Sad tales for winter

Musical Times, Winter 2001 by Mellers, Wilfrid

The next number, `The little old table', is another `satire of circumstance' which complements the previous one in that it is not about a baby but about an old man (Hardy himself), remembering. Although this poem is bleakly about non-communication, this is not because memory is dimmed but rather because it is too acute: and Britten captures this by making his setting the most ,realistic' song thus far, since the creaking of the table becomes the substance of the music. The piano part enunciates the Creak in rocking quavers in 2/4 (quick and light'), spiced with false relations that are double appoggiaturas, interspersed with a scale-figure up or down that, crossing the barlines, and overriding key, makes the creaks bumpily spasmodic. That is what we would expect of a table that's even older than Hardy was; but the vocal line - which at first seems to be merely onomatopoeic like the piano-part - changes at the reference to `one who gave you to me', for these words are set to a 'warm' melisma, intensifying the Phrygian E minor. The first stanza ends with wriggling semiquavers that transform the table's creak into squawk; and although the second stanza begins again with physical imitation, the breaks in the vocal line shift attention from the table's material creaking to the mental state of the man who regards it. The point lies in 'my' (Hardy's) incomprehension of the reasons for the woman's gift, all those long years ago: and the extended melisma on the word 'did' in the phrase 'I did not understand', adds pathos to the lyricism of the setting of the words `one who gave you to me'; indeed Britten's stress hints that Hardy's words mean that, while he then did not understand, now, he does. I suspect this was Hardy's intention too, though that we're not sure whether the nostalgia is pleasurable or painful is an aspect of life's irremediable ambiguity Although this is very much a Song of Experience, it seems to leave the old man baffled, unknowing. The chromaticised appoggiaturas in the melismata iron out the bitonality of the creaky accompaniment into Phrygian E minor, as the final stanza returns from recollection to the table here and now. The lyrical melismata recur on the final phrase, `from long ago', a third lower, landing on the tonic E. Though the heart of the song has been the reinvoking of emotion long past, if not totally buried, that final droop to the tonic renders the feeling elusive, even ghostily insubstantial, as compared with the hard little table we're left with, semitonically squeaking into the eternal silence.

The next number, `The choirmaster's burial', is the longest song and forms the climax to the cycle, being a ballad in the basic sense that it tells a psychologically complex story. It's a story, we note, of the `old times', when Hardy was a lad: a ghost story narrated by a `tenor man' who had sung for the choirmaster through many years; and it turns on the contrast between the choirmaster's Blakean innocence and the vicar's mundane, and therefore unBlakean, experience. In this tale the vicar is on the world's, and perhaps the Devil's, side, while the choirmaster is on God's side - as God, it turns out, is on his. The measured movement of the shortlined rhyming verses creates his openhearted simplicity: which Britten echoes by setting the narrative in open-eared Anglican liturgical incantation, in the Mixolydian mode on B(flat). The piano accompanies with simulated church-- organ the request that the hymn `Mount Ephraim' should be played at his grave-side: and there's a hint of dominant modulation before the potential vision of the seraphim lilts in airy dotted rhythmed triplets back to B(flat) with flat seventh, to fade on an unresolved second.