Haunted Arabia - W Denis Browne

W. Denis Browne (1888-1915),  as a schoolboy at Greyfriars, Leamington Spa.  This photo might sum him up better than the usual photos of him in uniform, for his last music was written in June 1914. Almost exactly a year later, he would be killed at Gallipolli.  In this photo his youthful spirit  is captured forever, gazing wistfully but unafraid.  Browne went on to Cambridge and later studied with Busoni. He heard Stravinsky, and was impressed enough by The Rite of Spring and Petrushka to embark on his own ballet, never completed.  Today he's best known for a handful of songs, particularly To Gratiana, Dancing and Singing to a poem by Richard Lovelace (1617-1657).  Though that song is well represented on recordings,  most of the other songs are less well served.  I wish there were better versions on record of Arabia, for example, Browne's last completed song, which I've heard live in much better performance.

Arabia is an adventurous piece which seems to reach out, exploring new musical territory.  The poem, by Walter de la Mere, describes "the shades of Arabia, where the Princes ride at noon, 'mid the verduous vales and thickets under the ghost of the moon". The piano part moves with mysterious deliberation, firm single chords separated by silence, allowing the voice to ring out. The idea  might be to suggest a voice reaching over vast expanses. Not expanses of desert, though, but a "vaulted purple" where "flowers in the forest rise and toss into blossom against the phantom skies".  Warm breezes seem to propel the second verse, "Sweet is the music of Arabia" each line infused by gentle, swaying rhythms.  The vocal line rises high, and the piano part changes, suggesting the plucking of "strange lutes" that "ring loud with delight.......in the brooding silence of the night". Despite the beautiful sounds around him, the poet is haunted by someone, something others cannot see. "Stll eyes look coldly upon me, cold voices whisper and say "He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia, they have stolen his wits away". Not a romantic reverie ! Thus the jumbled images of moon and noon, of feverish, unhealthy imagination.  Ideal territory for the kind of English tenor who can express archness and horror behind luminous limpidity. Not straightforward at all. 

Für den Graben, Mutter, für den Graben.

Mutter, wozu hast du deinen Sohn aufgezogen?
Hast dich zwanzig' Jahr mit ihm gequält? 

Wozu ist er dir in deinen Arm geflogen,
und du hast ihm leise was erzählt? 

 Bis sie ihn dir weggenommen haben.
Für den Graben, Mutter, für den Graben.

 Junge, kannst du noch an Vater denken?
Vater nahm dich oft auf seinen Arm.
Und er wollt dir einen Groschen schenken,
und er spielte mit dir Räuber und Gendarm.
Bis sie ihn dir weggenommen haben.
Für den Graben, Junge, für den Graben. 

Drüben die französischen Genossen
lagen dicht bei Englands Arbeitsmann.
Alle haben sie ihr Blut vergossen,
und zerschossen ruht heut Mann bei Mann.
Alte Leute, Männer, mancher Knabe
in dem einen großen Massengrabe. 

Seid nicht stolz auf Orden und Geklunker!
Seid nicht stolz auf Narben und die Zeit!
In die Gräben schickten euch die Junker,
Staatswahn und der Fabrikantenneid.
Ihr wart gut genug zum Fraß für Raben,
für das Grab, Kameraden, für den Graben! 

Werft die Fahnen fort!
Die Militärkapellen spielen auf zu euerm Todestanz.
Seid ihr hin: ein Kranz von Immortellen -
das ist dann der Dank des Vaterlands. 

Denkt an Todesröcheln und Gestöhne.
Drüben stehen Väter, Mütter, Söhne,
schuften schwer, wie ihr, ums bißchen Leben.
Wollt ihr denen nicht die Hände geben?
Reicht die Bruderhand als schönste aller Gaben
übern Graben, Leute, übern Graben 

Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) 

Mother, for what have you brought your son up? What have you done for him in 20 years ? Why has he flown from your arms, and you've gently reared him?  Until he was taken from you to the trenches. Mother, for the trenches. 

Young man, can you yet think of your father? You father who held you often in his arms and gave you a penny to spend and played Cops and Robbers with you.  Until you were taken away from him, to the trenches, Lad, to the trenches.

Over by the French buddies lay the English worthies, mown down together man by man.  Old guys, men in their prime, kids, all in a single mass grave. 

Don't be proud of Orders and Medals ! Don't be proud of  wounds and of time !  You were sent to the trenches by the Junkers, mad governments and greedy merchants of war.   You're now food for ravens. For the trenches ! Comrades ! For the trenches !

Chuck out the flags ! Military bands are playing your Dance of Death. There you have a wreath of immortelles. That's the thanks you get from your country.

Heed the death rattle and the groans. Over there stand others, fathers, sons, trying hard, like you to scrape a living. Don't  you want to help, them ?  the hand of brotherhood is the finest gift. Better than graves, folks, better than graves.

George Butterworth 100 years ago today

One hundred years ago today, George Butterworth was still alive. On 5th August 1916, his body lay dead on a battlefield in the Somme.  He was leading a party of men on a sortie up Munster Alley, when  shortly before 4.45 am on 5th August 1915, he was shot in the head. The best authority on Butterworth remains Michael Barlow's biography "Whom the Gods Love" and this is the one to get. Barlow's book is an invaluable source, much of it  drawn from family letters (now in Oxford)  and material at Cecil Sharp House. Curiously, though, there's little in his book on Butterworth's war record, since he relied on papers collected by Butterworth's father.  So 15 years ago, I went to the War Office archive thinking his details would be easy to trace. Then  I hit a brick wall. No Lt. Butterworth! No wonder Barlow was stymied

