conclusion that for generations would be the official finale of Op. 130, once he was guaranteed the Fugue would be published separately (he also provided his own piano four-hands version, mostly for study purposes). Even so, it didn't receive its next performance until 1859, thirty-three years later, the same year Wagner completed his Tristan und Isolde.

While Beethoven's colleague Ludwig Spohr considered it “indecipherable, uncorrected horrors,” Igor Stravinsky said the Grosse Fuge was “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.”

In this Graphic Animation version of Grosse Fuge (no performers acknowledged), ignore the information about the impending performance in California – while it's a maze of images to follow (the music is complicated enough), it might help you keep track of what's happening in the texture not to mention differentiating between the different motives (like the longer, sustained notes from the opening and the wildly jumping, rhythmic figure). The instruments are color-coded: 1st Violin = orange (or brown), 2nd Violin = magenta; Viola = green; Cello = bluish-purple. Good luck!



It might be of interest, having heard the Fugue, to go back and listen to the opening few minutes of the first movement: you may notice some similarities between this and the two themes of the fugue: the slow introduction of the first movement has been transformed into the “long-note” theme or subject of the fugue; the jagged, leaping theme of the fugue has its roots in the first fast section of the opening movement. Notice how, in both of these movements, there is so much give-and-take between these two contrasting tempos. Even though he had no idea how he would end the piece when he started it, it was like the seeds of the finale were there, one thing that ties the quartet together.

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While selection of performances of the complete quartet on YouTube are somewhat limited, for those who now want to experience the whole quartet “in context” and performed by one ensemble, here's the Zemlinsky String Quartet recorded at Festival Wissembourg in September, 2013:



Now, having been tossed back and forth over the abyss, you may want to retire to some distant corner to contemplate what you've just experienced in this piece.

On the other hand, since Beethoven gave in to pressures from his publishers, friends and performers to replace the over-sized Grosse Fuge with something “more manageable,” knowing the Fugue could stand on its own, he wrote what is essentially the Haydn-esque happy ending most people were hoping for. Though it's only about four or five minutes shorter than the original finale, it is much less difficult to play and far less exhausting to both play and listen to.

However, the “alternate finale” can't stand on its own and now that most quartets would play Op. 130 as Beethoven originally intended (as they should), it's a shame to lose this delightful piece if for no other reason than it's the last piece of music Beethoven ever completed.

He added it in November of 1826. He died on March 26th the following year.

So, while it's unlikely you'll hear it in concert as an “encore” except by Quartetto Masochismo, here is your chance to hear it (as you can in most recent recordings) as an added “bonus” track, performed by the Takacs Quartet:



And there is so much more to say about this piece - well, I'll still have plenty to talk about at my pre-concert talk!

Dick Strawser


Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Britten Centennial: The Daedalus Quartet with Britten and Beethoven and Purcell (oh my)

The Daedalus Quartet (photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco)
While Spring has finally arrived, so has the end of another season! This last concert – Tuesday at 8pm at the Market Square Church – brings the Daedalus Quartet to town for a program of quartets by Benjamin Britten and Ludwig van Beethoven (his Op. 130 Quartet with the original Grosse Fuge finale) and, joined by tenor Rufus Müller, the song cycle “Winter Words” by Benjamin Britten setting poems by Thomas Hardy.

The program is prefaced by fantasias of Henry Purcell, so let me begin there, briefly.

Purcell (painted in 1695)
Purcell is one of the great composers of the Baroque era – he died in 1695 at the age of 36 which places him in the generation before Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel. Considering he died on November 21st, I should also mention (just to tie things in) that would mean he died 218 years and a day before Benjamin Britten was born.

That may not be so astonishing, but consider that between Purcell and Britten, no English composer was considered “great enough” on the international stage. The most popular composers in England would be Johann Christian Bach (son of Joh. Sebastian) and George Frederic Handel – both German emigrees – then Felix Mendelssohn (a frequent visitor from Germany), but there are few English-born (and fewer English-trained) composers to be acknowledged on the international stage until... Benjamin Britten.

You can mention the likes of Sir Arthur Sullivan (better known as a composer of light opera with his colleague, Mr. William S. Gilbert), or Sir Edward Elgar or Gustav Holst or Ralph Vaughan Williams and, yes, they were esteemed at home – but as far as Europe was concerned, most music-lovers agreed with Richard Strauss' assessment of the country's musical life: “it is the Land without Music.”

