Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Saint Nicolas is very orthodox in a music that has a strong charm
BENJAMIN
BRITTEN – SAINT NICOLAS, A CANTATA – 1948
How can the
simple man hiding under or behind the saint or the bishop, behind the robe, the
mitre and the cross of gold be evoked, celebrated? The front of the bishop
hides the secret heart of the man. But at the same time celebrating the life of
a saint is always a perilous game because the humility of the saint should lead
him to refuse being celebrated, and yet we all have some vanity in our hearts.
The birth of
Nicolas has something mysterious and the second track is typical about this
miracle that the birth of the saint is and the evocation of the miracle is
punctuated by seven repetitions of “God be Glorified!” the first six sung by a
child and the last, the seventh instance sung by a male tenor, like the real
birth of the adult saint in the new-born. The Holy week of the creation or the
Holy week of the Passion is thus realized in this final male voice crowning the
whole week. This evocation of Nicolas’s birth is quite similar to that of Jesus
though in a maybe less poor environment since Nicolas has a crib whereas Jesus
only had a manger.
The third
track shows Nicolas getting cut off and away from the worldly artifacts of life
to dedicate himself to God. He is an early orphan and leaves his parents’ house
early. He then sells his land to feed the poor but he wants to go beyond plain
charity and reach love, meaning love for God and that leads him to cut himself
off from the world: “I cast away all things that could distract my mind from
full devotion to His will.” Yet this submission is not enough to satisfy God
and he makes God his “only Master, friend and guide.” The music is absolute
humility, softness, a soft string tune behind the voice that grows stronger,
more imposing, forbidding even. And here he works on a ternary structure that
is fundamental in the whole cantata. He uses a “burden” of sorts to conclude
the last three (out of four) stanzas. “But Love demanded more.” “But Love
desired more still.” “And Love was satisfied.” The last one is so suspended in
intensity and pitch that he seems to be choking in that Love, to be out of
anything real.
The fourth
track that evokes the journey to Palestine
The next track
brings up the pompous crowning of Nicolas as the Bishop of Myra. There Nicolas
asserts he has only one master and he is the servant of that sole master, God
and his Church. This dedication is then amplified by the Choir of women’s or
children’s voices that sounds like a choir of angels, distant and high pitched.
Then the choir of mixed male and female voices amplifies this angelic
impression by bringing us back to earth and the whole movement is multiplied
then by the hymn which the congregation is supposed to take part in or respond
to. This amplification of the discourse is surprising because where is the
simple man behind this pomp and glorious power? The man really disappears behind
the façade of the bishop.
That’s when in
the sixth track Nicolas is sent to prison by the Romans. Nicolas preaches then
from his prison to humanity and his persecution is clearly evoked as the
wilderness of man, a wilderness seen as a preference and then a cultivation on
the side of man, but this wilderness is “desecrated” by the crucifixion of
Christ. The word is surprising since this wilderness is sinful and anything but
sacred, and yet it is sacred to these sinners, and Christ crucified, desecrated
in his existence by the Passion, becomes the desecration of this so-to-say sacred
sinful life. Strangely enough that sets Christ apart from all humans, as if he
were a stranger, a foreigner, an extra-terrestrial even who comes on earth to
put the whole human wilderness upside down.
The seventh
track about the Pickled Boys is more dramatic. Travelers tell us about the
difficulties of the road, of the long distances they have to travel. A choir of
mothers then evokes three boys, Timothy, Mark and John, a trinity immediately
amplified by a ternary conclusion “Are gone! Are gone! Are gone!” This
evocation of the mother’s’ loss of their children is the mirror image of the
difficulties of travelers, though the loss of children is at home, in the
family and in the heart, it is the deprivation of the motherly love of these
mothers who lose the object of their love by losing their children. And this
pain and suffering of mothers is set in parallel with Mary and her loss of her
child Jesus. In this track we really have simple people and their suffering,
and these simple people are connected to Jesus through his mother Mary. And
that’s when Nicolas intervenes. His discourse is voluntarily pushing aside food
that he assimilates to sin, so that people can try to save the three souls of
the three children. But Nicolas clearly wants to bring the three boys out of
oblivion, back to our consciousness.
“Timothy,
Mark and John,
Put
your fleshy garments on!
Come
from dark oblivion!
Come!
Come! Come! Come!”
And the three
boys resurrect from their own death. They had been slaughtered by butchers and
their flesh had been salted, in a way
like pork. This is an evocation of cannibalism. The most surprising element is
the names. We could think of three apostles, but only two of them are gospel
writers. It is difficult to know what motivated the author of the libretto to
choose these three names, but the resurrection and the butcher’s knife that
killed them before does not go towards the three apostles. The whole track ends
with a long and very complicated conclusion repeating “Alleluia!” a great
number of times, over and over again, to celebrate the miracle, ending up with
a few measures of joyful dance music.
The eighth
track is the evocation of the legend and as such is just easy going music and
text and it is funny to see how he saves a man from court, three daughters from
sin, how he feeds a whole crowd from a single sack, how he saves three men from
execution, how he is part of the Nicaea Council that established Christianity
as the official religion of the Roman Empire, how he chastises Constantine the
Great into confessing his sins. But once again this is not the simple man
behind the bishop or the saint. We do not really see or feel his doubts, his
fears, his anxieties. He is asserted so powerfully as a perfect saint that we
seem to forget he also was a man. In fact the allusion to the prodigal son of
the New Testament (Luke
15:11-32) is dematerialized into some abstract elements: “He was prodigal of
love! A spendthrift in devotion to us all – and blessed as he caressed.” The
last remark is surprising. When he blessed people it was as if he caressed them
with gentleness, but that is also treating people as if they were pets because
you do not caress even children, certainly not adults.
And that leads us to
the ninth track and the evocation of the Death of Nicolas. I must admit the
discourse of Nicolas at this moment is bizarre in many ways. He greets Death as
his liberator since he can finally move on to the Lord and he rejoices in that coming
meeting and he thanks Christ who saved his soul by dying on the cross. It is
extremely self-centered and where is once again the man who was supposed to
serve simple people? Not one word for them. The whole Cantata then ends with a
hymn that does not open any new door in the field. Yet the last image is once
again a surprise:
“The clouds ye so
much dread
Are big with mercy,
and shall break
In blessings on your
head.”
This idea that the
clouds dreaded in life, the clouds of various adverse events, are in fact
merciful and can rain onto you in blessings. The oxymoronic nature of these
clouds has nevertheless to be set in parallel with the storm during the journey
to Palestine
In this early work
Benjamin Britten seems to be rather in line with some religious orthodoxy more
than discovering something new and creative. There are some good elements in
the music though but we are still far from the promise he had in him and he was
to fulfill soon.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:56 PM 
