Coda

Summary

In the discussion of the song cycle and its relation to its poetic source in Chapter 1, I observed that Schumann's Eichendorff-Lieder – in contrast with Schubert's two Müller-cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise – was a poetic structure fashioned by the composer from his selection and arrangement of poems from a larger collection of the poet's work. As such, any story that the poetic cycle might tell would be entirely Schumann’s. We must make this same claim about Britten's cycles, of course, but it is telling to consider how plausibly the stories we have derived from the foregoing analyses might also be Donne’s, Hardy’s, and Blake’s.

The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, op. 35, pursues an anguished psychological pilgrimage fraught with doubt and fear. The cycle's narrator treads the same ground of mental turmoil and uncertainty again and again, painstakingly wresting a concluding assurance of redemption from an initial accusation of guilt. The antecedent circumstance to Britten's creation of the Donne songs – the event, specifically, that motivated the cycle – was the searing experience of Belsen. And though this work was his first artistic response to the war, composed in its immediate aftermath, it was not his last. He was drawn back in 1954 by Edith Sitwell's poem “Still falls the rain” (Canticle III), op. 55, and again, of course, by the commission for the War Requiem, op. 66, in 1961. For this ardent pacifist who lived through an era largely defined by the reality or menace of war, its dreadful waste and loss seems always to have weighed heavily. And yet he composed, in a horrified and febrile state, a cycle of nine songs that conclude with an unequivocal and unconditional assurance of redemption. As a response to the war, of course, the story of the Donne cycle is Britten’s. But we might quite reasonably rewrite these concluding sentences thusly: John Donne lived through an era largely defined by the menace of hell, and his fear of it weighed heavily. His Holy Sonnets desperately seek an unequivocal and unconditional assurance of redemption. In this sense the cycle also tells Donne's story.

Britten's architectural embodiment of this story divides the cycle's nine songs into three groups of three, this tripartite scheme deriving from the design of individual sonnets, and extending, first, to the arrangement of poems into groups, and then beyond this, to the ordering of the groupings themselves.