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16785 results in Music: General Interest

Page 310 of 840

  • 3 - Catholicism, Ritual and Ceremony

  • from 1700
  • David Wyn Jones
  • Book:
    Music in Vienna
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 February 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 30-46

  • Summary

    The regulation of the liturgy

    ONE of the longest serving members of the Habsburg Hofkapelle was not a composer, singer or instrumentalist, but someone who had started as a functionary, copying and distributing the performing parts for the musicians, the Dispensatore delli Concerti, and who over half a century became the central authority on the organisation and presentation of sacred music at court: Kilian Reinhardt (1653/4–1729). He joined the Kapelle of Leopold I in the year of the Turkish siege, 1683, quickly making the transition from willing novice to efficient organizer. As several petitions from the late 1690s indicate, he felt that he was overworked and did not always have the respect of the performing musicians, accusing them of uncivil and coarse behaviour. His proposed solution reveals something about court hierarchy and prejudices; Reinhardt felt that if he were given the title of ‘Musician’ (‘Musicus’) that would elicit respect. This was granted as well as the enhanced title of Maestro di Concerti. By the 1720s Reinhardt's accumulated experience and detailed knowledge of the workings of the musical court, particularly in the complex area of liturgical music, was unrivalled, even by its Kapellmeister Johann Joseph Fux. As part of a review of the membership of the musical court instituted by Karl in 1726 Reinhardt seems to have been required to document this knowledge. The result was a handwritten volume of over 200 pages that indicates to the last detail the role of liturgical music at the court: Rubriche Generali Per le Funzioni Ecclesiastiche Musicali di tutto l'Anno (General Regulations on the Role of Ecclesiastical Music during the Entire Year). Written in Italian, the language that guaranteed maximum distribution amongst musicians and administrators, the volume has a lengthy dedication that indicates, alongside the tortuous supplicatory formalities, its authority:

    Holy, Catholic and Royal Majesty

    If the scrupulous care that I have taken in the preparation of these Rubriche, which I now most humbly present to Your Holy Imperial, Catholic and Royal Majesty, will elicit your most clement acceptance, I will rejoice greatly in that result and I will have realized the ambition to which I committed myself when I set forth on this work.

  • 9 - ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’

  • from 1900
  • David Wyn Jones
  • Book:
    Music in Vienna
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 February 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 178-198

  • Summary

    Otto Nicolai concert, 18 February 1900

    THE annual benefit concert for the sickness fund of the Philharmonic Orchestra was held earlier than normal in the 1899–1900 season, between the sixth and seventh concerts in the subscription series rather than at the end. The previous year Mahler had conducted a performance of his own Second Symphony; this year he chose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the first time he had conducted the work in Vienna. He assembled unusually large forces. Following the practice of doubling the wind instruments, the orchestra probably numbered over a hundred, but the choir was five times that size, drawn from the combined forces of the chorus of the court opera, the Singakademie, and the well-established amateur male choir of the Schubertbund.

    Sheer numbers were useful throughout ‘An die Freude’, but the desire that the male voices should be powerful enough reveals a particular concern for a major turning point in the work: the moment when the choir and orchestra suddenly halt their singing of ‘Freude, schoner Gotterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium’ and turn to a new text, ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen. Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt’. The tempo changes from Allegro assai vivace to Andante maestoso, the key falls down from D major to G major, and tenors and basses, accompanied by cellos, double basses and bass trombone, declaim the new text to a new theme. Mahler's performances were vividly characterized by extremes of expression, ruthlessly controlled and delivered. Here the Andante maestoso marking was probably taken at a slower tempo than Viennese audiences were accustomed to and the contrasts of the subsequent Adagio ma non troppo, ma divoto were certain to have been delivered with maximum theatricality – piano, exaggerated swellings of tone, the beginning of a crescendo from piano that is turned back to pianissimo, followed by a crescendo to a full-toned fortissimo.

    The hall had been sold out and the performance was so compelling that a repeat performance, with all the logistical problems of assembling the large forces once more at short notice, was organized for the following Thursday.

