Britten

[Roger Webb]

... o, he is a very particular voice, and worth getting to know (if not too deeply... ). His episodic horror novel The Three Impostors is quite exceptional, and really got to me - you will, I think, enjoy it - but you will feel very unclean when you get to the end...

Even better, Machen's 'The House of Souls' which is the book Ireland chanced upon at the bookstall at Charing Cross station to read on the train to Deal where was residing at the time.

The book most closely associated with Ireland's mystical works - particularly those he wrote after moving to downland Sussex is The Hill of Dreams. It is sometimes stated that this is the book he bought first...this cannot be as it wasn't published until a year after the Charing Cross purchase.

I've often walked The Downs around the area near Ireland's home, Rock Mill (I was born at Ditchling just along the Downs), he is buried in Shipley churchyard just north of there...a village perhaps better known for another Mill-dweller, Hilaire Belloc.

[smittims]

Of course neither Britten nor Ireland deliberately portrayed their sexual orientation in their music, any more than Tippett or Walton, but one cannot help one's nature coming through the subconscious into one's art, and I think Master Jaques puts this well in his third paragraph. There was a shyness about Britten ; it's possible he had only one fully-sexual relationship, unlike Pears, and seems to have been the passive one.

I can't agree that sexuality is unimportant in any creative artist; this is not to suggest that the composers concerned (Vaughan Williams for instance) were always thinking about it and attempting to use it deliberately in their art, but it is one aspect of their personalities and makeup which went into to the making of their music , if subconsciously.

[Master Jacques]

John Ireland though is an interesting example . I believe he deliberately rewrote the piano part of his piano concerto to make it unplayable by its first performer - one of his (many) lovers he’d broken up with. A really mean trick that.

Poor Helen Perkin was dastardly enough to go and marry somebody else, after he'd dedicated the Concerto to her. But the most complicated of all his relationships - even more so, perhaps, than that with his housekeeper Norah Lofts - was perhaps with the young chorister who inspired The Holy Boy, Bobby Glasby. There's a good play in that one!

[Master Jacques]

... o, he is a very particular voice, and worth getting to know (if not too deeply... ). His episodic horror novel The Three Impostors is quite exceptional, and really got to me - you will, I think, enjoy it - but you will feel very unclean when you get to the end...

Quite right, "unclean" is precisely how I feel after reading an Arthur Machen book. The most positive of them, perhaps, is The Great God Pan, which is in the Algernon Blackwood class for lyric, mystical horror.

[Master Jacques]

I can't agree that sexuality is unimportant in any creative artist; this is not to suggest that the composers concerned (Vaughan Williams for instance) were always thinking about it and attempting to use it deliberately in their art, but it is one aspect of their personalities and makeup which went into to the making of their music , if subconsciously.

Their sexuality - like their sexual experiences - are of course important to their lives, but I would not be so certain that we can link that up with their music. The weasel word here is "subconsciously": claiming that the fastidiously chaste Manuel de Falla, for example, was somehow (obscurely) transmitting his homosexuality across in his music without knowing it strikes me as highly doubtful, to say the least. What's worse, any such assertion does nothing to illuminate his art. Quite the reverse, in fact.

In Britten's case, part of its appeal is its child-like freedom from mature sensuality: some even find parts of his work "maidenly", though that's not a term I'd use myself.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks, especially to smittims and Master Jacques, for what is turning out to be both a most informative and entertaining thread. I have led so much, never having known that Manuel de Falla was gay??

[eighthobstruction]

Thanks, especially to smittims and Master Jacques, for what is turning out to be both a most informative and entertaining thread. I have led so much, never having known that Manuel de Falla was gay??

....I don't know mate Prince, Freddie Mercury, and Marc Bolan must be turning , turning....turning....

....yes a most excellent thread....

[Quarky]

Thanks, especially to smittims and Master Jacques, for what is turning out to be both a most informative and entertaining thread. I have led so much, never having known that Manuel de Falla was gay??

Agreed . On a similar level of erudition to the Turangalila thread, which I have been consulting recently.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't know. I began this week hoping to have my feelings about Britten modified in a more positive direction from learning more about his earlier output, but - unless the final programme manages to spring an unexpected rabbit out of Magician Macleod's hat, I fear I am going to end up liking him even less!

