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Sentence into Cadence: The word-setting of Tippett and Britten

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Barbara Docherty
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Extract

When Addressing a text to be set a composer will, at the extremes, offer it violence or reverence, and a sharp-edged exchange was committed to print in the 1960's concerning the correct relation between parole and musica when sentence (or stanza) is made cadence. In his Conclusion to Denis Stevens's A History of Song, Michael Tippett stated that one of the attributes of the song-writer was the ability to destroy all the verbal music of the poetry he set and to substitute ‘the music of music’. Five years later, in his contribution to the Festschrift for Tippett's 60th birthday, Peter Pears made a spirited denial of this ‘Mantis-like’ proposition: the composer should court his text, designing a musical structure compliant to his purpose while according the words the care of the poet whose art they first were. Behind this genteel shadow-boxing lay a wider issue: whether there were definable canons for the setting of English text (as exemplified by Benjamin Britten, since it was against his vocal works that the felicities and inflations Pears discerned in Tippett's 1943 cantata Boyhood's End and 1951 song cycle The Heart's Assurance were implicitly being measured) and whether Tippett's practice flouted them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 166 , September 1988 , pp. 2 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 Hutchinson (1960).

2 Kemp, L. (ed.), Michael Tippett: A Symposium for his 60th Birthday (Faber, 1965)Google Scholar.

3 Considered in greater detail, and expanding the study to Britten's Winter Words and Tippett's Boyhood's End, in a forthcoming article (Contemporary Musk Review); the present article concerns the case contra Tippett and the contemporary Britten cycle most clearly distinguished from it in setting manners.

4 Both a summation of technique achieved, pour mieux sauter in Tippett's case to The Midsummer Marriage (1955), and in Britten's via the chamber operas to Billy Budd (1951), a ‘double perspective’ Donald Mitchell perceives also in Peter Grimes and Death in Venice (Mitchell, D. (ed.), Death in Venice, CUP, 1987, p. 24)Google Scholar.

5 Three poems by Alun Lewis (b. 1 July 1915, d. March 1944): Song (I), Compassion (III), The dancer (IV), two by Sidney Keyes (b. 27 May 1922, d. 10 March 1943): The heart's assurance (II), Remember your lovers (V).

6 Stevens, , op.cit., p. 463 Google Scholar; The Holy Sonnets, in Pears's words, answered Buchenwald with a ‘strong love’ (Mitchell, O. and Keller, H., Benjamin Britten: a commentary on his workfrom agroup of specialists, Rockliff, 1952, p. 71)Google Scholar.

7 Ex. 1 (pp.4–5) outlines a notation that allows composers' ‘musical prosody’ and their poets' literary one to be compared.

8 IV (= Britten's 1), XIV (2), III (3), XIX (4), XIII (5), XVII (6), VII (7), I (8), X (9).

9 See my article ‘English Song and the German Lied 1904–34', TEMPO No. 161/162, pp.75–83.

10 Alun Lewis, Lines on a Tudor Mansion.

11 Alun Lewis, After Dunkirk.

12 Whose end-stops are themselves often strophically organized, as in Compassion's 1st/4th and 2nd/3rd stanzas, forexample.

13 Kemp, (ed.), op.cit., p. 49 Google Scholar.

14 Keyes, Sidney, The Uncreated Images (1942)Google Scholar.

15 In Britten, the ‘what manes the Nubian’ dialogue in The Rape of Lucretia (op. 37, Act 1, scene 1) is a rare example.

16 In Boyhood's End, ‘is a-gliller with illusory water’ in the scherzo tempts Tippett to a setting which is a mirage to the Ear as to the eye.

17 And, in its unaccompanied largamente declamation, of Spirto ben nato, the final setting in Britten's Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo (op.22).

18 Feare. (…) in XIX being the exception, pondering long on such terror being insupportable.

19 Compassion has three end-stops and one comma in 16 lines of verse; XIX has four end-stops, nine commas and seven semicolons/colons in 14.

20 Mitchell, and Keller, , op.cit., p. 70 Google Scholar.

21 cf. lulling charities in the Serenade's final Keats setting and Sleepe is a reconciling in Dowland's Weepe you no more apropos of Britten's ‘linkage’ technique, below.

22 Keyes, , The Foreign Gate, VI (02–03 1942)Google Scholar; Lewis spoke of his experiences ‘[forbidding]… the pen to write’ (The Assault Convoy).

23 Hooker, J., Afterword (Selected Poems of Alun Lewis, Unwin, 1981, p. 103)Google Scholar.

24 Lewis, The Cruxifixioti.

25 Keyes, The Uncreated Images.

26 Langer's, Suzanne thesis (Problems of Art, Routledge, 1957, p. 85)Google Scholar, quoted by Tippett in Bowen, M. (ed.), Music of the Angels (Eulenberg, 1980, p. 30)Google Scholar. See also Stevens, , op.at., pp. 462, 466Google Scholar.

27 See p. 10 below.

28 And the 2+2 figure in X (but thy pictures, etc.).

29 Dowland's Slay, time depicts the poet's desperate desire to arrest life's misery by the same device.

30 Mitchell, (ed.), op.cit., pp. 86, 211Google Scholar.

31 Cf. the ‘local’ consistency that ‘spells’ beauty, etc. by the same few notes or their close variants, and the ‘long-range’ consistency that evokes the love/death theme from Tristan in Claggart's leading motiv (Billy Budd) and the opening notes of Le suicidé (Shostakovich, 14th Symphony) in the opening notes of the strawberry-seller's song (Death in Venice, Act I, scene 5).

32 A vocal line built of two 4-note shapes (Evans, P., The Music of Benjamin Britten, Dent, 1979, p. 351)Google Scholar.

33 Palmer, C. (ed.). The Britten Companio (Faber, 1984, pp. 274–5)Google Scholar.

34 Cf. Zelter's note-for-a-syllablc reverence for his Goethe texts or Francis Poulenc's abstract coloration of Max Jacob's verses in Le Bal Masqué.

35 Stevens, , op.cit., p. 463 Google Scholar; from the weight of personal emotion discharged in the setting, it was presumably Remember your lovers that began Tippett's engagement with The Heart's Assurance poems.

36 Audon, W. H., epigraph. Look Stranger! (1936)Google Scholar; my terms ‘syllogist’ and ‘symbolist’ derive from Arnold Whittall's discussion in Lewis, G. (ed.), Michael Tippett: A Celebration (The Baton Press, 1982, p. 112)Google Scholar, ‘syllogist’ implying the imposition on the text of a calculated structural imperative; their relation to Britten's and Tippett's setting practice is considered in detail in the forthcoming CMR articles.

37 An archetype of human grief, cf. ‘Now the great Bear and Pleiades’ (Peter Grimes, Act I, scene 2).

38 Lewis, The Assault Convoy.

39 Bowen, (ed.), op.cit., p. 40 Google Scholar.