Next step, then, was to go to the list of medals, which are meticulously documented.  There, I found that Butterworth had enlisted as "Kaye Butterworth!"   He'd only been awarded one Military Cross, not three, but that's still an important achievement since MC's are not handed out except in exceptional cases.  Although I didn't have time to access the main regimental records, which aren't in London, I did find the original War Diary of Butterworth's Regiment. War diaries are moment to moment records of what was happening in battle, written down verbatim as the action was happening.  They're sent to higher command behind lines so the generals can follow what's happening on the front line, while action is still in progress. In 1914-18 field communications weren't what they'd be today. Sometimes these diaries are written on scraps, sometimes in pencil and sometimes they're stained with mud and darker substances.  And here is what I found :

2.53 sent following message to Lt Butterworth at B Company "Send a strong bombing platoon up Munster Alley to hold and block". Note owing to our artillery shelling our front line Lt Butterworth cannot have received this message until after 3.45 am

3.40 received from Lt Clarke "we must have reinforcements at once...the men I have got are being kept there by revolvers". 3.41 gave Lt Batty message for Lt Butterworth to reinforce Munster Alley with one platoon at once.

4.19 Forward observation reported that our party at Munster Alley was being heavily bombed but we were apparently holding our own. 4.43 (Brigadier sent 25 men from another unit to relieve)

4.45 Lt Butterworth killed.

Casualties 5th August : Lt G S Kaye-Butterworth, Lt N A Target killed, 2nd Lt Rees
and Batty wounded. Other ranks : 4 killed. 18 wounded, 3 shell shock, 5 missing. 

(Note: the unfortunately named Lt Target featured in the Diary many times. He seems tto have been a charismatic fellow who had been awarded a Military Cross in June. He was much admired by the Brigadier and the man who wrote the diaries. Butterworth would have known him too.)

Plenty on Butterworth on this site, please explore.  Including

Complete Butterworth Song Book (Mark Stone)

A Jonquil not a Grecian Lad - Butterworth Songs (Roderick Willliams)  

The  photo at the top shows the officers of the 13th Durham Light Infantry  The man circled is supposed to be Butterworth.It's possible since we know the Kinora films and Morris dancing stills that Butterworth was short and self effacing. Below, Butterworth second from left, in 1912.

From Admiral Jellicoe, Happy Christmas NOT

Anthem for Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen 11/11

Only the monstrous anger of the guns. 

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle 

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; 

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all? 

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes 

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. 

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; 

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, 

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

 Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Three Choirs Festival - Elgar, Rasch, Germans and British

The Three Choirs Festival, which began more than 300 years ago, is the oldest music festival in the western world. Instead of competing, the choirs of the cathedrals of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford  came together to share their faith through music. That sense of co-operation is very much a part of Christian tradition. As Jesus taught "Love thy neighbour as thyself". If only people could live by that concept, whatever their faith. Conflicts breed when people can't get that simple, basic tenet into their heads.

The Three Choirs Festival is much more than just a  music festival. Fundamentally, it represents the best of Christian values. Thus the Three Choirs Festival decided to mark the outbreak of the First World War with a special programme "Reflections on 1914", bringing together British and German musicians and composers. I wish I'd been there (though I greatly enjoyed Elgar The Apostles the following evening (review here). Fortunately, the programme can now be heard on BBC Radio 3 here.

Baldur Brönnimann specializes in new music, so he revealed  Elgar's Spirit of England  in all its true magnificence. The piece has suffered from the more belligerent aspects of Lawrence Binyon's texts, and from worthy but unquestioning performance practice. Binyon equates war with Spring and regrowth. England  "fights the fraud that feeds desire on Lies, in lust to enslave or kill, The barren creed of blood and iron," Brönnimann instead emphasizes the innate optimism in the music. Whatever the "spirit of England" might be, it can be glorious and idealistic as well as bloodthirsty.  Brönnimann emphasizes the innate glory of the music. Brönnimann's Spirit of England applies to all men (and women).

 Brönnimann brings out the forward pulse, highlighting the economy with which Elgar builds up textures so they feel alive and sprightly. Slow hushed moments give rise to soaring themes (great woodwinds!). "We shall remember them!" sing the choirs and Peter Hoare, the soloist, sings  They have not died in vain if they're remembered in a performance as glistening and passionate as this. "Age shall not weary them" was truly expressed in the freshness of the playing of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Such clarity, such purity, surpassing the revered recordings of the past, setting new standards. Using a tenor instead of a soprano helped, too. Peter Hoare's voice is still youthful enough to suggest the soldiers who marched off, never to return.  While a female singer suggests Boadicea, a male voice is more personal and direct, making us think of the real people who sacrificed all for "the spirit of England".

Matthew Trusler was the soloist in Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. This is a work so beautiful that it transcends time and place, evoking powerful responses in all who hear it.  Usually I'm fixated on the violin part, but this time, the lushness of the Philharmonia's playing added a marvellous veil of poignant mystery.

The Three Choirs Festival is very English, but Torsten Rasch grew up in a similar tradition. He was a boy chorister with the Dresdner Kreuzchor, which produced Peter Schreier and Rudolf Mauersberger (lots about them on this site too). Rasch's music embraces wider genres.  He emigrated to Japan as a young man and has worked in theatre, film and multimedia.  Read more about him here.  Loosely based on British Evensong which combines song with readings, Rasch brings together the words of poets from opposing sides in the war - Georg Trakl, Edward Thomas and the Dymock poets, finding common ground, so to speak, particularly in the Latin passages.. Rasch's music is modern enough to sound unworldly, but accessible enough to feel dramatic. We hear intimations of conflict in jarring, expansive passages that disintegrate into dark rumblings, yet also bell sounds and subtle pastoral. At Worcester, people who'd heard it told me that they'd been quite intrigued. I especially liked the way the music seemed to revolve like the movement of a sphere.

