BaL 12.05.18 - Britten: Winter Words Op. 52

[Mal]

... It is one of R3's more specialist slots (as opposed to the 'easy listening' of Essential Classics, etc)...

I don't think this is true, Brahms 1 was covered a few weeks ago. Anyone could follow that programme, nothing could be easier. Corelli's violin sonatas and Bernstein's Candide were also approachable by any "essential classics" listener. I listen to BAL most weeks and I've never struggled like this! It's like having a "building a library of novels" series that covers Scott to Tolstoy, but then throws Finnegan's Wake at you! They should give us "essential classics" types some warning when the highest of high modernism is about to be thrust upon us.

[silvestrione]

Finnegan's Wake? Steady on there Mal. Surely, after the first poem, the next handful are very accessible? The only obscure one, for me, would be the last, but Britten rescues it with that wonderful musical longing for lost innocence which is one of his trademarks.

Just listened to the programme. Very, very enjoyable. I thought the Anthony Rolfe Johnson voice more distant at some times than others, the balance less than perfect, as you might expect with a live version, so I'm not tempted, will stick with Britten/Pears.

[vinteuil]

...I've never struggled like this! It's like having a "building a library of novels" series that covers Scott to Tolstoy, but then throws Finnegan's Wake at you!

... a pedant writes :

the Joyce novel is Finnegans Wake.

(The 19th century ballad is Finnegan's Wake.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegan%27s_Wake

.

[Howdenite]

So if I spend a week studying late Hardy, and another late Britten, I think I might begin to understand and like these songs. But should it take such effort? is it worth the effort? It's like trying to read Finnegan's Wake.

I struggled with much of the poetry that Britten set at first. With most of the cycles, I fell in love with the sound before I managed to penetrate the poetry. This cycle, on the other hand, I fell in love with right away because several of the poems are very clear and are stories that are easy to follow (the above mentioned Abraham and Isaac falls into the same category for me, as does the Journey of the Magi, also from the Canticles). I think it is very much worth the effort! And these are a very good place to start. Listening to Britten's song settings is one of the great joys of my life.

Oh, and I agree with most everyone about this BAL. It is one I will save and listen to again for the joy of it.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

They should give us "essential classics" types some warning when the highest of high modernism is about to be thrust upon us.

Britten???!!!

[Ein Heldenleben]

In reply to # 60 from Mal

I suppose the trees are like waltzers waiting because in the semi dark they appear black , are of human shape ,and are gently swaying in the breeze. I think the simile does not extend to head tossing - that is something the trees are doing not the waltzers but there is no wrong or right - it's ambiguous . If they are is the head toss one of recognition or indifference? - we don't know. You sometimes wonder whether Hardy has the line just for the sake of the glorious triple alliteration and partial assonance of where, waltz and wait . I think your gloss on the larger meaning of the line is pretty well spot on . It's an image of communal enjoyment - so common in the novels - against the solitariness of old age. Why bother planting the pines ? - they are going to die. That line where TH uses yellow as a verb - this is genius . It's hard enough setting bad poetry to music but great poetry demands the best and as others in the thread have intimated Britten succeeds magnificently .

[verismissimo]

Britten???!!!

Not even in his own lifetime! Now Ferneyhough, that might be more like high modernism.

[Mal]

Isn't Britten thought to have had modernist tendencies now and again?

Of course his musical language is often joyously accessible (The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) or austere but still accessible (Sinfonia da Requiem.) I find Britten very difficult to place! The Telegraph says, "Neither romantic, classicist nor modernist, neither revolutionary nor reactionary, Britten ploughed his own furrow..." But couldn't you just as equally say he is all these things at different times?

Hardy is just as problematic! All those accessible realist novels and then he turns into a difficult modernist poet in his old age: "Hardy's penultimate volume, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925), published when he was 85, offers a break with his poetic practice which was itself a different kind of modernism ‐ even if one barely articulated by the poet. Hardy's work edges, as we have seen, toward the aesthetics of modernism and toward an understanding of language, abstraction, and the possibilities of representation akin at least to some strands of modernism."
A Companion to Modernist Poetry https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...118604427.ch26

Anyway, maybe I'm over-reacting to that surreal, allusive first verse - ever the scientist wanting to know exactly what is going on! Must suspend that tendency, or I'll never get to the second verse... After doing so, I agree the rest of the poem is very straightforward... and very beautiful...

P.S. I think the "waltzers" are rejecting him, the simile extends, and they are indeed tossing their heads back in disdain, if they were accepting wouldn't it be a nod? Then again, couldn't waltzers refer to fairground waltzers? Perhaps Hardy is reacting against machine driven modern civilisation?

P.P.S. Here's the full libretto:

http://www.lieder.net/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=96

P.P.P.S. Might the waltz at close of day be considered a dance of death? So, OK, the toss might be a welcome to the death dance.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Isn't Britten thought to have had modernist tendencies now and again?

I'm not entirely sure what "modernist tendencies" are, Mal, but I think that this is still a considerable back-tracking from regarding Britten (and Winter Words) as "the highest of high modernism" (which is as bizarre as describing Robert Frost as an Imagist).

Britten - particularly as a young man - was interested in the work of some composers associated with Modernism (very little was available to him - or anyone in Britain - in the 1930s; I don't think he ever heard any Varese, for example) and some of his works from that period show a sort-of watered-down "influence" from that interest. But he was far, far too much of a Pastoralist for such ideas to take any real root in his own work.

