Sad tales for winter

Musical Times, Winter 2001 by Mellers, Wilfrid

The last repetition of the sequence takes the triads down to the tonic D major and the vocal line up to F(sharp). The ultimate cries of `How long?' oscillate between high F(sharp) and G, the notes the song had started from, now loud, even assertive. The noble falling fourths, echoed by the piano, reestablish the tonic key unambiguously, the bass triads wavering between tonic D majors and first inversions of the dominant seventh. The piano's final falling fourths are still potent: although consciousness, in obliterating unconsciousness, destroys Eden, it is none the less what man was born for. Since he 'fell' from Eden, and never really. lived in it, he cannot evade 'consciousness' which, if he can take it, may be his ultimate reward. Even the most trivial incidents described and the most fleeting moments envisioned in the cycle have their place, and their intrinsic dignity, in the patterns of experience.

THIS is why Britten's meticulous planning of the cycle is not so much clever as significant. Two philosophical, as distinct from narrative or operatic, songs serve as prologue and epilogue, the prologue being in traditionally 'obscure' D minor, a key of pilgrimage, and the epilogue in 'glorious' D major, albeit with many `fortunate falls' into flat keys. Inside the prologue and epilogue are placed two paired, quasioperatic story-songs with railway settings that imply human pilgrimages, or journeys to destinations unknown. The first presents an unknown and 'unknowing' Journeying Boy, in turbulent C minor (Beethoven's 'dynamic' key), with bewildering tinges of 'rational' C major or of 'painful' E minor, with some ambiguity as to the tonic. The matching penultimate number in the palindrome concerns a fiddling boy at a railway station, along with a convict who is conscious of little except that he is handcuffed, whereas the fiddling Boy is free. Unsurprisingly, this number cannot decide whether it is in (dour) A minor or in (shining) A major. Within the two railway songs Britten places, in his palindrome, two small scherzos, the first being about a baby and a wagtail, which begins around pastoral F major but evanesces in blithe A major when the baby decides - or is he encouraged by Nature or God? - not to think. At the other end we have a song about the obliviousness of birds, chattering, in unconscious heroism, in humanly heroic E(flat) major.

Then, as the midmost pair, we have a song about an old man (Hardy himself) who fails `consciously to remember, and therefore to understand: this being in E minor, a purgatorial key and, indeed, Bach's key of crucifixion. This is bracketed with the climacteric, and longest, song about a dead Choirmaster and a living Vicar whose roles, as representatives of the Flesh and the Word, are reversed: for the dead choirmaster's basic key is Mixolydian B(flat) major - a tritone away from `purgatorial' E minor and traditionally an 'earthy' key one step down the cycle of fifths from pastoral F major - while the Vicar's (remote) key of A major displays innocence only ironically, and even cynically. The epilogic song - both the grandest and the deepest - is pointedly called `Before life and after'; and moves us deeply because we know that, however desperately those soaring `How longs'?' yearn for a renewal of Eden's unconsciousness, our destiny can only be consciousness, which embraces pleasure and pain alike. Consciousness, of its nature, involves the tragic sense. Only human beings have it.