Sunday, December 04, 2016
The Young are the Psychopomps of the Old to Eternal Living Death
Britten's Operas Love Rejection Death
Published on Dec 4, 2016
Britten'sOperasSurvivalPsychopompDeath
Abstract:
The
first task was to gather what can be called opera. Quite a few vocal works are
not classified in that genre because they are considered as oratorios as if an
oratorio was not an opera (a musical work entirely sung generally in two tones,
prosodic and psalmodic). That goes back to the Old Testament which is divided
in its accompanying music, written in the margins, in these two tones. It is of
course present in any oratorio, starting in the 13th century in Beauvais
Cathedral with Ludus Danielis.
The
opera is only the transfer of this religious musical genre into the secular
field. The opera is nothing but a secular oratorio. And can we see a musical
difference between operas and oratorios in Handel and are Bach’s Passions
oratorios or operas? Some purist will tell you the opera was invented in Italy
Anyway
it does not apply to Benjamin Britten for the simple reason that he does not
differentiate the recitative from the arias. The music is the same in tone and
style from beginning to end. Then the difference between operas and oratorios,
if there is one, is purely because of the religious dimension of oratorios.
That is light and semantic.
You will
hereafter find my notes on the 21 works I classify in this field, in
chronological order, some small, some big, some famous, some less well-known,
but all in a distinctive musical style that is unique and yet that is also very
closely articulated on the music of the 20th century. Benjamin Britten knew his
classics, even the modern classics of his time, and borrowing or imitating are
fundamental: he is able to use the style of anyone and turns it into his own
style that is first of all transformative.
The second point to add here is the fact many of his works are all male
and use many boys’ choirs. The modern tendency though is to use treble choirs
including girls. This is, when it is done, a treacherous breach of the British
tradition of all male choirs and boys’ choirs that developed and prospered in
boys’ schools and universities with countertenors cultivated and respected even
after these universities were finally opened to women. In fact to use mixed
choirs instead of boys’ choirs is a sexist position that negates the
originality of the British tradition. Other composers (and Benjamin Britten in
some works) vastly composed for mixed choirs or even for girls’ choirs, and
that is legitimate.
My last remark will be I have tried to capture the
original intended meaning of these works that systematically present some
outsider, stranger, foreigner, outcast in central position, and the boy who is
the main character is often the victim of mistreatment by society or some
adults, mostly men. It is a trend to consider this is to be connected with
Benjamin Britten’s gayness. I think this is excessive even if this gayness gave
Benjamin Britten a direct taste of being excluded, marginalized or kept under
suspicion. I will rarely allude to this gayness and I will try to avoid seeing
gay innuendo everywhere.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0.
Introduction p.
2
1.
Paul Bunyan 1941-1976 p.
5
2.
Peter Grimes 1945 p. 13
3.
Rape of Lucretia 1946 p.
18
4.
Albert Herring 1947 p.
23
5.
Saint Nicolas 1948 p.
30
6.
The Little Sweep 1949 p.
33
7.
Billy Budd 1951 p.
39
8.
Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac 1952 p. 43
9.
Gloriana 1953 p.
45
10. Turn of
the Screw 1954 p.
51
11. Prince
of Pagodas 1957 p.
74
12. Noye’s
Fludde 1958 p.
75
13. Midsummer
Night’s Dream 1960 p.
79
14. War
Requiem 1962 p.
92
15. Curlew River
16. Burning
Fiery Furnace 1966 p.
109
17. The
Golden Vanity 1966 p.
119
18. Prodigal
Son 1968 p.
120
19. The
Children’s Crusade 1969 p.
124
20. Owen
Wingrave 1970 p.
126
21. Death
in Venice
Research Interests:
Music, Music History, Jewish Studies, Death Studies, Children and Families, War Studies, Opera, Death and Burial (Archaeology), Philosophy of Love, Ideologies of Motherhood, Masculinity, Fatherhood, Boys, Child Soldiers, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Psychopomps and ópera
Jacques COULARDEAU & Benjamin BRITTEN
at Academia.edu (60)
The Turn of
the Screw, from James to Britten
Presentation of discussion
Abstract:
The following comparison of Henry James’ The Turn of
the Screw and Benjamin Britten’s adaptation of this novella to the operatic
stage reveals there are two oceans that are crossed: the Atlantic
Ocean and the ocean of time. In spite of his life spent between
the USA
On the other side Benjamin Britten is British to the core and ghosts cannot be ghosts because the ocean of time has been crossed along with two world wars, the two successive births of globalization. We have more or less abandoned the soul in psychiatry and we have vastly replaced it with the mind and the great masters of the mind in 1955 were Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan already and emerging fast, but not yet Michel Foucault. Each one of these set the mind in one special place of the body. For Freud the mind is in emotions and impulses. For Jung the mind is heritage from the old culture we receive with our milk after birth. For Jacques Lacan it is in the conflict and construct of two essential dimensions: the basic physiological body and the concept of authority, both in their conflict and cooperation constructing a superego he called the Phallus. Michel Foucault sets the mind at the level of the consciousness of one’s sexual apparatus, in many ways like Wilhelm Reich but with a mental dimension that Wilhelm Reich never reached, tied up and locked up in the sexual drives, both penile and anal, or vaginal and anal.