 A Foreign Field is a Three Choirs Festival Commission, but it's also being shared with Chemnitz, a city heavily bombed in 1945 by the British.  In 1918 savage reparations led to to the Second World War. In 1945, the Marshall Plan broke the cycle of hate, rebuilding a new Germany which is now a force for peace.

Thus the importance of conciliation, and the guiding moral spirit behind the Three Choirs Festival. Just as the Three Choirs Festival is about more than music, Torsten Rasch's A Foreign Field represents idea as well as sounds. Roderick Williams, Peter Hoare and Yeree Suh were joined by the Three Choirs Festival Chorus, the Chorus of the Three Cathedral Choirs and singers from Die Kantorei der Kreuzkirche, Chemnitz, in a highly symbolic coming together. Thus it was all the more offensive that a chorister was reported as having impersonated Hitler and made joking references to Auschwitz, (here). Whatever the situation, this isn't funny. Even though Christians forgive, there is far too much casual, unthinking nastiness about to simply ignore such things. It's not just one individual but a mindset that goes largely unchallenged.

Lest we forget - Bleuet Poulenc

Just as the Poppy symbolizes war to the British, the cornflower symbolizes loss and memory for the French. The Western Front was in France and Belgium, lest we forget....... French soldiers wore blue uniforms, hence the multiple connotations of the word "bleuet".

At right, Francis Poulenc aged 21, in uniform, painted by a friend. "Jeune homme /de vingt ans /Qui as vu des choses si affreuses /que penses-tu des hommes /de ton enfance/la bravure et la ruse" wrote Guillaume Apollinaire. Read the whole poem HERE in Emily Ezust's Lieder and Song Texts page, because Apollinaire sets the poem out so it descends diagonally across the page, as if the very words were marching. Apollinaire's visual layout emphasises the meaning of the poem,where phrases break off and the word "Mourir" stands alone.

"Young man of 20 , who has seen things so awful, what do you think of  the men of your childhood, of courage and cunning?

"You who have faced death in the face more than 100 times, you take it as if it were life.  Transmit your fearlessness to those who will come after you. Young man, you are joyful. Your memory is soaked in blood, your soul is red. with joy. You have absorbed the life of those who died next to you."

"For you it is decided.  It is 5 o'clock and you're going to die. If not better than those who went before you, at least more piously, because you know death better than you know life." 

"Ô douceur d'autrefois, Lenteur immémoriale"
.O sweetness of former times, to linger in eternity.

Apollinaire was injured badly at the front in 1917. Poulenc, writing his setting in October 1939, reflected not on militarism or glory, but on the tenderness with which Apollinaire depicted the waste of youth and life. 

Lest We Forget Prom - RVW Butterworth Stephan Kelly Manze BBC SSO

 "They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, The lads that will die in their glory and never be old." 

 A E Housman was writing about handsome farm boys going off to the Boer War. Maybe he was more concerned with the loss of their physical beauty but Prom 42 "Lest We Forget"  with Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra reminded us of the lost music which the three younger composers featured in this concert might have produced.

Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth's Six Songs From a Shropshire Lad.  He never disappoints. He sang with the commitment and heroism the occasion of a keynote Prom warrants. I've written extensively about George Butterworth, (read more here) so I'll just comment on the version  we heard here. It's not strictly Butterworth but a modern orchestral adaptation. Butterworth wrote two separate pieces based on Housman's verse, one for voice and piano and an entirely orchestral version, A Shropshire Lad: a Rhapsody. where the themes are reiterated. Maybe piano song doesn't work so well in the Royal Albert Hall, but it would have been wiser to pick the orchestral piece. Much as I adore Roderick Williams, I think we need to appreciate Butterworth for more than his songs. When there is enough authentic Butterworth around, can't we "honour the fallen" by  using the man's own work?

Butterworth's orchestral A Shropshire Lad would have worked better with the rest of the programme too, especially with Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra no. 2 (1912, rev. 1913), Stephan's breakthrough piece which won him a publisher and a lot of favourable attention. It's superb. It's full of interesting ideas, crafted together with flair: definitely a distinctive voice. Listen to the rebroadcast : this isn't recycled retro but intelligent and highly original, reflecting the creative ferment of Secession Munich, and possibly the "modern" Germany of Weimar art and, film and literature. Stephan might have given Alban Berg (also a serving soldier) a great deal to think about. Stephan is definitely on the radar in Germany. There are no less than three recordings of his opera Die ersten Menschen on the market. I'll write about that when I have time - please come back.

In contrast, Frederick Kelly's Elegy for Strings was written in memoriam Rupert Brooke. Kelly is also remembered because he was born in Sydney of Irish parents and served in Gallipoli, and is thus a figure in Australian music history. It's a lovely, elegiac piece with a good violin part, but without the character of Stephan and Butterworth.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was too old to fight in the frontline but served in an ambulance unit, experiencing bombardment knowing he'd have to go out and pick up the carnage. Vaughan Williams's Symphony no 3 "The Pastoral"  may be "about " landscape in an abstract sense, but it's even more about the strange, new landscape of the trenches. Ancient farms and villages were flattened, pitted with craters like the moon. The terrain still hasn't recovered.  RVW's ambiguous swirling tonality suggests psychic dislocation. This isn't "cowpat school", though you can "feel" the mud. It's far more unsettling.

