Donald Mitchell

‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’: Britten's other ‘Serenade’

Brittens Serenade , op.31, for tenor, horn, and strings, was first performed at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 15 October 1943, with Peter Pears, Dennis Brain and an ad hoc orchestra conducted by Walter Goehr. It was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West.

An Afterword on Britten's ‘Pagodas’: The Balinese Sources

I MUST APOLOGIZE first of all for having mis-described one of the principal sources of the gamelan music in The Prince of the Pagodas. In n.19 of my earlier contribution on this subject (TEMPO No.146, September, 1983, pp.13-24: Catching on to the technique in Pagodaland) I referred to the overture Kapi Radji: this should read Kapi Radja. If this were all I had to report, I should not be troubling the readers of TEMPO with the news. But in fact, as I shall explain below, there is a whole history attached to Kapi Radja, which has a direct bearing on Brittens ballet and of which I was unaware when I wrote my original article. The first new fact I turned up (and I was put on the track of this by Neil Sorrell, of York University, and one of his M.A. students, Somsak Ketukaenchan from Thailand)2 was how Kapi Radja, the overture, was brought into existence: a most curious story, and one that was generated in the first instance by one of Brittens most famous works, the Young Person s Guide to the Orchestra, op. 34, composed in 1946. To locate the story, we have to turn to John Coasts Dancing out ofBali (London, 1954). It was Mr. Coast who brought a troupe of Balinese musicians and dancers to England (and then to America) in 1952-an historic cultural event, with many repercussions, and still vividly remembered today. On p. 158 of his book, he recounts how he devized a programme with the village gamelan ofPliatan that would make particular sense for Western audiences:

Hans Keller 1919–1985

I Apologize for reading from these notes. But in saluting Hans I dont want unduly and inappropriately to fumble or stumble. Im conscious as I speak of his unique ability to think aloud in perfectly articulated and continuous sentences, something I could not hope to match. And in saluting Hans, I am also saluting Milein, and remembering her fortitude during this last week and recent months.

Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land

THE PRINCE OF THE PAGODAS, Brittens only ballet score (his only mature score originally composedfor the ballet, that is), and that comparatively rare bird in the 20th century, a full-length ballet, was first performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1957, on the first day of the new year, with the composer conducting. The choreographer was John Cranko and the scenery was designed by John Piper. Pangs rather than pleasure had attended the birth of the work, for Britten had found the whole business of writing the ballet an exceptionally arduous task. It was not so much the quantity of music involved, though this was daunting enough, but his being confronted with the difficulties, intransigencies, and vivid temperaments (and tempers!) of the ballet world. The language of ballet did not come easily to him: thus communication was a problem. It was an experience that left him feeling bruised and debilitated;2 and almost up to the time of his death he could rarely be persuaded to

Britten's Revisionary Practice: Practical and Creative

clusion of tuba and double bassoon makes possible, together with the string basses, some range of positive colours at a very low pitch, so that the cello can be accommodated in its lowest register without having of necessity to be the functional bass too. The upper woodwind tend to be used as a composite group in a fairly high register, so that their tubby middle harmony shall not blanket the soloist. To point to all the felicities of orchestral lay-out in this score would require another article. Some of these can be glimpsed from the examples quoted, and I must restrict myself to a few of those which, in this as yet unheard work, most keenly stimulate the aural imagination. The development of the first movement includes a dialogue between double bassoon and high clarinet (later oboe) supported only by the soloists oscillating thirds. At one point the scherzo surrounds a loud, nagging cello figuration with a high oboe octave pp and a Stygian chord (modelled on Ex.5, bar3) on horn pedal, tuba and double bassoon ppp; and the tenuity of texture that typifies this movement is often produced by no more than two widely separated instruments. The finales rhapsodic fifth variation has a background shimmer of empty fourths on vibraphone and flutes, later translated to much lower register by horns and tam-tam. But aural titillation, if less surely calculated than this, is not the least common attraction of much of the music written today. I do not doubt that, when this symphony reaches performance, we shall recognize in the nobility and economy of its ideas, and in the masterly structures in which their potentialities are realized, Brittens most considerable achievement in the field of purely instrumental music. Once again, Rostropovich may take pride in a tribute that far surpasses a mere salutation of virtuosity.

Stravinsky and Neo-Classicism

Stravinsky himself has argued that neo-classicism embraced not only his own works but those of his great contemporaries: “Every age,” he observes, “is a historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either/or to its partisan contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or come to be components of the same thing. For instance, ‘neo-classic’ now begins to apply to all of the between-the-war composers (not that notion of the neo-classic composer as someone who rifles his predecessors and each other and then arranges the theft in a new ‘style’). The music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the twenties was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but these composers now appear to have used musical form as I did, ‘historically’. My use of it was overt, however, and theirs elaborately disguised. (Take, for example, the Rondo of Weberns Trio; the music is wonderfully interesting but no one hears it as a Rondo.) We all explored and discovered new music in the twenties, of course, but we attached it to the very tradition we were so busily outgrowing a decade before.”

British Festivals: Some Comments on their Customs

In many ways Edinburgh is the most substantial, the most luxurious, the most opulent of British Festivals, yet not necessarily the most interesting or even the most significant. It is as well to remind ourselves that British Festivals did not begin with, and certainly do not end at Edinburgh. They have been characters on our musical stage for many years, although all too often they have disguised themselves with distressing reticence in the drabbest robes and made use of a property-box that has not caught up with the times. The Messiah might give way to a younger work now and again, if the suggestion were not considered revolutionary. A change round of the cast, a draft of new blood, is always refreshing, and indeed essential, if a festival is not to become a funeral. Charles Stuart, writing in TEMPO in the autumn of 1947, bemoaned the complacency of the Leeds Festival of that year and gave a list of the “Festival battle-horses”—Beethovens Ninth Symphony, Berlioz Te Deum , Verdis Requiem —which drew the cortege to its final resting place. The Leeds authorities seem to have realized the importance of a blood transfusion, and Mr. Stuart could not complain of the 1950 programme, which shows this Victorian infant (born in 1858) to be still of lusty and adventurous age and embarking on the second public performance in England of Brittens Spring Symphony , besides Honeggers rarely-heard King David , Rubbras Morning Watch Motet, Strausss Oboe Concerto and Vaughan Williams Sixth Symphony.