Winter Words (Op

Program Notes and Texts

Notes on Britten by Maryanne M. Kim

Notes on Vaughan Williams by Kenneth Martinson

An Introduction to Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, England, on November 22, 1913. Britten composed his first piece of music at the age of five and continued to produce compositions with relatively little guidance throughout his childhood. His formal composition studies began with Frank Bridge when he was eleven and continued with John Ireland at the Royal College of Music in London from 1930 to 1934. In 1939, Britten left England for the United States of America with his lifelong companion and collaborator, Peter Pears, a tenor; there Britten wrote his first opera, Paul Bunyan, to the libretto of W. H. Auden. Britten later returned to England in 1942, where he settled permanently in his native Suffolk. From there, Britten founded the Alderburgh Festival in 1948 with Peter Pears and writer Eric Crozier. It was at the Alderburgh Festival that many of Britten’s works received their first performances. Although Britten wrote orchestral, choral and chamber music, he is best known as one of the 20th century’s greatest opera composers. Among the most well-known and frequently performed works of Britten’s eleven operas are: Peter Grimes (1944-45), Albert Herring (1947), Turn of the Screw (1954), and Death in Venice (1973).

In 1964, Britten won the Robert O. Anderson Aspen Award in the Humanities for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) and War Requiem (1961). Later in life, Britten won the French Government’s Ravel Prize in 1974 and was made a Life Peer in 1976, giving Britten the title of Baron. Later that same year, Britten passed away in Alderburgh.

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Winter Words Op. 52

In 1953, Britten composed Winter Words Op. 52, a song cycle delivered on the poetry of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). The sparse texture of songs in this cycle exemplifies the composer’s growing concern for integrating methods of serialism. The economy of musical means found in this piece produces a tendency to strip musical ideas to their bare essentials, discouraging any florid textual details. Perhaps this tendency is well-paired with Hardy’s sober and at times, simplistic poems. The genius of the composer, however, is found in the imagination and vivid drama heard in these songs.

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet whose poetry was set to music by Gerald Finzi, most notably, in Earth, Air and Rain. The songs in this cycle come from a series of collections of Hardy’s poems including Poems Past and Present (1902), Satires of Circumstances (1914), Moments of Vision (1917) and Winter Words in various Moods and Meters (1928). The poem selected from Hardy’s Winter Words is the 6th song in the cycle, Proud Songster. Perhaps the reason Britten named this song cycle “Winter Words” results from the overarching themes of the poems in this cycle. Many of the songs deal with the passage of time in an individual’s life; from youth to adulthood; from innocence to experience; and from birth to death. In these thought-provoking and beautiful songs, scenes of human existence passing through time are captured in the words and music of Hardy and Britten, one—a superb story teller and the other—a great dramatist. The thematic content reflects a mature person’s understanding of life, spoken in the “winter” years of life.

Interestingly, Graham Johnson also shares his insight on the composer’s choice of the title by pointing out Britten’s affinity and reverence for Schubert’s songs. Any musician hearing the word, “winter”, as a title of a song cycle would think of Schubert’s song cycle of 1827, Winterreise (or Winter’s Journey). By pointing out that Britten and Peter Pears had performed Winterreise on more than one occasion, Johnson conjectures that perhaps this cycle is Britten’s homage to the great song composer, Schubert.

Folk Song Arrangements

Britten is not the first composer to arrange folk melodies from England, Scotland and Ireland. Starting in the 1870’s, George Thomson of Edinburgh (1757-1851) published folksong arrangements written by some of the great living composers of the time, including Ignaz Pleyel, Josef Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. These arrangements satisfied the growing demand by middle class enthusiasts for more accessible music beginning in the 19th century. Other composers soon followed in the later half of the 19th century and continued on into the 20th century, most notably by Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) and Percy Grainger (1882-1961).

With Britten, the well-loved folk melodies were clothed with simple, yet artful and sophisticated piano accompaniments. Almost all of these arrangements are strophic, and as Graham Johnson points out, they are Schubertian, in that a single pianistic motif encapsulates the meaning and mood of the songs.

Miller of Dee harkens back to Schubert’s Am Feierband and Gretchen am Spinnrade in perpetually running 16th note textures in the accompaniment, providing a jabbing dissonance that perhaps paints the jaded miller. The Salley Gardens is William Butler Yeat’s poem set to a folk melody called The Maids of Mourne Shore by the Northern Irish composer, Herbert Hughes, titled Down by the Salley Gardens. Besides Britten’s arrangement, O Waly Waly was also set by Cecil Sharp from Somerset. With a remarkable use of the simple accompanimental motif repeated throughout, with harmonic changes underlining the text, Britten captures the idea of the disappointment of a love lost. Oliver Cromwell recalls the story of the remains of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), the English Puritan leader, who was posthumously dug up and hung during the reign of Charles II for the regicide committed against Charles I. The assurance of the “buried and dead” Oliver Cromwell heralded a new Elizabethan era, which can be heard in the glee suggested in the music.