Curiously, one of Purcell's achievements was to absorb musical styles from Italy and France and out of this to create his own voice with a decidedly English accent. In a sense, this might seem easier to us than it is, especially as we're not generally aware of other English composers of the previous hundred years.

And what makes Britten stand out on the international stage? He was able to combine “continental” stylistic ideas into his English heritage which, before him, is usually described as the “English pastoral” or “cow-looking-over-the-fence” style (one could hardly say that of Holst's The Planets, however) and in this sense created a musical language that was of more interest to the rest of Europe. As much as I love Vaughan Williams or you may hum along with Elgar's “Pomp & Circumstance,” it was not music that traveled well.

Britten's did.

And while many European composers learned the basics of counterpoint – the handling and balancing of textures – from the music of Bach and Handel, Britten learned his primarily from Purcell and the Elizabethan Renaissance.

Here, as an example, is one of the “Trio Sonatas” by Purcell (not on the program) but which will give you an idea of his style.
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This is a “chaconne” or a “passacaglia.” Though we are trained to differentiate the two, in Purcell's day the two were nearly interchangeable: the important thing is, it's a set of variations over a “ground” or repeated theme or figure in the bass – kind of like (I hate to mention it) Pachelbel's Canon (which is also a piece based on a “ground”). There are famous passacaglia's by Bach, but they are very different in approach: the bass-line is a theme, and the variations are more-or-less self-contained (or “sectional”). In this example, Purcell's variations (the top part) often overlap and push through the bass-line's cadences to create a more fluid texture and continuous form.

Also, listen to how sometimes the upper parts swerve off harmonically and create some amazing dissonances (like 6:47 to the end). This will come in very noticeable when you listen to Britten's music!

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Benjamin Britten
Technically, this is the Benjamin Britten Centennial Year, beginning with his birth-date of November 22nd, a good excuse as any to program anything by him, as far as I'm concerned. It also happens he was born on the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music.

He is primarily known as an English composer – he traveled little, spending most of his time on the chilly shores of Suffolk where he was born and where he died in 1976, not long after his 63rd birthday. Most of his life, he lived at Aldeburgh on the coast of East Anglia, a wind-swept region that figured prominently in his first international success, the opera Peter Grimes in 1945 (if you don't know the opera – and you should – you've probably heard the “Four Sea Interludes”).

There is a story about how he had emigrated to the United States before World War II because the political and artistic climate in England was not conducive to a young composer: Europe, about to be embroiled in another war, had little to offer – America was, he thought, where it's at. It was while he was in California, far from home, that he had an attack of homesickness after reading George Crabbe's poem, “The Borough” which had a passing mention on a village outsider, a fisherman named Peter Grimes. And so he decided – now, mid-war – to return home where the premiere of the opera based on that episode became a symbol of the revival of English art and, quickly enough, its arrival on the international stage.

But the String Quartet No. 1 is not one of Britten's “English” Works – it was written in America and was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge who had done so much for contemporary music (including, among others, the 4th Quartet of Arnold Schoenberg who was by then a resident of Beverly Hills).

Britten, Copland & Pears
Arriving first in Canada along with Pears and the poet W.H. Auden, they eventually moved to New York City after which he and Pears chose to stay with friends in Amityville, on Long Island, where he began working on a new string quartet. Caught up by the war and advised to stay in America as “cultural ambassadors” by the embassy, Britten and Pears then went to California where he continued working on the quartet in a garden tool shed in Escondido until he finished it in the fall of 1941.

It was given its first performance in Los Angeles but, due to difficulties with their host, the pair “borrowed” their car and drove cross-country back to New York and then returned home to England (it was on this perilous voyage – the ocean was not safe from Nazi U-boats – that Britten composed one of his most familiar works, A Ceremony of Carols).

Among the works he composed in America are the Violin Concerto, the song cycle Les Illuminations, the Sinfonia da Requiem, the “Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo,” an “operetta” based on Auden's version of the folk-tale Paul Bunyan, the String Quartet No. 1 as well as “An American Overture” in which he absorbed his friend Aaron Copland's “wide-open sound” to sound more American (it was never performed and had been left behind, forgotten, when he returned to England) as well as sketches for a Clarinet Concerto left incomplete.

Here is his String Quartet No. 1 – not his first quartet, just the first one published: there's one from 1931 (he was 17) and another from 1926 (he was 12) and perhaps three others in one shape or another – “in,” as he admitted to Ms. Coolidge, “would you believe D Major?”