RVWs 3rd is a companion to his 2nd, the "London" Symphony, dedicated  to and inspired by George Butterworth, so hearing the 3rd at this Prom was particularly poignant. Andrew Manze and the BBC SSO  gave a dignified account. An excellent "distant" trumpet, and nicely defined references to typical RVW themes expressing nostaglia and, well, Sensucht,  and loss. Unusually, Manze used a tenor, Allan Clayton to sing the vocal part. A male voice is probably more appropriate in the circumstances  and RVW knew his Bible well enough to know that angels were often men. The trumpet can be diffuse, since RVW was remembering a real trumpeter playing in the landscape. But the dead and dying were all too present. Clayton's "manly" tenor rang out loud and clear. No, we must not shy from the reality of war. There's violence in the crescendi, and folk tunes pop up as  ghosts. Perhaps the voice, like the violin part, loosely reminiscent of The Lark Ascending, is reminding us that life, and nature, will soar upwards from the ruins.

The mystery of George Butterworth

Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth Songs from A Shropshire Lad at tonight's BBC Prom 41 at the Royal Albert Hall. Williams is by far the best best British song specialist around. He has such a warm. conversational style which makes his singing direct and personal. (Read more here) .For my review of the Lest We Forget Prom read here).

The photo at right show George Butterworth  in civilian days. Read Michael Barlow's biography "Whom the Gods Love," (more here)  It's good, given the sparsity of source material. Butterworth was a very private person, and shielded himself from such things as prying historians. There are so many mysteries. Why did he destroy his unpublished music when he went to the front? There are no Butterworth descendants any more - George and his only male cousin died without issue. So perhaps we could  use modern intuition and reflect.

Butterworth's father's archives are in Oxford, but they're not completely reliable because they were compiled by a man who loved his son dearly but probably didn't understand his complexities any more than he understood military procedure. After reading Barlow's book I went to the War Office Archives to read regimental documents. Shock! No "Butterworth" listed!  However, being a good archivist, I think like a detective. I found the original war diary kept by the commanding officer of Butterworth's unit, where each day's events were written as they happened, sometimes in pencil.  I found the actual record of Butterworth's death. Read my account "George Butterworth in the trenches" . I also found his original medal citations by searching under his third forename, Kaye. Somehow, by accident or design, he had been listed as Kaye-Butterworth rather than Butterworth when he signed up.

Finding the war diary is easy enough because British officers' records are extensively documented. But that started another mystery. His fellow soldiers didn't even know he was a musician.  He wasn't actively hiding anything because the army contacted his father after his death. But one wonders who Butterworth might really have been. An Oxford don, on seeing the student Butterworth with a friend, remarked that they were two of the "reddest" revolutionaries in Britain.

Why was Butterworth keen to keep his lives as soldier and composer apart? Was he gay, or conflicted about his father's remarriage ?  By the standards of his time, A E Housman was about as much out of the closet as was possible. The poems in his collection of A Shropshire Lad are heavily homo-erotic. Obviously, orientation doesn't dictate art. The very hetero Ralph Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge is based on Housman's poems too.  But one wonders what Butterworth might have achieved had he not been killed so young. Would he have stayed in the Cecil Sharp fold  with its repressive neo-fascist style? Would he have found a creative breakthrough like RVW? RVW adored him. His  London Symphony was inspired by Butterworth, who pushed RVW towards symphonic writing.  Even Carlos Kleiber liked Butterworth's orchestral music. We shall never know what Butterworth might have achieved,  but I suspect we shouldn't assume that Butterworth was "simply" a writer of folk-inspired songs and pastorals.

The Forgotten Soldiers of Empire

If you do only one thing to remember the First World War do this : watch David Olusoga's powerful documentary Martial Races on BBC i-player (link here)  This opens up a whole new dimensions which many British people know nothing about. We're never going to appreciate the magnitude of 1914-1918 until we appreciate its world-wide significance.

Did Empire save Britain and France? Could they have won the war without using colonial nations?  A million African, Indian, Black American and Chinese people took part, some fighting front line in the trenches, others supplying the back-up labour without which no army can survive. Hundreds of thousands died, and each man left behind a family and a community. These men didn't march off to war cheering. They were not volunteers, but men trapped by circumstances. In Africa and Asia, people were so poor that men would join up from sheer desperation.  Many of the Africans were rounded up by agents and chained. Slaves, not jolly volunteers fighting for a cause.

These men were simple peasants who didn't know much past their own villages, far less about the world. Thousands had never worn shoes in their lives. Suddenly they had to wear heavy, ill-fitting army boots and live in damp trenches.Nowadays even in remote areas people have TV, internet and mobile phones, even a smattering of education. A hundred years ago, these peasants might as well have been rocketed into space, so alien was the environment they found themselves in. Even now there are dozens of different language groups in Africa and Asia. A hundred years ago men from diffrerent villages might not speak the same dialect. Suddenly they're all thrown together, with hardly anyonen to talk to.

The concept of  "Lesser breeds" underpinned Imperialist thinking. The West didn't colonialize for love. Social change and modernization were side effects, not goals. Olusoga reads from British Army records which describe the different communities of the Indian subcontinent as if they were breeds of dogs or horses. Unpleasant as these things are, we need to acknowledge them if we're  to move on.

1914-1918 was a world war, with global causes and global consequences. It came about in many ways as a continuation of colonial rivalry. The British and the French grabbed colonies first, excluding the Germans, Japanese and Americans.  1914-18 didn't happen because some Serb shot an archduke. In the Middle East, the Germans (and their allies the Turks) were struggling with the Russians and British for control of oil fields. Then, as now. And so the British and French used their "resources" in the form of human fodder.

Olusoga's documentary is meticulously well researched and presented. This is the kind of exceptional high quality that the BBC was once known for. Most of this material is well documented in academic circles, but there's  material here that's never been seen in public before. Olusoga makes it human and personal.  To understand our present we need to understand our past. This series is very, very important.

