"Songs of Experience"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, March 27, 2006.
In July, 1945, Benjamin Britten accompanied the
violinist Yehudi Menuhin on a brief tour of defeated Germany. One day,
the two men visited the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, and
performed works by Mozart and others for a silent but intent crowd of
former inmates. Stupefied by what he had seen, Britten went home to the
East Anglian coast and set to music the most spiritually scouring
poetry that he could find—the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. He composed
nine songs at feverish speed, beginning, on August 2nd, with “Oh my
blacke Soule!,” and ending, on August 19th, with “Death be not proud.”
While he wrote, Death had more to celebrate: several hundred thousand
people were vaporized by the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japan.
On August 6th, the day of Hiroshima, Britten set Sonnet XIV, which
begins, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” There was an eerie
coincidence at work here, for Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the
American nuclear program, was spellbound by the same poem, and had it
in mind when he named the site of the first atomic test Trinity.
Britten
is not the kind of artist one associates with great turning points in
history. He was, despite his reputation as England’s preëminent
composer, a loner, an independent man. He prided himself on his
parochialism, tailoring his works to churches and halls around East
Anglia and to the amateur musicians who patronized them. He also wrote
big operas for international stages, but he kept returning to his
roots, his obsessions, his elliptical self. He thought that there was
too much intellectual grandstanding in modern music, and demanded that
composers make themselves more useful to ordinary people. All the same,
his “Holy Sonnets of John Donne” are a titanic statement, one of the
most penetrating responses to the Second World War. They do not try to
depict horror; instead, they offer the consolation of sublime,
transcendent rage. At the end of the cycle, the tenor declaims, on a
rising major scale, the words “And death shall be no more”; then he
bears down on the word “death” for nine long beats; and, finally, over
a clanging dominant-tonic cadence, he thunders, “Thou shalt die.” Death
does not die, but possibly shudders for a moment.
Ian
Bostridge, the British tenor, recently sang an all-Britten program at
Zankel Hall, the space underneath Carnegie. It was the first in a
series of concerts that the singer is presenting this spring, under
Carnegie’s Perspectives rubric. Now forty-one, Bostridge has assembled
a repertory that ranges across several centuries and several languages;
his Carnegie concerts include German lieder, Italian arias by Handel,
and twentieth-century works by Britten, Vaughan Williams, and
Lutoslawski. The role of curator falls naturally to him, for he is not
only a lyric tenor of uncanny focus and intensity but also an
accredited scholar (D.Phil., Oxford, 1990, “Witchcraft and Its
Transformations, c. 1650-c. 1750”) and a deft commentator on musical
matters. The day after his recital, I went to talk to him about the
undervalued art of singing Britten.
Britten’s operas are
heard reasonably often in New York—Gotham Chamber Opera recently
mounted a musically well-turned production of his 1947 comedy, “Albert
Herring”—but the songs do not get their due. At Zankel, Bostridge sang
Britten’s five Canticles, based on various religious texts, together
with the surging song cycle “Winter Words,” a setting of Thomas Hardy
poems. A search of Times reviews and
listings suggests that the cycle has received six or seven performances
in New York in fifty years. Bostridge may have given the New York
premières of the last two Canticles. Even stranger, I couldn’t find any
evidence of a performance of “The Holy Sonnets of John Donne” in this
city since 1989.
“The way some people talk about Britten
is an example of everything that went wrong with music appreciation in
the late twentieth century,” Bostridge told me, over lunch in Chelsea.
“For example, they say that he’s not very bright in a literary way. You
hear this patronizing guff about how there is something wrong with his
setting of Rimbaud’s French in ‘Les Illuminations.’ In fact, Rimbaud’s
diction is on purpose peculiar, because he was in London when he wrote,
and was mixing French and English words. Actually, I can’t think of any
other composer who was so ambitious in his choice of poetry.” Bostridge
also mentioned the continuing unease over Britten’s personality, his
psychology, and, above all, his sexuality, which expressed itself in
one enduring relationship, with the tenor Peter Pears, and in a series
of sexless infatuations with boys.
“I have to confess
that none of that is very interesting to me,” Bostridge said, with a
rueful smile. “What strikes me is that so many of Britten’s songs
aren’t about romantic love at all. Quite a bit of the poetry I sing—the
German Romantic lieder of Schumann and Schubert—is, when you get down
to it, slightly embarrassing, adolescent stuff. Britten is an adult
composer, writing about adult things. The first Canticle, ‘My beloved
is mine,’ is maybe coincidentally a sweet tribute to Peter Pears, but
it is really a seventeenth-century poem using erotic imagery in a
religious way, and there’s a very strong current of that in Christian
tradition. The ironic thing about Britten was that he was actually so
buttoned up, so embarrassed by sex—so, you know, English."
Bostridge,
like many of his generation, was introduced to Britten by way of the
composer’s huge repertory of music for children. Growing up in London,
he sang in a boys’ choir, learning pieces like “Friday Afternoons” and
“A Ceremony of Carols.” He played a Rat in “Noye’s Fludde” and the
Captain in “The Golden Vanity.” In his teen-age years and early
twenties, as he became a devotee of the German lieder tradition, he
lost touch with the composer. Then he came across a classic Decca LP
that featured Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing “Songs and Proverbs of
William Blake” on one side and Pears singing “The Holy Sonnets of John
Donne” on the other. “If somebody had asked me in the abstract if
someone could make fantastic music out of Donne’s sonnets, I’d have
said, ‘Come on, they’re great as they are. They make music themselves.’
But, when I heard this music, I was completely bowled over.”
