Britten's 'Curlew River'

Author(s): John Warrack

Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 70 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 19-22
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/943936
Accessed: 22/07/2010 07:44

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 FIRST PERFORMANCES I9

the twelve-note ostinato assembles itself and the texture fills out with note-
cluster aggregations bounded by the all-important fourth (these clusters nearly
always take one of the two possible three-note forms available within the original
cell pattern, D-E-G, say, or D-F-G). Soon these random points of light coalesce
into a leaping horn theme which follows the harmonic pattern of the germinal
theme. This is the nearest thing in the movement to purposeful growth and is not
followed up; the poetry of the overall conception is too elusive to accept fully the
implications of such continuity. After a brass fanfare, the ostinato begins to peter
out and something like a second group appears, with more sustained lines to
complement each other in freely extending the horizontal pattern of the germinal
theme. Finally a chordal representation of the theme provides a moment of
repose, and then the opening texture returns to start what is the equivalent of
a development section. But the development merely explores aspects of the
cellular material after the manner of the exposition, and an outburst on the
brass marking what would have been the achievement of the tonic at the point
of recapitulation, quickly realises itself out of place (there has been no conflict
and no crystallisation so that there is nothing to celebrate). The movement
consequently pursues the only course that seems open to it and disintegrates
the rhythmic continuity which up to this point had bound the cellular fragments
together.
Both the slow movement and the scherzo skilfully maintain the fugitive
restlessness of the first movement, and the scherzo shows a concentrated basis
on the germinal twelve-note theme: the opening chord superimposes its charac-
teristic three-note clusters, and the most memorable theme of the movement
paraphrases its line. With the three opening movements thus conceived in terms
of subtle but only slightly varied monotone, the finale problem is an acute one.
Any apotheosis, resolution or confident gesture would be unmotivated, and
indeed it is difficult to see what task a finale could usefully perform. Raws-
thorne's answer is not convincing, the movement's most obvious defect being
its lack of impetus. In the development section for instance-the movement is
perhaps best described as a sonata rondo-there is a series of disruptive gestures
which sound as if they were conceived as a break to forward motion, but they
are meaningless since the previous contrapuntal working out has established no
dynamic norm. One can only hope that the composer will recast it, or better
still reconceive it, for the originality of the earlier movements deserves a better
conclusion.

Britten's CurlewRiver reviewed by John Warrack

Even at the time, the War Requiem (with its pendant the Cantata Mis-
ericordium)seemed to mark a culmination and summary. But with genius's gift
for anticipating itself, something in Britten was already alert to new demands
on his imagination. Possibly the most intensely English phase of Britten's career
is receding, and he needs now not the long accepted security of his native soil
but geographically wider imaginative forays. He has found in Rostropovich the
instrumentalist to join those singers, from Pears onwards, who have stood behind
his vocal music, and to prompt what he has (untypically) announced may be a
series of abstract instrumental works. And the world journeyings of this most

The music quotations from Curlew River

are reproduced by kind permission of
the publishers, Faber & Faber Ltd.
20 TEMPO

rooted, least parochial of artists could hardly fail to provide him with those stimuli
he felt ready to absorb. The Prince of the Pagodas gave a hint; now, as the East
draws closer and we seem on the verge of a sweeping influence of Eastern art forms,
Britten has registered first with those uncanny creative antennae.
But Britten is a creator, imposing his imaginative will on a form and not
merely succumbing to its titillation. His art is one of Forsterian connexion,
coupled on the professional level with the kind of cleverness that at once per-
ceives the solution to an artistic problem. At a first hearing of Curlew River
it seemed to me that Britten had magisterially taken over Japanese No, by the
brilliant idea of making it meet him half-way-the now famous transference of
Sumida-gawa and the age-old Japanese ritual theatre to the one Western art-
form that could prove hospitable both to it and to Britten, mediaeval liturgical
music drama. Indeed this is the common ground-a human emotion expressed
through religion's oldest universalizing tool, ritual-on which men from opposite
ends of the earth may recognize each other. But further experience of the work
shows that one's (at any rate, my) knowledge of Britten had exceeded knowledge
of Japanese No and consequently underestimated the subtlety and thoroughness of
the musical connexion.
The interesting quality of the synthesis, however, does still lie in the way
Britten has taken what are apparently Japanese procedures into his own language
-which is thereby extended but not, of course, broken. The suspended tone-
clusters on the chamber organ which are the work's first harmonic sound take
their aural nature from an instrument used in Japanese gagaku court music, but
their constitution from a more Western organizational method, derivation from
the close intervals of the Gregorian chant 'Te lucis ante terminum' on which
the work begins-between appearances of which, indeed, the whole opera or
is
parable slung (see Exx.i and 2).

Ex.1
All Slow JLJ\) crec
-
Voices ., ;, f | jD k
Te lu - cis-- an te ter- mi- num, re- rum cre - a - tor po - sci- mus,

fi)H}h(a) e raZl.
dim. J
yXx#
ut pro tu - a cle - men- ti - a sis prae- sul et cus to-di -a A - - men.

