Monday, April 04, 2016
Britten is going to haunt me till december
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER
Brilliant Gregorian beginning in the sonority of a
medieval church we can imagine Romanesque. And we are transported to an eternal
time that has to be out of time.
We are introduced to the abandoned and the weak on the
side of the road and God lifting them up, giving them some life back. God is
with the dejected and rejected. The Curlew
River
A rite is to be performed for the first anniversary of a
burial on the other side of the river, a grave that is a curing place for the
sick. The ferryman is going to bring the people to that shrine. The trumpet of
the ferryman is like the trumpet of Jericho
The harp brings the traveler evoking some mermaid, some
voyage, from far behind to far ahead, from the remembered to the unknown, then
a change occurs and is announced by the music.
The mad woman is introduced as crazy and having made
people laugh with her raving. Her discourse is incoherent, she asks for passage
as well as for passage to be refused to her. The reedy sound at that time shows
that uncertainty, more than craziness. She is distracted by the loss of her
child she is looking for and she sees and loses at the same time. Her discourse
is incongruent and the music plays on these notes going up and then down as if
hesitating to follow one way and only one.
She explains her son was stolen from her by a stranger
and taken east. This dramatic event has made her mind unclear and fuzzy, which
is expressed by the last syllable of the first lines going up and then
systematically turning down. Is there still some hope? It sounds very bleak, a
favorite theme with Benjamin Britten: the child enslaved by some adult that is
no relative. He approaches the motif through the deranged mother.
Then the ferryman refuses to take her across the Curlew River
The madwoman starts speaking in a language that is too
sophisticated and she starts more or less asking birds a question about the one
she loves and if he is still alive. At this moment we feel all the expectancy
in her mind, she is both suffering and hoping. The situation then becomes tense
because everyone asks the ferryman to take the mad woman till he finally yields
since she knows where she wants to go. The superposition and even contrast
between voices though they are all men's voices create a deep dramatic tension.
Strangely enough the dividing river is turned into a
connection bringing people closer to one another and on the other bank they
discover people around a yew. The ferry has brought the west bank people to the
east bank people. The music seems to be alternating between a forward movement
and a retreat.
The explanation given by the ferryman about a boy that
came along with a foreigner as his master, and that boy being sick while
crossing and then unable to go on, was struck, abandoned by his master, taken
care of by locals but he died after telling he was the only son of a dead
nobleman and had been kidnapped. He dies and is buried along the way and a yew
is planted. People say he is a saint, come, pray and take some earth to cure
their sicknesses.
They all start praying a Kyrie Eleison of thankful hope
for a sad but miraculous event. The music is then very light with some sad
beauty, the beauty of the miracle and the sadness of the dead boy. The mad
woman is weeping. They come to the shore, punctuated by the drums. The traveler
and other people offer prayers to the boy, but the ferryman is pushing them,
along with the drums and kettles, to make haste.
Then the madwoman realizes the boy must be her son. The
music takes the shape of a dirge with long silences between sad sentences and
the singing voices are superimposed without being unified, each one pulling in
a different direction. The woman starts mourning and wants to see her son
again. The music becomes a complex assemblage of whirls and whorls as if taken
in a maelstrom of emotions. But the abbot tells her weeping does not help the
child whereas a prayer may bring him peace. She yields and gets ready to
deliver a prayer, while the toll is ringing on the percussions, persistent and
sad.
Then the prayer becomes powerful with the superposition
of the Traveler and madwoman's English on the monks' Latin very Gregorian
chant. The alliance of modern music and medieval singing creates a very
powerful atmosphere. The flute supports the madwoman with some rather sharp
notes. And a very high pitched voice starts singing as if it were the voice of
the child praying in his tomb. Then this spiritual voice introduces the spirit
himself that comes to the madwoman and transforms her.
The spirit brings the good news that the dead will rise
again and the singing becomes very pure on a single note like a continuo to
gives depth to the sky high and spiritual singing. The conclusion can then go
back to the Gregorian chant and Latin. The prediction is finished. The sign
from God has been registered and accepted. The progressive building up of the
unified medieval chorus really brings the piece to its fulfillment.
I would like to add a few things to this presentation.
First it is the pattern we find in this church opera. I
am not really interested by the Japanese inspiration. I listen to it as an
English post World War II composition by Benjamin Britten and there is a
pattern that has nothing to do with the Japanese No tradition. We have here the
story of a boy who was abducted by a stranger, a foreigner, a heathen Northland
man. We can only think of the 1963 (three years earlier) cold war spy novel by
John Le Carré, “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.” This man is here presented
as “a man without a heart” who brutalizes the child when he is dying. He
appears as the one who causes his death because of the abduction though he does
not kill him directly. This is a common theme in Benjamin Britten work.
Then this twelve
year old boy is buried. A yew grows next to him, a yew is the very symbol of an
ever growing tree that grows slowly but can live for centuries. A yew is the
symbol of life that can go beyond human time since it can join hundreds of
human generations. It is a tree that has no beginning and no end in a way. He
is a tree that represents God who is beyond the alpha and the omega. And this
boy appears at the end as a spirit who can speak to his mother because she
finally comes down from her grief and accepts to pray for the boy. Thus the yew
becomes the symbol of the reunion, reconciliation, rejoining of many
generations, of people from all sides, at least from the west and from the
east, those from the west crossing the dividing Curlew river to make that
pilgrimage in the east. It is obvious now that there is beyond these cardinal
orientations a discourse on the world: the old world of the Crusades to the
East to the Holy Land , and the modern world
and its Iron Curtain. We have to step beyond our divides to reunited humanity
into the belief in a salvation that cannot come if we do not pray for it. The
Yew is also a tree that grows up straight, higher and higher year after year.