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The Escher String Quartet (Chamber Music Society video)
1st Movement: Andante sostenuto / Allegro vivo


One of the things about discovering earlier, less-well-known works is that we sometimes hear them through these later, more familiar works. I can't help but notice the opening of this quartet (a kind of slow-introduction that recurs through the movement) reminds me of the opening of his 1952 canticle, “Abraham and Isaac.” Not a direct quote, as it seems, but so similar it obviously has to have its roots in the earlier quartet. Listen to the first few minutes of the canticle, here. He would again use this for obvious reasons in his “War Requiem” of 1961, setting Wilfred Owens' lines before “but [Abraham] slew his son – and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

But what did this passage mean to Britten in America at 27? Whether or not it had some deeper, psychological impact on him, it is a distinctly memorable if not original sonority.

The second movement is a brief scherzo and strikes one as an extension of the fast section that is the basis of the first movement.

2nd Movement: Allegretto con slancio (with momentum)


The third movement returns to sonic images of the first's introduction, but also brings to mind one of the Moonlight sea interlude from Peter Grimes written four years later.

Keep in mind, it was written in Escondido, CA, which is just outside San Diego and inland from the ocean. My question here is, when was this written in relation to his reading George Crabbe's “The Borough” which would not only inspire Peter Grimes, but make him think of home and the North Sea beaches of Suffolk?

When I first heard this work, I thought it went on too long without much happening; now, to me it's the emotional highlight of the piece and this, from a composer who's often described as being unemotional (critics – even a friend of his – described his early music as “existing in a vacuum”).

3rd Movement: Andante calmo


The finale is again a brief, quick-paced movement, lively and rambunctious (not to mention highly contrapuntal) with strong contrasts (after the opening, the long upper “theme” which slowly unfolds over a frenzied cello line; the contrasting sustained chords with nervous interruptions).

And because they have it available on You-Tube, for the final movement, we'll hear the Daedalus Quartet play the 4th Movement: Molto vivace

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WINTER WORDS
Just when we thought we've left winter behind us...

Pears & Britten painted by Kenneth Green (1943)
Benjamin Britten is considered one of the great song composers in the tradition of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. He has written many songs and collections of songs (song cycles) that have become major parts of the repertoire, most of them (like most of his operas) composed for Peter Pears whom he met in 1937. They remained both partners in music and in life until Britten died in 1976.

Britten & Pears
Schubert's song cycles – Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise – set several poems by the same poet, Wilhelm Müller, each telling (and commenting upon) a specific story. Often called a song cycle, Schubert's final songs are grouped into a collection called Schwanengesang (Swan Song), but this was not Schubert's intention nor are they a dramatic unity.

Britten wrote several works that are collections of different texts by several different poets – the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings of 1943 for one – but most of his song cycles focus on a single poet whether they constitute a narrative or not. Les Illuminations sets Rimbaud, the “Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo” (both from his American stay), and later, Poet's Echo setting Pushkin and the Songs & Proverbs of William Blake.

In general, these do not tell a single story but, despite being a collection of like-minded poems, often provide a dramatic continuity.

In Winter Words, he selected ultimately eight poems from Thomas Hardy's posthumous collection, itself called “Winter Words,” though there were two settings he discarded (the Britten-Pears Foundation has made these available for individual performance, but does not recommend they be added to the cycle).

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Originally composed for tenor and piano – and premiered by Peter Pears with Britten at the piano in 1954 – Winter Words has been arranged here for tenor and string quartet by cellist of the Daedalus Quartet, Thomas Kraines, himself a composer (and one whom I would like to hear more from).

While these clips provide an opportunity to hear the composer accompany the person for whom the songs were composed, the recording (or its transfer) from a 1972 recital is not the best and Pears was, at this time, 62 years old. (My apologies for “condensing” the text – otherwise, we'd be scrolling all night long...)

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1. At Day-close in November
The ten hours' light is abating, / And a late bird flies across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting, / Give their black heads a toss.
Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time, / Float past like specks in the eye;
I set every tree in my June time, / And now they obscure the sky.
And the children who ramble through here / Conceive that there never has been
A time when no tall trees grew here, / A time when none will be seen.
- - - - -
2. Midnight on the Great Western (or The Journeying Boy)
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy, / And the roof-lamp's oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face, / Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came.

In the band of his hat the journeying boy / Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box, / That twinkled gleams of the lamp's sad beams
Like a living thing.

What past can be yours, O journeying boy / Towards a world uknown,
Who calmly, as if incurious quite / On all at stake, can undertake
This plunge alone?

Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy, / Our rude realms far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete / This region of sin that you find you in,
But are not of?
- - - - -
3. Wagtail and Baby (A Satire)
A baby watched a ford, whereto / A wagtail came for drinking;
A blaring bull went wading through, / The wagtail showed no shrinking.
A stallion splashed his way across, / The birdie nearly sinking;
He gave his plumes a twitch and toss, / And held his own unblinking.
Next saw the baby round the spot / A mongrel slowly slinking;
The wagtail gazed, but faltered not / In dip and sip and prinking.

A perfect gentleman then neared; / The wagtail, in a winking,
With terror rose and disappeared; / The baby fell a-thinking.
- - - - -
4. The little old Table
Creak, little wood thing, creak, / When I touch you with elbow or knee;
That is the way you speak / Of one who gave you to me!
You, little table, she brought - / Brought me with her own hand,
As she looked at me with a thought / That I did not understand.
- Whoever owns it anon, / And hears it, will never know
What a history hangs upon / This creak from long ago.
= = = = = = =

Part 2

(Note to people who post on YouTube: If you're not going to include the encores, why not just cut the introduction...?)

5. The Choirmaster's Burial (or The Tenor Man's Story)
Britten's & Pears' graves
He often would ask us / That, when he died, / After playing so many / To their last rest, / If out of us any / Should here abide, / And it would not task us, / We would with our lutes / Play over him / By his grave-brim / The psalm he liked best—
The one whose sense suits / “Mount Ephraim”— / And perhaps we should seem / To him, in Death’s dream, / Like the seraphim.

As soon as I knew / That his spirit was gone / I thought this his due, / And spoke, thereupon. / “I think,” said the vicar, / “A read service quicker / Than viols out-of-doors / In these frosts and hoars. / That old-fashioned way / Requires a fine day, / And it seems to me / It had better not be.”

Hence, that afternoon, / Though never knew he / That his wish could not be, / To get through it faster / They buried the master / Without any tune. /

But ’twas said that, when / At the dead of next night / The vicar looked out, / There struck on his ken / Thronged roundabout, / Where the frost was graying / The headstoned grass, / A band all in white / Like the saints in church-glass, / Singing and playing / The ancient stave / By the choirmaster’s grave.

Such the tenor man told / When he had grown old.
- - - - -
6. Proud Songsters (Thrushes, Finches and Nightingales)
The thrushes sing as the sun is going, / And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales / In bushes / Pipe, as they can when April wears, / As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand new birds of twelvemonths' growing, / Which a year ago, or less than twain, / No finches were, nor nightingales, / Nor thrushes, / But only particles of grain, / And earth, and air, and rain.
- - - - -
7. At the Railway Station, Upway (or The Convict and Boy with the Violin)
"There is not much that I can do, / For I've no money that's quite my own!"
Spoke up the pitying child - / A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, - / "But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!"
The man in the handcuffs smiled; / The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
As the fiddle began to twang; / And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
Uproariously: / "This life so free / Is the thing for me!"
And the constable smiled, and said no word, / As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in - The convict, and boy with the violin.
- - - - -
8. Before Life and after
A time there was--as one may guess / And as, indeed, earth's testimonies tell -
Before the birth of consciousness, / When all went well.
None suffered sickness, love, or loss, / None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;
None cared whatever crash or cross / Brought wrack to things.
If something ceased, no tongue bewailed, / If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;
If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed, / No sense was stung.
But the disease of feeling germed, / And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;
Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed / How long, how long?
= = = = = = =

Of more recent recordings I would highly recommend American tenor Nicholas Phan but especially English tenor Ian Bostridge who, after Robert Tear and Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, has been to my ear the best interpreter of those works Britten wrote with Pears' voice in mind.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Britten composed these rather intimate songs immediately after he completed one of his most outward large-scale works, the “Coronation Opera” Gloriana, written for Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation festivities which he'd begun work on in October, 1952, and completed the following March. The songs were completed in September, three months after the opera's coolly received premiere.

Thomas Hardy may be best known for his novels – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure – in which he “examines the social constraints that are part of Victorian society and criticises beliefs that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness.” Some of this same mood can be felt in these last poems of his, published in 1928 following his death in the depth of a January winter.

From there, Britten immediately turned to his next opera, a chamber opera setting the ghost story by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.

Hopefully, now, I will have left enough additional information to include in my pre-concert talk which starts at 7:15...

- Dick Strawser