Ex.2 -
Org. X .-, o ' ^

PT-Zb8

The Abbot departs little from its tones and semitones, at most major thirds,
though he is allowed the luxury of an occasional falling sixth. The robing
music reverts to the chant in heterophony-what we regard as a mediaeval
European practice, but one which is also staple to ensemble playing in China,
Java and Japan. The sounds of this strange, overlapping march over clopping
- nor
percussion is neither Western nor Eastern recognisably Brittenish-any
more than is its succeeding version chanted by the monks. The intervallic pattern
widens with the arrival of the Traveller, over heavily groaning double bass notes
in pairs that add a new tinge to the instrument's tone colour. Accompanying him
is a triadic harp; and the Traveller's whole solo is couched in nothing but the
 FIRST PERFORMANCES 21

tones and semitones of the chant, modified by triadic movement. It is the Mad-
woman who tears across this carefully composed fabric. Not only is this the
first use of the tenor voice-which for Britten has, on his own admission I
believe, always stood for the unusual or outside in human experience-but the
intervals are violent fourths and sevenths. Nevertheless, she rapidly reasserts the
dominance in the work of the tone and semitone, in a wonderful long narration
over repeated instrumental notes sliding up or down bitterly at the end: it is the
material of the chant as well as that of Japanese grace-notes, yet also the naked
sound of grief, perhaps echoing from the cry of the curlew (Ex. 3). She enters the
Ex.3 cresc. ls
hI ? t

One day a- las he van-ished, one day he van - ished

l{Hn.(muted)7 Ft. A A ^ ,F.

t
f1 '- -
Jw
uj
P cresFc.
j b" '-Ila-
Vla. 7

!Y I

roar - ing like the sea.

lFr---r f_ p

boat,and to a more complex kind of heterophony (Ex.4) the sail is hoisted, while
boat, and to a more complex kind of heterophony (Ex.4) the sail is hoisted, while
over swirling scales the ferryman takes its music (still close in its intervals) for
his narration of the boy's arrival and death. The semitone is dominant again
Ex.4
Slow: all instr.
O .-. I i k

--- X
Perc. g5
N? I X

=== 5t
P
W
jp^7 == mf
xr

at the Madwoman's narration of hope, only an undulating flute meshing with

the voice. When the boy's spirit appears, it is to another Gregorian melody;
22 TEMPO

and the work unwinds itself in reverse, with the robing music, the Abbot's
final word, and ultimately the outward procession of monks chanting 'Te lucis'-
whose beauty is actually now enhanced by the events towhich ithasbeen subjected.
Used as we are by now to Britten's capacity for discovering new basic
truths about instrumental sound, there is astonishing novelty about the com-
binations and even about the unadorned tone he discovers in his seven instruments.
And his capacity for preserving his innocence into the utmost sophistication of
technique gives the raw intervals of music, even the adjacent notes upon which
the work depends, an increasing intensity that parallels the ritual nature of the
whole work. This in turn imposes a slowness upon the pace, as well as a narrow-
ness on the style, which lie foreign to Britten's naturally quick, alert talent.
Curlew River is an imaginative exercise of positively religious self-discipline.
What it presages, genius alone knows. But his surefootedness in making this
foreign experience at once his own and supra-national allows no room for doubt
about his still-increasing stature.

Malcolm Williamson's EnglishEccentrics

reviewed by Edward Greenfield
That Malcolm Williamson can respond to a challenge was obvious enough
from his first opera Our Man in Havana. There the subject was chosen for him,
but just as with Britten constriction of opportunity, self-imposed discipline
(formal or otherwise) often produces the most potent of all detonations, so
Williamson drew from his unlikely materials one of the most vital and colourful
of modern British operas.
EnglishEccentricshas also provided the right challenge. It was a commission
from Aldeburgh this time, and what was needed was an entertainment more
than an opera, something requiring the minimum forces, vocal and instrumental,
something limited in its dramatic scope, not even a chamber-opera in the
Aldeburgh sense but, as Peter Pears put it, something of an 'anti-opera'.
Edith Sitwell's fantasy scrap-book more than meets the requirement, but once
again the challenge of the impossible has brought triumph, and the most dazzling
success has come just in the solution of the most difficult problems. The first
scene of each of the two acts brings a wide variety of unconnected characters,
while the later scenes give more sustained pictures of other characters, with
their stories filled in more. These more sustained dramatic scenes are the more
readily susceptible to 'operatic' setting, but in fact it is the kaleidoscopic first
scenes that are both the most brilliant dramatically and the most effective in a
purely operatic sense. Without any story whatever except the chance juxta-
positions of a sophisticated charade game, Williamson is forcefully dramatic
with a diamond-like brilliance. One cannot take one's eyes off the stage. One
is dazzled; one is charmed; one is rushed from sampling one delectable sweet-
meat to the next, all in less time than it takes to think. In these scenes he has
achieved exactly what seemed most impossible, the transference to opera of
the finest qualities of sophisticated revue.
The juxtaposition of unrelated characters is both ingenious and deliciously
funny, as when two of Dame Edith's centenarian figures, Thomas Parr and the
Countess of Desmond, pop up in quick succession to be confronted bythe eccentric
parson, the Rev. Mr. Jones. We have learnt very briefly the story of each, and
 A scene from Britten's Curlew River (setting by Colin Graham, costumes by Annena Stubbs)

A shot from the original C.B.S. television production of Stravinsky's Noah and the Flood, the title
under which his 'Musical Play' was first shown.