But, and that’s my main point, Benjamin Britten moves away from the ghosts to deal with mental memories or constructs that replace the parents these children do not have any more, but he refuses the innuendo Henry James invested in his novella all the time in the form of extreme sexual obsession in the nameless Governess. He brings the kids back to their ages, eight and ten, and at ten a boy needs a male model and not a male sexual partner. This model is a father substitute when the father is absent or a father extension that brings into the mental father of the boy new elements to build his superego, or Phallus to use Lacan’s concept.
And Benjamin Britten shows his deep consciousness that with any maternal figure in that situation who would be too possessive and in this particular case a power and control (sexual) freak, the boy might be mentally destroyed to the point of desiring to get out of this world back into the world where his mental model is living, since Quint is dead and not dead at the same time. Simultaneously that boy, in the most innocent way, will punish the maternal substitute who dared push him into non-existence by dying in her arms, in her lap, his big death punishing the mother-torturer-executioner who dared provoke some ripples in the field of his still unawake little death without understanding that you cannot play with that impulse even with a boy of ten without running the risk of destroying him because it is castrating if you frustrate the dim satisfaction of it and traumatic if an adult takes advantage of it to satisfy his or in this case her phantasms.
This is part of a longer study due in December on the figure of the stranger in Benjamin Britten’s operas, still six to go out of twenty-one.
On the other side Benjamin Britten is British to the core and ghosts cannot be ghosts because the ocean of time has been crossed along with two world wars, the two successive births of globalization. We have more or less abandoned the soul in psychiatry and we have vastly replaced it with the mind and the great masters of the mind in 1955 were Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan already and emerging fast, but not yet Michel Foucault. Each one of these set the mind in one special place of the body. For Freud the mind is in emotions and impulses. For Jung the mind is heritage from the old culture we receive with our milk after birth. For Jacques Lacan it is in the conflict and construct of two essential dimensions: the basic physiological body and the concept of authority, both in their conflict and cooperation constructing a superego he called the Phallus. Michel Foucault sets the mind at the level of the consciousness of one’s sexual apparatus, in many ways like Wilhelm Reich but with a mental dimension that Wilhelm Reich never reached, tied up and locked up in the sexual drives, both penile and anal, or vaginal and anal.
But, and that’s my main point, Benjamin Britten moves away from the ghosts to deal with mental memories or constructs that replace the parents these children do not have any more, but he refuses the innuendo Henry James invested in his novella all the time in the form of extreme sexual obsession in the nameless Governess. He brings the kids back to their ages, eight and ten, and at ten a boy needs a male model and not a male sexual partner. This model is a father substitute when the father is absent or a father extension that brings into the mental father of the boy new elements to build his superego, or Phallus to use Lacan’s concept.
And Benjamin Britten shows his deep consciousness that with any maternal figure in that situation who would be too possessive and in this particular case a power and control (sexual) freak, the boy might be mentally destroyed to the point of desiring to get out of this world back into the world where his mental model is living, since Quint is dead and not dead at the same time. Simultaneously that boy, in the most innocent way, will punish the maternal substitute who dared push him into non-existence by dying in her arms, in her lap, his big death punishing the mother-torturer-executioner who dared provoke some ripples in the field of his still unawake little death without understanding that you cannot play with that impulse even with a boy of ten without running the risk of destroying him because it is castrating if you frustrate the dim satisfaction of it and traumatic if an adult takes advantage of it to satisfy his or in this case her phantasms.
This is part of a longer study due in December on the figure of the stranger in Benjamin Britten’s operas, still six to go out of twenty-one.