  • 2 - Music at the Imperial and Royal Court

  • from 1700
  • David Wyn Jones
  • Book:
    Music in Vienna
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 February 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 8-29

  • Summary

    Angelica, vincitrice di Alcina: an opera for the Habsburgs

    ON 1 August 1716 the newly appointed British ambassador at the Ottoman court, Sir Edward Wortley Montagu, and his wife, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, left London on their long journey to Constantinople. Travelling via Rotterdam, The Hague, Nijmwegen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Wurzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg, they arrived in Vienna just over a month later, on 3 September. A particularly challenging aspect of Montagu's new position as ambassador was to act as a diplomatic conduit between the two long-standing adversaries, the Ottoman court in Constantinople and the Habsburg court in Vienna, and he remained in Vienna until mid-November to familiarize himself with the perspective of the Habsburgs. His wife, Lady Mary, was also enquiring and impressionable and had already written several letters back to England about their journey to Vienna, revealing herself as an acute and lively observer of places, customs and personalities. From the imperial capital she wrote seven, often lengthy, letters about the city and the court. Protocol meant that her husband was given highest possible status as the representative of the British King George I at the court of Emperor Karl VI, and Lady Mary was treated accordingly. Her correspondence was a private one and she was able to report on aspects of life at the imperial court that rarely found their way into the diplomatic bag. She was not especially musical, but a clear highlight of the ten-week visit during the autumn of 1716 was her attendance of a performance of a new opera by the court composer, Johann Joseph Fux, to celebrate the birth of an heir to the throne, Archduke Leopold. She wrote to her friend, the poet Alexander Pope:

    Don't fancy, however, that I am infected by the air of these popish Countrys, thô I have so far wander'd from the Discipline of the Church of England to have been last Sunday at the Opera, which was perform'd in the Garden of the Favorita, and I was so much pleas'd with it I have not yet repented my seeing it. Nothing of that kind was ever more Magnificent, and I can easily believe what I am told, that the Decorations and habits cost the Emperour? 30,000 Sterling.

  • 10 - From Johann Strauss to Richard Strauss

  • from 1900
  • David Wyn Jones
  • Book:
    Music in Vienna
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 February 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 199-220

  • Summary

    The Waltz King turns to operetta

    JOHANN Strauss's waltz, ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’, was not the last time that Strauss and Brahms were linked together in a public manner. On 3 June 1899 Johann Strauss (the son) died at his home in Igelgasse in the Fourth District, exactly two years and two months after Brahms's death. The funeral arrangements were strikingly similar. Strauss had converted to the Protestant faith in order to marry his third wife, Adele, and the funeral service was held in the same church in the Dorotheergasse, attended by individuals as different in outlook and profession as Karl Lueger, the mayor, and Gustav Mahler, the director of the court opera. Following the service the funeral cortege made its way towards the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde where, as in Brahms's funeral, the Singverein sang that composer's ‘Fahr wohl’. The horse-drawn procession then made its way to the Zentralfriedhof, where Strauss was buried in a plot immediately adjacent to that of Brahms. At a memorial concert in the Musikverein on 25 October, Strauss's birthday, the Singverein, accompanied by an orchestra drawn from the court orchestra and conducted by Richard von Perger, performed Brahms's Requiem. The affecting waltz rhythms of ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen’ could never have sounded more appropriate.

    As two long-standing figures of the musical establishment, Strauss and Brahms had the affection and admiration of the Viennese public, but the nature of the affection and, arising from that, the appeal of their personal friendship was founded on a contradiction. Brahms was an outsider, from Hamburg, who had become an insider; Strauss, on the other hand was a Viennese, one of us, but for much of his career had been outside the mainstream of musical life in the city.

    Born in 1825 in the suburb of St Ulrich (later incorporated into the Seventh District) to a family that could trace its Viennese roots back to the middle of the previous century, Strauss had lived in Vienna all his life. With his father, Johann, and his two brothers Josef and Eduard, he had established Viennese dance music – the waltz, the polka and the march – as a constant, highly idiomatic presence in the social and musical life of the city, not only as music for dancing but as dance music to listen to, outdoors and indoors.

  • APPENDIX 1 - All the ‘useful rules’ in overview, for those who make opera

  • Michael Hampe
  • Translated by Chris Walton
  • Book:
    The Crafty Art of Opera
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 151-162

  • Summary

    What is opera?

  • ✭ Opera: enacting a story through music.

  • ✭ Understand the difference between music, and music for a purpose.

  • ✭ Define the purpose of the music.

  • ✭ Become a ‘music detective’.

  • ✭ Know the orchestra.

  • ✭ Give the orchestra a reason to play.

  • ✭ Train your imagination.

    • The heart

  • ✭ Go straight to the heart.