Ivor Gurney War Elegy Prom 20

Will Ivor Gurney at last receive the recognition he is due? His War Elegy received its Prom premiere at BBC Prom 20. Gurney's poetry is so well known that it's even taught in schools. so you'd expect that there might be a ripple of interest in the print media. Did millions die to make the world a safer place for Kiss Me Kate and War Horse?

Gurney's War Elegy is fascinating because it moves as a processional. The music seems to approach from a distance. Long, surging lines suggest  forward thrust, percussion pounding like a savage metronome. How grand those long lines seem, and yet so sad. They give way to a more contemplative mood. A solo woodwind plays an elusive melody that soars upwards until it merges with the strings in a new, fuller theme which itself ends when the horns enter. Darker undercurrents make their presence: basses and cellos pick up the "march" the prercussion had earlier defined. Yet again, the full orchestra leads forwards, trumpets and horns in command. Gurney's very structure incorporates  relentless forward movement. Wave after wave, tutti and spareness. Eventually the music rises to a grand crescendo, but cut through with sharp brass calls.: not quite disssonant but enough to dispel comfort. Perhaps this is the heart of the piece, where Gurney is making his point. Soon after, the music recedes, as if those who marched past us for a moment have vanished, pulled away beyond our hearing.

Gurney was only 30 years old when he wrote the War Elegy, yet it is a singular advance on what he'd written before. He's best known for his song settings, so one might ask:   "What Gurney orchestral music?"  as Ian Venables prefaced his talk at the Three Choirs Festival in 2010.  (more here).  In the disruptions of Gurney's life, unpublished manuscripts went missing. Fragments remain, though, and now the Gurney Archive at Gloucester is being carefully mined by Venables (himself a composer), and Philip Lancaster. It's now known that Gurney wrote quite a bit, including two symphonies, and even planned an opera based on  J M Synge's Riders to the Sea, whose theme is also the relentless progression of death.  Read more here about how Venables and Lancaster worked on Gurney's War Elegy.

Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody and the War Elegy were written around the same time, and completed in 1921, but the War Elegy is much more sophisticated as music, and much more emotionally charged. What might Gurney have heard if he hadn't been incarcerated during the later 1920s and 1930s when so much was happening in musical Europe? His was an original mind, not necessarily one to follow safe convention. I've been listening to Gurney's War Elegy repeatedly (link here) because on the night of the Prom I was in Worcester for the Three Choirs Festival (more here). Just as well. At home I can cry quietly for what we lost in the tragedy of Gurney's life.

Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC SO. He conducted the Philharmonia in 2010, so he's a bit of a Gurney maven. Prom 20 also included Sally Beamish's The Singing (2006)  a concerto for accordion, played by dedicatee James Crabb. Accordions and bagpipes operate in the same way, but bagpipes make savage music. Crabbe's accordion playing beautifully evokes the horror of the Highland Clearances, ethnic cleansing in the British Isles, not really so long ago. For an encore, he played a transcription of a Rameau piece for harpsichord. Accordions are much under-rated.

Brabbins also conducted William Walton's Symphony no 1. Nice performance, without the turgid shallowness that has put me off the piece for years.

Three Choirs Festival - Reflections on 1914 Elgar Rasch

"

The Three Choirs Festival began more than 300 years ago. Perhaps it is the oldest music festival in the western world. The exact start date is unknown: members of the choirs of the cathedrals of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford  decided to join together and sing. That sense of community and cooperation, is very much a part of Christian tradition. As Jesus taught "Love they neighbour as thyself". If only people could live by that concept, whatever their faith.

Next week we mark the centenary of the day on which Britain declared war on Germany. Thus began a conflict that, arguably, continued until 1945. Would the cycle of attack and revenge have continued?  Instead of punitive reparations, the US introduced the Marshall Plan: victors supporting the welfare of the defeated.  Mutual humanity. Some - certainly not all - Britons might still relish foreign wars (on behalf of other states) but Germany has becomes a force for peace. In this spirit I salute (perhaps the wrong choice of word) the Three Choirs Festival for its concert tonight, Reflections on 1914.

"Spirit of England, go before us !" the soprano sings at the start of Edward Elgar's The Spirit of England. The melody echoes, gloriously,  in the solo violin, recurring and uniting the piece, its warmth suggesting sunny confidence. . Lawrence Binyon's poem "The Fourth of August", written in the heat of the moment, refers to the "grandeur of our fate". Binyon even equates war with Spring and regrowth. England  "fights the fraud that feeds desire on Lies, in lust to enslave or kill, The barren creed of blood and iron," The photo above shows officers of the Worcestershire Regiment posing before they're sent to the Front in 1914. How many would survive?

Perhaps Elgar wasn't quite so belligerent. He sets the middle section (loosely based on Binyon's To Women, in a more reflective key, ushering in the final section "To the Fallen". Trumpets blare and a march-like rhythm emerges. "The enemies of England|" are still a threat. At last the meaning of death sinks in. The text comes from Binyon's most famous poem, To The Fallen. "We will remember them" repeats the soprano, her melody taken up by the chorus, and at times a melancholy cello. .Boadicea-like, the soprano's voice soars. even as the orchestra becomes hushed. "As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain."

Ralph Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending  can mean many things but in this context, one might reflect on its melancholy. Something very beautiful is being glimpse, but through a haze of nostalgia. Perhaps when the violin soars upwards, we could be thinking of transcendence, deliverance, or timless release? Music doesn't exist just in notes but in our emotional response.

 Two of the greatest British composers, responding to a war that would change their world, and a youngish German composer who has travelled the world, reflecting on what went before him.  Torsten Rasch grew up in a tradition very close to the Three Choirs: he was a boy chorister with the Dresdner Kreuzchor, which produced Peter Schreier and Rudolf Mauersberger (lots about them on this site too). Rasch's music embraces wider genres. He emigrated to Japan as a young man and has worked in theatre, film and multimedia.  Read more about him here.