But, more importantly (I think) - you really don't need to do the sort of "study" that you suggest in #60. Study before enthusiasm can often be dangerously (or, in some cases, "fertile-y") misleading. "Just" listen to Winter Words a few times, and let its lyricism become familiar to you - get used to the sounds of the Music first (it's a lot less "difficult" than Brahms #1) and see if you get more enthusiastic about it. If not - fine: it's not for you. But if it does start to "speak" to you - then you might want to do the "study" - and benefit from it.

[Mary Chambers]

Anyway, maybe I'm over-reacting to that surreal, allusive first verse - ever the scientist wanting to know exactly what is going on! Must suspend that tendency, or I'll never get to the second verse... After doing so, I agree the rest of the poem is very straightforward... and very beautiful...

.

Poetry is never going to tell you “exactly what is going on”. Neither is Britten.

I am as interested in poetry as I am in music, which is probably why Britten is the ideal composer for me.

There is a new book due out soon called Literary Britten, edited by Kate Kennedy. She contributes an essay on the Nocturne, which should be well worth reading. It’s Boydell and Brewer, so expensive - £60.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Isn't Britten thought to have had modernist tendencies now and again?

Of course his musical language is often joyously accessible (The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) or austere but still accessible (Sinfonia da Requiem.) I find Britten very difficult to place! The Telegraph says, "Neither romantic, classicist nor modernist, neither revolutionary nor reactionary, Britten ploughed his own furrow..." But couldn't you just as equally say he is all these things at different times?

Hardy is just as problematic! All those accessible realist novels and then he turns into a difficult modernist poet in his old age: "Hardy's penultimate volume, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925), published when he was 85, offers a break with his poetic practice which was itself a different kind of modernism ‐ even if one barely articulated by the poet. Hardy's work edges, as we have seen, toward the aesthetics of modernism and toward an understanding of language, abstraction, and the possibilities of representation akin at least to some strands of modernism."
A Companion to Modernist Poetry https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...118604427.ch26

Anyway, maybe I'm over-reacting to that surreal, allusive first verse - ever the scientist wanting to know exactly what is going on! Must suspend that tendency, or I'll never get to the second verse... After doing so, I agree the rest of the poem is very straightforward... and very beautiful...

P.S. I think the "waltzers" are rejecting him, the simile extends, and they are indeed tossing their heads back in disdain, if they were accepting wouldn't it be a nod? Then again, couldn't waltzers refer to fairground waltzers? Perhaps Hardy is reacting against machine driven modern civilisation?

P.P.S. Here's the full libretto:

http://www.lieder.net/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=96

P.P.P.S. Might the waltz at close of day be considered a dance of death? So, OK, the toss might be a welcome to the death dance.

I think your reading of the poem is true without achieving the impossibility of being accurate . I don't think Hardy' s work falls neatly into an " accessible realist " novelist / "modernist " poet split. If anything it's the other way round with Jude The Obscure having a claim in its frank and at the time controversial dealing with sexuality to be one of the first 'modern novels ' .
Quite a bit of his fiction is difficult with his tendency to use recondite words and classical allusion. There is also an engagement with complex themes e.g. evolution in ' A Pair Of Blue Eyes ' , the treatment of women in late Victorian Society in Jude and Tess, the destruction of agricultural communities in the Mayor of Casterbridge , not to mention the supplanting of rural folk music and the older religion in 'Under The Greenwood Tree ' - also hinted at in the Choirmaster's burial. Winter Words strike me as almost self consciously old fashioned in form at least if not in theme - and it was published 6 years after the Waste Land.

[Ein Heldenleben]

... Though flicking through my copy of the Collected Poems most of selection Britten makes for his Winter Words cycle weren't part of Hardy's volume of the same name - but written much earlier. I wonder how he got round the Hardy Estate and their copyright interest.

[Mal]

Poetry is never going to tell you “exactly what is going on”. Neither is Britten.

Fair enough, but surrealist metaphor (pines = waltzers) does make things difficult. "Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts...The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms" - Wallace Stephens.

"When ordinarily unassociated elements are juxtaposed, the reader is called upon to determine. But if this determination is not logically possible, if the relation between the two is undecidable, something else appears in this gap. Eliot and Pound even spoke of "emotion" in this context."

http://litrefsarticles.blogspot.co.uk/1996/01/allusions.html

I guess thinking of the wildness of the pines blowing in the winter wind and the thought of waltzers whirling on the dance floor produces a heightened emotion, or the identification of trees with people makes one think of "steadfastness of human life", which Hardy undermines by pointing out that trees also vanish without trace, thereby heightening the feeling of desolation (typical Hardy...)

[Nick Armstrong]

More agreement here on KK's excellent analysis. What a treat to listen to this morning. As mentioned above, I have a number (but the 'wrong' Rolfe-Johnson) so was interested to hear them in the context of others. I've also had a few goes through with a singer or two, so sort of know them from the inside (though far from the level of some - great insights, Nev! ).

I'd put in a word for Gilchrist/Tillbrook, not much mentioned above, but the extracts came across very well I thought with ideal-sounding recording (unlike some of the more distant/wet sounds of other versions). I was also intrigued by the sprechgesang quality (as it struck me) of the Daniel Norman performance.

I'll investigate those as well as the 'winner' (I love Rolfe-Johnson), with undimmed allegiance to Pears and Langridge for their unique communicative powers.

[ardcarp]

Off piste warning

I wonder if Britten ever thought of setting W.H. Barnes' Dorset poetry? The first part of the following (a rather clever animation) is voiced over by a real Dorset man....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AoAJw4igc

...ignore the rest. Around here, we still comes across the occasional older person who speaks like that, but the accent is fast dying, as is the true Somerset of, for instance, The Somerset Levels.