There's a passage I read many years ago from some writer up of a piece by Georges Auric which he says contains page after page in which the harmonic language makes no sense whatever. I feel rather the same applies to much of Britten. There are exceptions: most of A Boy was Born; the "We keep his memories alive" movement from St Nicholas, not featured this week. It's one thing to say, right, I'm going to rip up the harmonic theory book entirely, entirely another to know what to put in its place. None, and I mean not one of the universally recognised C20 pioneers with the possible exception of John Cage, built up new musical languages without initially having taken what was given by their predecessors or teachers before in-depth questioning and either in the light of the given expanding on or rejecting known knowns. Behind the energetic surface, I find little or nothing here - Britten's music is idiomatically thin - a lot of it almost infantile in sounding like a child arbitrarily and innocently finding note combinations using just the white notes on the piano. It makes me think of some spoilt brat saying "I can get away with this, all you dupes". How these basic howlers are then dressed up is then dependent on his clever clogs sense of instrumental colour and contrast. He seems at his "best" composing pastiche: the tuneful Matinées Musicales could have been composed in the 1860s by someone like Gounod. However my feeling about Mont Juic, which I have always liked, is that Lennox Berkeley his collaborator probably exercised some controlling constraints on the quality of the end-product. When other reputed composers broke the rules, either the discriminating ear could usually detect where the composer was coming from, or the outcome was directed towards some new constructive principle already emergent that spoke persuasively of governing authority. I rarely hear this in Britten, not even in the one early work I do like, the Frank Bridge Variations, which succeed in some magic mood painting, but which exhibit another fault in Britten, episodicism, the inability to see ideas through.

[smittims]

I've looked in Lewis Foreman's John Ireland Companion and elsewhere but have found no reference to Ireland having re-written the solo part of his concerto. What he did do was to remove the dedication to Helen Perkin after they parted, a sad end to what had been a beautiful, if platonic, relationship. At any rate the published recording of her playing the Sonatina shows that the concerto as it stands now would have no problem for her; the other warhorse in her portfolio was Prokofiev's third. Like the Grieg, the Ravel G major (and what the hell,,, Mozart too!) the Ireland is not a difficult work technically, but rather interpretatively.

Vaughan Williams (and Joe Cooper in his youngerdays) rewrote his concerto, possibly because (though he was too polite to say so) he was dissatisfied with Harriet Cohen's playing of it (Adrian Boult, who had conducted the premiere, in a private memo said frankly that she could not play it) .

[Ein Heldenleben]

I've looked in Lewis Foreman's John Ireland Companion and elsewhere but have found no reference to Ireland having re-written the solo part of his concerto. What he did do was to remove the dedication to Helen Perkin after they parted, a sad end to what had been a beautiful, if platonic, relationship. At any rate the published recording of her playing the Sonatina shows that the concerto as it stands now would have no problem for her; the other warhorse in her portfolio was Prokofiev's third. Like the Grieg, the Ravel G major (and what the hell,,, Mozart too!) the Ireland is not a difficult work technically, but rather interpretatively.

Vaughan Williams (and Joe Cooper in his youngerdays) rewrote his concerto, possibly because (though he was too polite to say so) he was dissatisfied with Harriet Cohen's playing of it (Adrian Boult, who had conducted the premiere, in a private memo said frankly that she could not play it) .

My source is from a performance given of the concerto at Cadogan Hall by Mark Bebbington. At the pre performance talk was an Ireland expert possibly even his biographer. The re writing of the concerto was bandied about between the members of the panel including the conductor and pianist as of it was common knowledge. I even asked a question specifically about the rewrite as I’d never heard about it.
The concerto is a technically difficult work particularly for small hands . It’s approximately ABRSM diploma standard - of the same level of difficulty as Rach 2 but not as difficult as Rach 3.

[Master Jacques]

He seems at his "best" composing pastiche: the tuneful Matinées Musicales could have been composed in the 1860s by someone like Gounod.

It's worth pointing out, perhaps, that the Soirées and Matinées Musicales are not pastiches, but string arrangements of original tunes by Rossini, many of them indeed "sins of his old age" from the 1860s. Not that this affects your argument: that Britten did have a remarkable gift for parody (rather than pastiche) is evident, not least in the play scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Having said which, I don't quite follow your point on his harmony. What's "right" and what's "wrong" when it comes to harmonisation? Just because a composer chooses not to follow the rules of (e.g.) the Rimsky or Piston treatises doesn't necessarily mean they don't know what they're doing - as Britten's technically brilliant parodies and arrangements of other composers demonstrate. Don't his quirks provide his personality?

[Roger Webb]

....................... Britten did have a remarkable gift for parody (rather than pastiche) is evident, not least in the play scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Although the Choral Dances in Gloriana do lean towards pastiche more.

[Master Jacques]

Although the Choral Dances in Gloriana do lean towards pastiche more.

I'm not sure: like Maxwell Davies's Dances in Taverner two decades later, don't they lean more towards "original composition using Tudor forms"? Splitting hairs, I know ... and whether or not, they're wonderful bridges between the old and new Elizabethan ages, I'm sure we'd agree!

[Master Jacques]

IVaughan Williams (and Joe Cooper in his youngerdays) rewrote his concerto, possibly because (though he was too polite to say so) he was dissatisfied with Harriet Cohen's playing of it (Adrian Boult, who had conducted the premiere, in a private memo said frankly that she could not play it) .

Quite so. I often think the - totally unnecessary and counterproductive - rewriting as a two-piano concerto is a remarkable example of RVW's capacity to blame himself for somebody else's faults. Unnecessary, because the writing for two hands is perfectly idiomatic; and counterproductive, because it provided a stick to beat him with ("he couldn't write technically for piano") which lasted for far too many years. Now at least we can enjoy the original version for what it is.