Torsten Rasch's A Foreign Field is a Three Choirs commission, (in connection with Chemnitz Opera) continuing the Festival's support for new music in its core repertoire. "It's not a Requiem" says Rasch. He uses the British Evensong tradition to bring together English and German poems texts by poets who served on opposite sides in 1914-18 - Ivor Gurney, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. Below a sample

A Face in a Crowd

One hundred years ago today, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. From relatively small beginnings, thus was ignited the "Thirty Years War" of the 20th century. In Vienna, saccharinely rebranded the "City of Dreams", people gathered to cheer. The Face in the Crowd ? Adolf Hitler. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

BBC First Night of the Proms 2014 Elgar The Kingdom

  

Sir Edward Elgar's The Kingdom, First Night of the BBC Proms 2014. A magnificent start to the season, particularly one which commemorates 1914, the start of the First World War. From that perspective Sir Andrew Davis's The Kingdom moved me deeply.

Elgar dreamed of writing a trilogy of oratorios examining the nature of Christianity as Jesus taught his followers, using the grand context of the Edwardian taste. In The Apostles, Jesus sets out his beliefs in simple, human terms. Judas doubts him and is confounded. In The Kingdom, the focus is more diffuse. The disciples are many and their story unfolds through a series of tableaux, impressive set pieces, but with less obvious human drama. The final, part would hase been titled The Last Judgement, when World and Time are destroyed and the faithful of all ages are raised from the dead, joining Jesus in Eternity. The sheer audacity of that vision may have stymied Elgar, much in the way that Sibelius's dreams for his eighth symphony inhibited realization. Fragments of The Last Judgement made their way into drafts for what was to be Elgar's third and final symphony, which we now know in Anthony Payne's performing version. There could be many reasons why Elgar didn't proceed, but he may well have intuited the contradiction between simple faith and extravagant gesture.

In his excellent programme notes, Stephen Johnson describes The Kingdom "as a kind of symphonic 'slow movement', a pause between two much more monumental pillars. It doesn't exist on its own out of context, and can't really be judged as a stand-alone. Elgar's creative output declined after the First World War. Since we know the wars that followed, listening to this piece is even more poignant. The Kingdom is a fragment of a confident but doomed past. I also like The Kingdom because, like The Apostles, it portrays Jesus and his followers are down-to-earth ordinary men and women encountering events normal comprehension. They're not pious saints but simple folk with fears and insecurities, saved by faith.

 

Andrew Davis conducted the Prelude with sober dignity. The disciples are starting a journey that continues 2000 years later. Davis's tempi were unhurried, with just enough liveliness to suggest the excitement of hopes to come. There are familiar themes from The Apostles here, and lyrical passages, which Davis conducted with particular finesse. I watched his hands sculpt curving shapes, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra responded well. Nice bright horns, seductive lower winds. The long pauses with which Davis marked the different parts of the piece serve a purpose, but tended to break the flow. However, Davis masterfully contrasted extreme of volume and relative quietness, giving dramatic structure. 

When the combined forces of the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the BBC Symphony Chorus entered, the effect was splendid. This is what good choral singing should be: lush richness yet brightened by sharp, disciplined diction, individual sections clearly defined within the mass.  These Christians march forwards but don't lose themselves  to the multitude. Unsurprisngly, the chorus masters were two of the best in the genre: Adrian Partington (of Three Choirs fame) and Stephen Jackson. 

The soloists were Erin Wall (Mary the Virgin), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Mary Magdalene), Andrew Staples (St John) and Christopher Purves (St Peter). All are extremely reliable, and well experienced in large choral repertoire, and they delivered well. Staples, however, was unusually  expressive. His firm, animated tenor seemed to shine from the dense textures in the music around him. The Kingdom unfolds like a procession of tableaux, each savoured at a measured pace, so Staples provided welcome individuality.

Interestingly, The Kingdom focuses on female figures. The contralto (Wyn-Rogers)  has lovely recitatives and the soprano (Erin Wall) has the glorious"The sun goeth down".  The female choruses have good music, too,  and were very brightly coloured and lively. Davis highlighted the relationship between solo voices and instruments, such as the dialogue between Wall and the First Violin, Stephen Bryant. The Kingdom is a showpiece, not because it's flamboyant but because it's restrained.  More a prolonged recitative than an aria, but without recvitatives to hold the drama together, where would we be ? It's better, in many ways, to start the BBC Proms season with something esoteric than with something crude. 

This review also appears in Opera Today. Each year I cover around 40 Proms, so please keeping coming back. Please also read my other posts on Elgar, on Three Choirs, The Apostles, Caractacus, The Dreeam of Gerontius, The Powicj  musiuc and so on.

Blair, Britten and Owen Wingrave

In the Red House, Aldeburgh, where Benjamin Britten lived while Owen Wingrave was being written. Read my review of Britten Owen Wingrave at the Aldeburgh Music Festival here This is part of the library which Britten and Peter Pears used. The décor is totally of its time, preserved much as it was when they chose it. Who sat in the red chair?  Who sat in the white?

Off to Aldeburgh now, for Owen Wingrave at Snape. It's the fourth production I've seen. What period is Owen Wingrave really set in? Can a militaristic family who worship sacrifice really survive from Agincourt to Kandahar? Statistically they'd have been wiped out long ago. Soldiers who die young reproduce less frequently than most men. Rather, I think Paramore is a state of mind. The house is a metaphor for closed minds and conformity. Henry James, a psychologist, might have intuited it as a kind of mental prison, with the haunted room at its core. Maybe that's why the family is so afraid of the legend. It's significant that the women in Owen Wingrave are just as psychotic as the men, perhaps even more so. Mental rigidity is the antithesis of the creative spirit. Perhaps the men in this family run away to war to escape something even more horrible than physical death?
 
