Sad tales for winter

Musical Times, Winter 2001 by Mellers, Wilfrid

Britten's 'Lyrics and ballads of Thomas Hardy'

In the 25th anniversary year since the composer's death WILFRID MELLERS revisits a classic English song cycle

IN 1953 BENJAMIN BRITTEN COMPOSED - only a few years after his Spring symphony of 1949 - his wintry masterpiece, under the title of Winter words. The work is a cycle of settings for tenor and piano of poems by Thomas Hardy who, superficially, may seem the least likely of Britten's many poetic masks, who include Auden, Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Blake, and William Soutar. We're apt to think of Hardy - especially Hardy the poet - as old, sere, retrospective, living in a past he'd not only lost but thought he'd humanly failed in; whereas we think of Britten as perennially young, if not for that reason lacking in wisdom. Over the years, however, I've come to think that the Hardy cycle, Winter words, is the finest and most deeply characteristic of the cycles dedicated to a single poet, and to voice and piano.

In between the Spring symphony and Winter words Britten composed his second grand, and tragic, opera, Billy Budd, and since most of Britten's chamber works are in some sense chippings from his operatic workshop, it may be helpful to approach the song-cycle by way of the opera. It has often been said that all Britten's operas gravitate around the same theme; and the limitation of range is part of the evidence of his genius. In dealing with innocence and persecution Britten knew what he knew, and that the theme of the sacrificial scapegoat is relevant to our time is patent enough. We are obsessed with innocence because we have lost it; and for the same reason we resent and persecute those who haven't. Britten couldn't have dealt with this theme so powerfully if it hadn't been deeply personal to him. What matters is that his art creates, from personal conflicts that don't concern us, myths that prove to be deeply and disturbingly pertinent. And - at least before Death in Venice - Billy Budd must count as Britten's most obsessionally personal opera: so much so that, at the time of the original performances, I momently wondered whether the personal interests weren't too strong to be mythologised. One can put the point simply by saying that Melville's womenless man-of-war cannot be an adequate image for the Ship of Life. Grimes, though an unhero, is genuinely a tragic character, the Sauvage Man who, given different circumstances, might have grown to civilised consciousness. Billy is not a tragic figure because we aren't aware that he has potentiality for growth. He is a child destroyed by his childishness, by a stammer that we cannot accept as mea culpa - as a, let alone as the, `tragic flaw'. For this reason, the crucifixion analogy, so stridently emphasised in the first production, seemed illegitimate. Billy cannot be equated with Christ, who did grow up, the hard way.

Later productions, with the Christ equation played down, convinced me that it's unhelpful to compare Budd with Grimes, since in Billy Budd the drama is mainly psychological and archetypal, not social nor even, except in a rather special sense, moral. Thus the ship isn't so much the World as the Mind: and the mind is that of Captain Vere, who is the opera's central character because he's the only human consciousness we're aware of. Billy and Claggart are what they are: their white and black are both within Vere's psyche, and the opera tells us that growing up is a complex equilibrium between the contradictory impulses they don't 'stand for' but are. We cannot - as Billy tries to -- dispose of evil by a blind blow, provoked by the inarticulateness of the good within us. To accept destiny, with courage rather than in will-less passivity, is the most formidable - the most 'special' in the sense referred to above - moral obligation we are likely to come across; and Britten's marvellous musical metaphor for this acceptance - the procession of slow major triads that, echoing and resolving the minor triads of Claggart's aria of destruction, initiates the death-sentence - moves us so much because we know that Billy cannot live to taste the fruits of experience. Yet this resolution is, of course, not Billy's but that of Vere, who has lived through his life to find peace in submission to a law `beyond good and evil' because it recognises their mutuality. The action of the opera is enclosed within the memory of this old man, whose name means truth.

Truth is old, like our image of Hardy, and like him it is unblinkered in its acceptance of destiny. That Britten should have turned to Hardy, in the intimate medium of chamber music, after his epic Melvillian seascape, therefore seems natural enough; for all his cosmopolitan sophistication, he was a profoundly English composer who, after the unknowable wastes of the ocean, comes home to the English countryside at a time long enough ago to be aware of an historical past, yet near enough to be immediately apprehensible. And with his customary self-knowledge Britten chose just those verses which are germane to his purpose. They are not Hardy's greatest poems, which tend to be those most deeply rooted in his personal history - usually too rhythmically and emotionally subtle to take or need projection into sounds other than those of the speaking voice. Poems 2 to 7 of those Britten selects come into the category he calls 'ballads': dramatic vignettes that set a scene and tell a tale, tiny operas exploiting Britten's `physical' auralisation of experience. The opening and closing songs, however, are lyrical and philosophically reflective, the theme being precisely the relationship between Innocence and Experience.