Research Interests:
Child and adolescent mental health, Mental Health, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Opera, Mental Representation, Trauma Studies, Benjamin Britten, Henry James, Post traumatic
stress disorder, Mental Imagery, Mental Models, PTSS,Ghost stories,
and Control Freaks
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (55)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S OPERAS
Abstract:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S OPERAS
DEATH – MARGINALITY – TRANSCENDANCE – LOVE DENIAL
On the basis of the very first steps in that project forAvignon
Here are the operas I will consider after collecting them. Some are ballets, some are vaudevilles, some are operettas, but all are about that strange foreigner who is the only stranger in our life that counts: death, death our friend, death our lover, death our life partner.
Thinking of it now, just at the beginning of this search and hunt, I feel death is the most beautiful experience man can have, and that is not morbid because any “Danse Macabre” is not a simple ordinary dance. It is a trance that leads us to bliss and full mental orgasmic enjoyment.
One of my starting block is La Chaise Dieu’s Danse Macabre and I add to this first lap my review of two books on this Danse Macabre.
DEATH – MARGINALITY – TRANSCENDANCE – LOVE DENIAL
On the basis of the very first steps in that project for
Here are the operas I will consider after collecting them. Some are ballets, some are vaudevilles, some are operettas, but all are about that strange foreigner who is the only stranger in our life that counts: death, death our friend, death our lover, death our life partner.
Thinking of it now, just at the beginning of this search and hunt, I feel death is the most beautiful experience man can have, and that is not morbid because any “Danse Macabre” is not a simple ordinary dance. It is a trance that leads us to bliss and full mental orgasmic enjoyment.
One of my starting block is La Chaise Dieu’s Danse Macabre and I add to this first lap my review of two books on this Danse Macabre.
Research Interests:
Christianity, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Death Studies, War Studies, Opera, Early Christianity, British Music, Second World War, Death and Burial (Archaeology), New Testament and Christian Origins, Philosophy of Love, Jesus Parables, Q, Historical Jesus, and Biblical
Hermeneutics for Ethico-Political Interpretation of New Testament, The relation
between Theology and Ethics in Pauline Letters, Masculinity, Fatherhood, Boys, Coventry,
and Requiem
Discussion
Jacques Coulardeau & Paul Bunyan
at Academia.edu (62)
Paul Bunyan,
from wilderness to consumer's society
Abstract:
In the project going on right now to cover the figure of the stranger in
Benjamin Britten's operas I have reached the first opera after many more I have
studied before. This one is more a manifesto, musical and political, on Auden
and Britten's side than a purely evanescent "entertainment neither true
nor beautiful nor witty."
The revival version though has cut off two essential scenes. But what is important here is the fact that Bunyan reaches both the level of the epic hero of a picaresque adventure and that of a myth, a legend, a folkloric character that becomes universal in his all-encompassing historical vision of his conquest of the west, like in a way the Chinese Monkey of the Buddhist Journey to the West.
Is teh stranger, teh eternal guest as he calls himself, that Bunyan is in our world an ideal, a prophet, a guru, or just a friend to accompany our dreams of a better world?
The revival version though has cut off two essential scenes. But what is important here is the fact that Bunyan reaches both the level of the epic hero of a picaresque adventure and that of a myth, a legend, a folkloric character that becomes universal in his all-encompassing historical vision of his conquest of the west, like in a way the Chinese Monkey of the Buddhist Journey to the West.
Is teh stranger, teh eternal guest as he calls himself, that Bunyan is in our world an ideal, a prophet, a guru, or just a friend to accompany our dreams of a better world?
Research Interests:
Marxism, Sigmund Freud, Freud and Feminist Psychoanalysis, Karl
Marx, Hollywood, Soup, Lumber industry, Beans, John Bunyan, Oedipus, Spanish conquest of the Americas, Campfire, Lumbering, Manhattan, Grand Central Station, Lumber History, and A brief summary in spanish about Jocasta
Discussion
The figure of the stranger in Benjamin Britten's
operas is more and more a stranger from outside that completely perturbs the
status quo of where he arrives, or a stranger from inside that makes one
confront his or her real circumstances or real deeper self. Too often it has
been associated with Benjamin Britten's sexual orientation and in this case his
collaboration with Auden increases the tendency especially since it is about an
all-male environment in which there is ONLY one woman, and also one dog and two
cats, all of them sung by women as Auden notes in his introduction to the
libretto.. Yet I feel that it would be a mistake to consider the question only,
first of all or in any priority way as having to do with Benjamin Britten's
sexual orientation, just as much of a mistake as connecting his approach of the
American conquest of the West with his dentist of a father whose drill he would
try to run away from.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:54 PM 