When Owen confronts it, he's confronting the source of the psychosis in his family. That's why they are so terrified of the room. They'd rather get torn apart by sabres on the barttlefield than confront the darkness in their psyches. Owen is not a hero in the usual sense of the word.  His whole persona seems to go against flag waving and bombast. For me a key to his character is that he is one of Britten's innocents. Purity of spirit is the most elusive form of bravery, ever. Although Owen Wingrave connects to The Turn of the Screw, in many ways another connection is with Billy Budd, who doesn't conform to any simplistic idea of "hero". Captain Vere spends the rest of   his life trying to figure out why Billy went willingly to death. When Owen is kicked out of Paramore by his grandfather, he finds peace. Perhaps he could have walked away and started a new life from scratch. But Kate, his childhood buddy, confronts him. She might be little more than a child but already she's been poisoned by the family mass hysteria. So he goes into the room. What happens next, I've often wondered ? Is Kate saved ? Does the family collapse?

Britten adds an extra layer of pacifism to Henry James's original, expanding the psychological with the political. It's absolutely valid that this aspect of the opera should be developed in this year when we remember 1914-1918. Pacifism isn't easy.   Defying the forces that push nations to war requires great strength and committment. It is by no means the easy option. Today, when Tony Blair refuses to connect his WMD lies with the present destabilzation,  we need more than ever to recognize responsibility for our actions.  In 1914 men marched to serve "the war to end all wars". But war did not stop war.

Please see my other pieces on Owen Wingrave, Britten and Aldeburgh by clicking on the labels below. Review to follow.

Garsington Opera's 25th Anniversary : past unites with future

Garsington Opera's 25th anniversary season starts Friday - some seats still available,. But there's a lot more to the season than the three operas on offer. Douglas Boyd, Artistic Director, speaks about this year's programme and about thrilling new developments that could launch Garsington Opera into the next 25 years at the forefront of British country house opera. Read the interview HERE IN Opera Today for more.  

 The late Leonard Ingrams founded Garsington Opera in 1989 in his own home, Garsington Manor. In 2011, the festival moved to Wormsley Park, Mark Getty's estate in the Chiltern Hills. The larger and even more spectacular setting has great potential. The award winning pavilion is now permanent, and its backstage area has been expanded. Garsington Opera's own orchesstra will continue to produce chamber-scale specialist work - Garsington Opera is the foremost house for Rossini rarities  in the UK - but the facilities now cater fro larger scale orchestras and a wider repertoire.

Furthermore, Garsington Opera will be able to create a new niche through which opera, chamber and orchestral music can be heard together with literature and discussions on broader issues. In 1915, Lady Ottoline Morell bought Garsington Manor as a retreat from her estate at Morrell Park in Oxford. Her salon attracted the more adventurous artistic minds of her era - she knew TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and many others.  At right a photo showing her on the lawn at Garsington with Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Siegfried Sassoon, the war poet, stayed at Garsington Manor while recuperating from the Somme.

This year, Garsington Opera is holding a weekend "Peace in our time?" (note the question mark). Discussions, concert performances, chamber music, masterclasses, cricket matches and poetry readings. By remarkable coincidence, two previously unpublished poems by Siegfried Sassoon will be read in public for the first time. One poem, "Atrocities", was suppressed during war time, but the other is an ode to Beethoven: the composer who perhaps more than others deals with ideas of oppression, war, resistance and hope through brotherhood. Celebrated in a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, who knew war and injustice, and whose poetry stimulated a whole new artistic aesthetic. (Ivor Gurney lived in High Wycombe down the road from Wormsley, and Wilfred Owen lived near Henley-on-Thames)  Perfect dovetail : Garsington Opera's past and its future.

photo of the Garsington Opera Pavilion at Wormlsey by Christopher Jonas

Bunnies and Bombs - Easter 1914

Why is this Easter bunny wearing an ammo belt and beating a marching drum ? And why are these soldiers arresting the bunny ? Perhaps the impact of war hadn't sunk in. Or maybe  escapist fantasy helped.  Why do Christians go to war ? Below, an image that deals better with the meaning of Easter. A soldier lies dying. A farmhouse burns in the background. Maybe at home, the soldier's farmhouse might be burning too. But the fallen soldier looks up at a wayside cross. Erschiene mir zum Schilde, zum Trost in meinem Tod Shine your shield on  me and comfort me at the moment of my death" 

Three Choirs Festival Worcester 2014

Tickets go on sale 15/4 for the 2014 Three Choirs Festival, this year in Worcester, the city where Elgar grew up. This is also the first year the Festival has been curated by Dr Peter Nardone. Moreover, this year marks the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. The Three Choirs Festival mirrors a type of Englishness that has survived centuries of strife and change. Perhaps we can better appreciate that "Spirit of England" by engaging with The Three Choirs Festival and what it represents.

This year's Three Choirs opens on Saturday 26th July. Perhaps the Opening Service at 11.30 in Worcester Cathedral will mean more than usual, given what is being commemorated. You don't have to be a Christian to care. We all share (I trust) universal faith in goodness, humanity and hope. At 2.30,  Roderick Williams, easily the greatest baritone in this genre, presents a recital on The Great War in English Song, built around George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad. Butterworth was killed in the Somme in 1916. There's a lot about him on this site, including something I found in the War Office archives which no one had found before. Please use the "Butterworth" label at right.