“The
Holy Sonnets” were a calling card for Bostridge early in his career.
Difficult as it was to compete with Pears’s electrifying delivery,
Bostridge made the music his own, in concert and in a fine recording
for Hyperion. Recently, with the Berlin Philharmonic, under Simon
Rattle, he made an authoritative recording of “Les Illuminations,”
“Serenade,” and “Nocturne,” three major cycles for tenor and orchestra.
He is also making his way through the Britten operas; he has sung “The
Rape of Lucretia,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream,” and will soon take on “Billy Budd” and “Death in Venice.”
Eventually, he wants to tackle the role of the abusive fisherman in
“Peter Grimes,” which, these days, is usually assigned to a heroic
tenor. “I’m keen to explore my inner sadist,” he told me.
“As
a tenor, I’m just grateful for the existence of this music,” he went
on. “As with Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf, you can take the serious,
single-minded approach—you can do a one-composer recital, and it really
works. It’s complex, sophisticated music, but it’s also an endless
pleasure to sing. At the center of the ‘Serenade’ is the Dirge, which
is very dark stuff, and terribly grating on the voice. Straight after
comes the Hymn, with its coloratura, so health-giving for the voice.
Out of nowhere, you get this gift.”
There
was no question that Bostridge’s first concert at Zankel was music for
adults. This was not the sort of vocal recital at which the listener
could expect to skim the poems in the few minutes before the lights
went down. The Canticles, which call not only for tenor and piano but
also, at various points, for countertenor, baritone, harp, and French
horn, incorporate the ecstatic devotions of Francis Quarles; the
Chester miracle play “Abraham and Isaac”; an apocalyptic wartime ode by
Edith Sitwell (“Still falls the Rain— / Dark as the world of man, black
as our loss”); and two of T. S. Eliot’s most abstruse Christian
meditations, “Journey of the Magi” and “The Death of Saint Narcissus.”
Britten wrote each Canticle in the wake of a major operatic effort, as
if to purge theatricality from his system. All his life, he veered
between a childishly innocent view of human nature and a preacher’s
consciousness of the workings of sin: he had trouble reconciling the
light and dark within himself. Bostridge, who says that he is “not
stunningly religious,” points out that in Canticle II, as in the
Sanctus of Britten’s “War Requiem,” the composer’s sense of God is
“alien and frightening and Other, a voluntarist God who can do as He
likes.” He added, “It’s a quite scary thing to grapple with.”
This
riven consciousness is something that Bostridge conveys supremely well.
He is not the sort of recitalist who processes all different kinds of
music through the same lovely tone and smooth technique. Instead, he
works to bring out the storytelling and the drama inherent in song. He
is capable of singing in many voices at once, sounding like Noël Coward
in one moment and the God of Abraham in the next. Fischer-Dieskau was
his model early on, but he also admires Bob Dylan and others who use
their voices like knives, to cut through convention. In “The Death of
Saint Narcissus,” a harrowing scene of failed martyrdom, Bostridge did
a hairpin turn in the lines “Then he had been a young girl / Caught in
the woods by a drunken old man,” going from a smooth, silky delivery to
a creepy sort of muttering shout. The singer is almost too happy to
take risks, but his technique is secure enough so that he almost always
gets away with them.
It was a tribute to Bostridge’s
standing within the vocal world that he was able to attract two star
collaborators to fill out the extra roles in the Canticles: the
countertenor Bejun Mehta, who sang the part of Isaac in Canticle II,
and the baritone Nathan Gunn, who filled out the complement of the Magi
in Canticle IV. David Jolley provided richly melancholy horn solos in
Canticle III, and Bridget Kibbey, the harpist in Canticle V, caught the
various shades of glitter and menace in the music. Most important,
Julius Drake, at the piano, provided a kind of resonant stage for
Bostridge’s personae, creating a meticulously nuanced play of light and
shadow around the voice.
Bostridge’s singing of “Winter
Words” went to another level. When Britten wrote this cycle, he was no
longer the ferocious young genius who had written “Peter Grimes” and
the “Holy Sonnets.” He was turning forty, and had experienced
disappointments together with triumphs. He had discovered that his
domestic life with Peter Pears was not going to erase the darker
strains in his nature. For “Winter Words,” he collected various Thomas
Hardy poems about the fleetingness of experience, which weigh the
sensations of the instant (a boy’s boredom on a long train ride, the
creak of an old table, a certain light in the trees in November)
against the unfeeling vastness of time. Britten’s music finds precise
images for that heavy theme, often by juxtaposing bursts of figuration
against extended, hypnotically repetitive chordal patterns. Bostridge
here set aside the slightly demonic aura that he often delights in
presenting onstage (and that cannot be detected in his lunch-table
manner); instead, he emphasized the tenderness of his voice, its
straw-in-the-wind quality.
Britten’s song cycles very
often end with a world-stopping cry from the heart: “Death be not
proud”; Shakespeare’s Sonnet XLIII, in “Nocturne”; Keats’s sonnet “To
Sleep,” in “Serenade.” Each is a passionate protest against mundane
consciousness, the facts of life, the way things are. “Before Life and
After,” which closes “Winter Words,” is the most extreme, and most
affecting, of these denunciations of the outer world. Over a slow,
solemn procession of triadic harmonies, it remembers “a time there was
. . . when all went well,” a primal state before “the disease of
feeling germed,” and wonders whether such a time could come again. I
don’t remember anything about how Bostridge sang the last words, “How
long, how long?”—only the storm of emotion that was contained in them,
the desperation, sorrow, rage, and hope.