It is a typical Romanesque symbol of vegetal elevation towards heavens and God,
that elevation that was represented in Romanesque churches with the sculptures
of many plants that just grow up to the sky like ferns and many others, or like
angels and birds who can fly.
And that is this idea of salvation if we forgive, and
maybe at least push aside if not forget, the evil that was imposed onto us that
is the wish of a redemption with the promise of a final reunion in heaven. We
can take this Christian tale as a metaphor or a parable of real life and then
we can expect a redemption in life if we are able to forgive people and step up
to the renascence of our own minds, of our own souls in the light of the communion
with those who have been the victims of the past. This pattern is not only a
parable or a metaphor carried by the semantic meaning of the words. It’s a lot
more.
It is also carried by the poetry of the text dramatically
reinforced by the music that is expressive in supporting every single syllable
with an instrument, a note, a tone that all contribute to the serenity (to be
specified) that is slowly built in the opera. It is all built on a ternary
figure or motif. The three main characters, the Madwoman, the Traveller and the
Ferryman are the very core of the opera. But from the very start the language
reflects that ternary pattern and widens it slightly. The phrase “a sign was given of God’s grace”
we have three /g/ sounds. It is echoed with the reduced phrase “a sign of God’s grace” with only two /g/ sounds, which makes five. This is
repeated just a few lines lower in the very same form. And that makes four
instances of “God’s grace.” But a third instance of this pattern is given some
lines lower but without the echo and it becomes: “as innocence outshineth guilt, a sign was given of God’s good
grace.” By adding “good” the
librettist and composer turn the ternary phrase into a group of four /g/
sounds. And they introduce a fifth one before with “guilt” which brings the
group to five /g/ sounds. We have thus five “God’s grace” phrases and we have
three instances of five /g/ sounds. In the Christian context we are not
surprised by the ternary figure which is the Holy Trinity, hence God in its
ternary unity. But five implies that something evil lies at the core of this
human reality, in spite of God’s grace. It is the pentacle of evil.
We could then think the opera should lead us towards
salvation, redemption. It does but the same way as the boy’s spirit tells his
mother: we will meet again in heaven when this world comes to an end. The poet
and the composer do that at the end with subtlety. First they play on “Amen.”
Abbot and Pilgrims say one first “Amen” and just one line lower Ferryman,
Traveller, Abbot Pilgrims say two “Amen,” which makes a first group of three.
One line lower the Mother/Madwoman says three “Amen,” a second group of three,
and behind Ferryman, Traveller, Abbot and Pilgrims say two “Amen” finally
echoed by a final one “Amen” by the Boy’s Spirit, which makes a third group of;
three. All together nine and nine is the Apocalypse, Doomsday, the ninth hour
when Jesus died on the cross, the crucifixion being identified to four and
being absent here, ninth hence that represents also the death of the world
after the second coming which is identified as eight, an upright standing omega
of the end, the final end, and this ninth “Amen” is brought by the Boy’s Spirit
because he announces heaven and meeting again with his mother.
And yet the very ending is more complex in that
ambiguity.
First a repeat from the beginning: “a sign was given of God’s grace.
A sign of God’s grace” with five /g/ sounds and
a disquieting pentacle. Further on a second repeat from the beginning that I
did not mention but could have: “the fallen, the lost, the least.” Three “the”,
three /l/ sounds. That makes six, the number of Solomon, of wisdom, in a way of
Sophia, the star of David, all elements heavily symbolical after World War II.
But add to this the two /st/ endings and you come to a pattern of eight, of the
upright omega, of the Second Coming, and yet the next line is a lot crueler:
“the hope He gives, and His grace that heals.” Four /h/ sounds, two of them
being God and the other two the positive action of God (hope and healing) along
with the symbolized gift of his son crucified to redeem human sins and
humanity. But also two qualities coming from God, “hope” and “grace” twinned
with “gives” and “heals” which creates a
double quaternary pattern verb-nouns and /g/-/h/ sounds. Remember that this
quaternary pattern is the crucifixion without which the second coming of eight
(four plus four) cannot come. Heaven will be after the Second Coming (8), after
the Apocalypse (9) both brought by the crucifixion (4) and yet evil is
everywhere, even in that last moment since the beast and the Dragon are there
too, both representing 999, or 666=18=9+9. Note 666 is the beast in the Book of
Revelation and 666=6x111=2x3x3x37, a complex mixture of 2x3=6, wisdom, and
3x3=9 the apocalypse and 2x3x3=18= 2x9=3x6 with the intricate intertwining of
3, 6 and 9.
And the last line is even more cryptic since it expands
“hope” into “In hope, in peace, ends our mystery.” You can build
“hope-grace-hope-peace,” a quaternary structure reinforced by the repetition of
“hope” and the two similar ending of the other two words that do not rhyme
really but are an echoing consonant. And this quaternary structure (with the
two preceding ones they build twelve, the apostles who are essential at the
beginning of the Book of Revelation, but the last four is expanded into five by
“mystery,” though the last two had been expanded into three by this very same
“mystery.”
I don’t know if that subtlety can be considered as
inherited from the Japanese No tradition, but it sure is in phase with the
deepest Romanesque symbolism and imaginary world of the first half of the
Middle Ages, and then with the more Gothic tradition that will develop from the
end of the 13th century to the middle of the 15th century
(and slightly longer into the Renaissance in Germany) with the culminating
point of the Black Death: a period haunted by the demographic overpopulation
crisis, heretics like the Cathars, the Black Death itself of course and then
the Danse Macabres and “The Three Living and The Three Dead.”
Hence we can conclude the serenity we spoke of at the
beginning of the opera is definitely something difficult to reach in this world
and even problematic in the other world.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:55 PM 