This year, London's Globe Theatre  tours to Worcester: a very special event indeed. The Globe will be doing Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing at 3.30 in the College Hall. T.hen, at 745 in Worcester Cathedral itself, Britten's War Requiem. Britten wasn't a Three Choirs regular, and the piece isn't conventionally religious. Please read what I've written about the War Requiem, Britten and Britten's pacifism on this site, using the labels at right. If ever there was an occasion when the Three Choirs ethic and Britten dovetail, this will be it. This War Requiem could be a coming-together on a very deep level.

Many concerts during Sunday 27th. Alternatively, you could visit Elgar's Birtthplace at Broadheath three  miles from the city centre. Excellent museum, with very well stocked CD shop. There will be other opportunities to visit during the week, and specially curated Walking Tours through the countryside Elgar was so fond of visiting. Sunday night will be a good chance to savour Three Choirs hospitality at the King's Hall - Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding! After which one will be well fortified for Dvořák’s Stabat Mater in Worcester Cathedral, which Dvořák himself conducted at the Three Choirs Festival in 1884. The Choirs was very much in the vanguard of "new" European music when it was new.

This tradition continues: On Thursday, 31/7 in Worcester Cathedral, Torsten Rasch A Foreign Field will receive its premiere. It's a Three Choirs commission,  and will be heard with Elgar's The Spirit of England and Vaughan Williams' A Lark Ascending. The concert, titled Reflections of 1914, will be another significant coming-together. Two of the greatest British composers, responding to a war that would change their world, and a youngish German composer who has travelled the world, reflecting on what went before him.  Rasch grew up in a tradition very close to the Three Choirs: he was a boy chorister with the Dresdener Kreuzchor, which produced Peter Schreier and Rudolf Mausberger (lots about them on this site too). Rasch's music embraces wider genres. He emigrated to Japan as a young man and has worked in theatre, film and multi media.  Read more about him here.

But without Elgar, no Three Choirs Festival would be complete. This year's Elgar highlight will be The Apostles, on Friday,1st August in Worcester Cathedral. This is a hugely ambitious, even extravagant work and should be stunning with the massed choirs. Good cast, too : Andrew Kennedy, Brindley Sherratt, Sarah Fox, Claudia Huckle, Neal Davis, Marcus Farnsworth, conducted by Adrian Partington. This week  BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting Mark Elder's Proms Apostles which I wrote about here. The photo shows Elgar conducting The Apostles in Worcester at the 1905 Three Choirs Festival. Don't recognize the organ? The performance took place in The Public Hall, Worcester, demolished in 1966 when the city centre was rebuilt. .

Smash Hit - Elgar, London Coliseum

On Monday, 11th June 1917, at what was then a music hall and is now the London Coliseum, Edward Elgar's Fringes of the Fleet received its premiere. Smash hit! Initially part of a Variety performance that repeated twice daily - imagine - the songs proved so popular that the run was extended week after week, and the show toured, returning to London at the end of the year.

Elgar used texts from Rudyard Kipling's best-selling poems. The songs are robustly vivid and good enough as pure music that they work better than many of Elgar's other art songs for piano. A hundred years ago, there wasn't any prejudice against crossover like there is now. Modern music snobs don't know music history.  Fringes of the Fleet was performed with full staging and special effects. The photos above and at right show the singers in their costumes seated "at a seaside pub" as they begin their recital of maritime shanties. The Lowestoft Boat describes a herring boat commandeered for the war effort. The crew aren't sailors! The mate was a vicar in a chapel in Wales, more used to top hat and tails, and the engineer is 58, "so he's prepared to meet his fate"

"A game is more than the player of the game and the ship is more than the crew", the refrain in Fate's Discourtesy sums up the mentality of the era, when war seemed like a jolly jaunt. In  Submarines (Kipling's Tin Fish), the four baritones sing long lines near the bottom of their register, like a submarines lurking "in the belly of Death". New technology and surprisingly "new" sounding music, making the most of the unusual four-man ensemble. Best of all, I think,  Sweepers (Kipling's Minesweepers) . Mines have been reported in the fairway, and ships are bottled up in port. The minesweepers are heroes. Hence the chorus, using their names, "Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain". Rather a mouthful to sing, but carried off with style.

Elgar's Fringes of the Fleet was so popular that a recording was rushed out in early July 1917, three weeks  after the first performance. The singers were Charles Mott, Frederick Henry, Frederick Stewart and Harry Barratt,.On July 23, Charles Mott, the lead, who had sung Wagner at Covent Garden, was called up. He was killed in battle in May 1918. Elgar himself conducted - he was an early advocate of new media. The definitive recording is the recent SOMM disc, with other Elgar rarities  The edition used is by Tom Higgins, who conducts the Guildford Symphony. (more here). The 1917 recording is now available commercially here or here and serves as an interesting example of how vocal styles have changed.  How rigid the phrasing seems now, as if the singers were old men in young bodies. In the earlier Lowestoft Boat, the singers hammed up the sound of dogs barking at the dog's home where the ships cook worked as a civilian. It's cute, but Roderick Williams and his sturdy crew (Nicholas Lester, Duncan Rock, Laurence Meikle) have the musical nous to sing better without losing the sense of adventure.

100 years ago today

100 years ago today - the world was still innocent, oblivious of what was to come. New Year 1915 greetings cards depicted military images but traditional symbols of good luck still dominated on 1/1/14.  The First World War is a watershed in world history, but change is something that happens all the time, even if we don't notice.

The same applies in music history. On 1/1/1814, Bach was "obscure", and on 1/1/1914 Schubert's works still weren't organized into D numbers. As always the best form of armament is knowledge. "If we don't learn the lessons of history, we repeat the mistakes"

Please see "This year, I'll be wearing a poppy for the last time."