The Purcell Realisations

One of the more interesting aspects of twentieth-century composition is its complex and fertile relationship with the musical past. More than at any previous time, composers in the modern period had knowledge of and access to the works of previous centuries, and they frequently entered into creative dialogues with their musical forebears. Some sought to update eighteenth-century forms and styles as an antidote to what they felt was the overblown rhetoric of the late Romantic era; Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony and Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella may be the most famous examples of this practice, but they are far from unique. Other composers went further, appropriating not only certain style traits but actual compositions from the old masters. Schoenberg and Webern, for example, made transcriptions of Handel and Bach that are so far-reaching that they must be considered original compositions rather than just orchestrations. The same may be said of Richard Strauss' Divertimento after keyboard pieces of Couperin. Stravinsky reworked music by Bach, Pergolesi, Tchaikovsky and Gesualdo. More recently Lukas Foss, Luciano Berio, Jacob Druckman and other composers have recycled older music in imaginative ways.

And then there was Benjamin Britten, the leading English composer of the last century. Britten, too, took a lively interest in music from earlier periods. As a pianist and conductor, he often performed works by Schubert, Mozart and Bach. Not surprisingly, though, he was especially drawn to older English composers, and his involvement with their work went beyond simply performing it. Britten devoted considerable energy on behalf of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the foremost English composer of the Baroque period. He transcribed two of Purcell's best-known instrumental pieces, the Chacony in G Minor and the "Golden" Sonata, for modern instruments; realized from Purcell's figured-bass shorthand the keyboard accompaniments for a collection of songs; and helped prepare modern editions of two of Purcell's major dramatic compositions, Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen.

FOUR HYMNS for Tenor, viola and piano

Ralph Vaughan Williams (born Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, ENGLAND, Oct. 12, 1872; died London, Aug. 26, 1958) was the most important English composer of his generation, and he was a key figure in the 20th-century revival of English music. It is clear that he held the viola in a special place in his heart throughout his compositional career, having contributed the Suite for viola and orchestra, Romance for viola and piano, 4 Hymns for viola, tenor, and strings, and Flos Campi for viola, choir, and orchestra. The 6 Studies in English Folksong are originally for cello and piano, but he transcribed them for viola as well as many other different instruments. Vaughan Williams learned violin as well as piano and organ at an early age. He switched to viola for three years before taking up an interest in composition. Later, he studied composition and music history at Royal College of Music and Trinity College.

The Four Hymns for tenor voice, viola, and strings seems to be a smaller scale companion piece to his Five Mystical Songs for baritone voice and orchestra. These hymns were written for the Worchester Festival, but its premiere was delayed until 1920 because of WWI. In 1914, aged 41, Vaughan Williams felt bound to involve himself in the war (no compositions were written between 1914-1920), serving as a wagon orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, later becoming an artillery officer. The works were written for Steuart Wilson before the war, and the gave the premiere performance with the London Symphony Orchestra at Cardiff, six years after the work was written. These hymns are another example of how Vaughan Williams was able throughout his life, despite being agnostic, to set music words in the accepted terms of Christian revelation as if they meant to him what they must have meant to their authors.
Still Falls the Rain
The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn

Words by Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain

In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain –
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,– those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear –
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain –
Then – O Ile leap up to my God: who pulles me doune –
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, – dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain –
“Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.”

Winter Words

Words by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

At Day-Close in November

The ten hours’ light is abating,
And a late bird wings across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,
Give their black heads a toss.

Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,
Float past like specks in the eye;
I set ev’ry tree in my June time,
And now they obscure the sky.

And the children who ramble through here
Conceive that there never has been
A time where no trees, no tall trees grew here,
That none will in time be seen.

Midnight on a Great Western (or ‘The Journeying Boy’)

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp’s flame
Play’d down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came.

In the band of his hat the journeying boy
Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
Like a living thing.

What past can be yours, O journeying boy
Towards a world unknown,
Who calmly, as if incurious quite
On all at stake, can undertake
This plunge alone?

Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,
Our rude realm far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete
This region of sin that you find you in,
But are not of?

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Wagtail and the Baby (a Satire)
The Little Old Table
Creak, little wood thing, creak,
When I touch you with elbow or knee;
That is the way you speak
Of one who gave you to me!
You, little table, she brought—
Brought me with her own hands,
As she look’d at me with a thought
That I did not understand.
—Whoever owns it anon,
And hears it, will never know
What history hangs upon
This creak from long ago.
In these frosts and hoars.
Requires a fine day,
And it seems to me
It had better not be.’
Hence, that afternoon,
Though never know he
That his wish could no be,
To get through it faster
We buried the master
Without any tune.
But ‘twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
When the vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstone grass,
A band all in white
Like saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster’s grave.
Such a tenor man told
When he had grown old.

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