Sad tales for winter

Musical Times, Winter 2001 by Mellers, Wilfrid

The first poem, pointedly enough, is called `At day-close in November'. The rhythm of the verse accords with the bleak landscape, making for a calm acceptance of impervious Time's threat to childhood's innocence. 'Old' Hardy, like old Captain Vere, knows, but the young ones don't, their happiness lying in their ignorant unknowingness. Britten's musical images are precise. Although the verse's pulse is slow and weary, the music is `quick and impetuous', like the children's frolicking, while the bitonal chords (often telescoped tonics and dominants) and the dislocated or syncopated rhythms of the piano enact both the wind-blustered swaying of the trees and the agitation within the aged poet's heart. The intermittent unison Ds, always approached by a tightly Phrygian semitonic EL, suggest a stoic acceptance of the inevitable, the bitonal arpeggios being loud, but the unison Ds always soft.

While the telescoped harmonies and dislocated rhythms continue in the piano part, the vocal line, though anchored on the intermittent unison Ds, is highly chromaticised, with traditionally 'obscure' D minor as the basic tonality, acting out, as so often in Britten, our undeniably obscure pilgrimage. The vocal line is no less distraught, sometimes growing from verbal inflexion, but at other times violently contradicting it, as in the stress on the article in the opening phrase: `The ten hours' light is abating'. The hiatus in the fastish waltz rhythm as the `late bird wings across' is both physical action and psychological distress; similarly with the pine trees imaged as `waiting waltzers', wherein Britten doesn't hesitate to repeat words to intensify the physicality of his musical metaphors. In the next stanza the hemiola rhythm stretched across the bar lines makes the beech leaves wither to yellowness, and the recurrence of the opening phrase for `set every tree in my June time' now gives an offbeat stress to the crucial 'I': the person who instigated the then-new tree-life that now - in a hemiola droop of a major sixth underlined by false-- related triads both major and minor - obscures the sky.

The final stanza is introduced by the original cross-accented tonics and dominants now in triple piano, and the vocal line, grown more major than minor, rocks sweetly through intervals widening from fourth to fifth, to sixth, to seventh, crooning of the children's blissful obliviousness. Again, extensions to the vocal line both make action audible and point its meaning: consider the melisma on the word 'never' that makes the children 'ramble' while at the same time stressing the word's remorselessness. Similarly, the emphasis on the word 'no' in the phrase `when no trees' transmogrifies minor into major third as part of a warmly drooping sixth, balanced by a rising seventh at the remembrance that here life once was. The hushed harmonies shiny-shally between major and minor, though for the deathly final phrase (`none will in time be seen') the decline down the scale to the tonic D, again by way of Phrygian E(flat), is irremediably minor. This time the downward-- pushing E(flat) stays in the final bitonal arpeggios which, being between triads of A and E(flat) majors, are now a devilish tritone apart. The ultimate unison D is a brief quaver, pp but accented: a wary acceptance evanescing into silence.