Sad tales for winter

Musical Times, Winter 2001 by Mellers, Wilfrid

Such is the burden of the final, epilogic song, `Before life and after', the poem of which is specifically about the Fall, equated with the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness. The rhythmic and metaphorical life of that poem is so highly charged that we cannot take it baldly as a statement that nothingness or nirvana is preferable to the pain of experience. Paradoxically, the language of negation seeks to be powerfully physical; the crash, cross, wrack, wincing and waning, the heart-- wringing and sense-stinging, generate a kind of pride in being human; for it is something, not nothing, to have been through so much, and we deserve the however illusory panacea of a respite. Britten's setting affirms this heroic stance, beginning in 'glorious' D major with thick triads in the left hand, and with the right hand floating in octaves, asymmetrically between fifth and sixth. The vocal line, beginning high but soft, alternates stepwise movement with godly fourths, while the bass line mounts the scale from D to B, then quietly falls. For the first time the quaver movement is stilled in wonder on the words `When all went well'. Momently, the sense of wonder freezes the chugging movement of Time, as the voice moves between tonic and the major second, while the piano enunciates concords of G major, falling flatwards to C on the words `none suffered sickness', teetering in ambiguous tonality and in painful, thickly scored false relations through the `starved hope' and `heart-burnings'. With a return of the noble falling fourths in the voice part, a modulation to blissful G major seems feasible but, in an interrupted cadence, the lower mediant, E(flat) major, is substituted for what would have been the new tonic. The pulsing quavers are again stilled to minim concords on E(flat) and B(flat), but their effect is paradoxical: for whereas at the minims' first appearance they'd told us that `all went well' before we were conscious, now, while rendering the thud of Time immobile, they `bring wrack to things'. Perhaps this suggests that there are positive as well as negative aspects to the growth of `consciousness' through its remorseless procession of quaver triads. This seems to be implicit in what's left of the song, as it is in Hardy's poem, since the music grows more lyrically affirmative the more texture, harmony, and tonality are clouded.

The third stanza veers betwen E(flat) with flat seventh and B(flat), its dominant, the voice's arching fourths being ever more pervasive. Possibly E(flat) here implies a measure of human heroism, as it often did in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music; and possibly it's no accident that the basic key of `Proud songsters' had been E(flat) major, paying homage to the birds' (of course unconscious) heroism. And although when `brightness dims and dark prevails' the vocal line droops chromatically in dotted rhythm, the chugging bass quavers rise. On the words `No sense was stung' the minim triads again banish the clumping quavers, though this time the triads are no simple concords, but a dominant seventh of E major followed by an F(sharp) triad that is simultaneously major and minor. The chords' stillness is thus not quite immobile; on the contrary, they lead into the `disease of feelings passage which generates energy from its bitonality organum-style triads descending from B to E major in the left hand, while the right hand, echoed by the voice, rises up the scale of G major. The pattern is sequentially repeated as `primal rightness takes the tinct of wrong% the bass triads muddily falling from B(flat) to E(flat), then from A(flat) to D(flat), while the rising scales reach up to F(natural).