    • The seven ‘W’ s

  • ✭ Start with the six ‘W’ s: Who? Where? When? What? hoW? Why?

  • ✭ Then define the seventh: Whom? – the addressee.

  • ✭ Locate the addressee.

  • ✭ Change the addressee where necessary.

  • ✭ If the addressee is imaginary, choose a fixed point and address it instead.

    • Sense and sensuality

  • ✭ Find out: what does the work mean?

  • ✭ Consider: what does your role contribute to it?

  • ✭ Make sense. Both in the details and in the overall context.

  • ✭ Sense trumps effect.

    • Bodies in space

  • ✭ The body in the space is already part of the action.

  • ✭ Develop a feeling for space in relation to your co-performers.

  • ✭ Sameness is boring. Be dissimilar.

  • ✭ The singer stands further upstage, the listener further downstage.

  • ✭ Position yourself according to the golden section, not in the centre.

  • ✭ A king can't play himself. Those surrounding him play him.

  • ✭ Stand at an angle to the stage ramp, not in the ‘pancake position’.

  • ✭ Maintain your relationship with your partner. Avoid the ‘tenor's turn’.

  • ✭ Seek a position between two fronts. It's dramatically effective.

  • ✭ Wherever possible, place the leading voice in an ensemble on the left.

  • ✭ Leave space around you. Otherwise objects can become competitors.

  • ✭ Hold your stance – don't wobble around.

  • ✭ When you move, make sure it's with a purpose and a specific goal.

  • ✭ Violence and torture have a greater impact on a live body on stage than in the two-dimensional images of film and TV.

  • ✭ Fill the space with breath. If the audience coughs, you've got too little breath.

  • ✭ Regard sentences and musical phrases as the arch of a bridge. Make sure to reach the other side.

  • ✭ Master the play of tension and release.

  • The ‘trizophrenic’ upbeat

  • Michael Hampe
  • Translated by Chris Walton
  • Book:
    The Crafty Art of Opera
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 65-68

  • Summary

    As mentioned already above, we all have to do two things before saying anything: thinking and breathing. Only then is speech possible. This is even truer of music. The expansion of time in an arching musical melody demands the appropriate breath, plus the corresponding emotional span. Therefore it is eminently necessary to be ‘ahead’ of the music. Only then can the singer seem as if he himself is creating the music in that very moment; only then can his voice and body form a unity. While the singer is singing one phrase he must already be preparing himself inwardly for the next so as to connect it to the first. And, above all, he has to use the upbeat of his breath to make the orchestra his servant, his vehicle of expression, in order to explain to the audience the meaning of the music emerging from the pit. It happens all too often that singers breathe when they already should be singing, while the orchestra stampedes away without any visible reason. This is a sure sign that the singer did not think – more generally, he did not ‘switch’ on time. Lagging behind the music like this, instead of ‘creating’ it in good time, can often be involuntarily comic.

    The decisive element is the upbeat. Anyone watching me teach might be irritated by my frequent interjection: ‘And – ’ just when the singer is singing at his most beautiful. His concentration on the sheer beauty of his sound makes him forget the upbeat to what's coming next. In my childhood we had an old housekeeper who had the habit of ending her sentences with ‘and –’. As in: ‘I'm going shopping now, and –’. The effect was magical because the whole family would be waiting to hear what came next. It was the magic of the upbeat. ‘And –’ is the magic formula for all types of upbeats. Long ones drawn out over several bars, and short ones; hard, soft, exalted or graceful upbeats. Upbeats for every type of music and movement.

  • Introduction: Britten and Pears's ‘personal and consistent’ Correspondence

  • Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer
  • Book:
    My Beloved Man
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    ‘your letters have been life & breath to me […] My man – my beloved man.’

    Britten to Pears, December 1942 (Letter 27)

    Maintaining contact through their letters was of vital importance to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears throughout their 39-year relationship. Towards the end of his life, on 17 November 1974 (Letter 349), Britten wrote a letter from Aldeburgh to Pears who had recently made his Metropolitan Opera House debut in Death in Venice:

    I've just listened to a re-broadcast [on the radio] of Winter Words (something like Sept. –72) and honestly you are the greatest artist that ever was – every nuance, subtle & never over-done – those great words, so sad & wise, painted for one, that heavenly sound you make, full but always coloured for words & music. What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for? I had to switch off before the folk songs because I couldn't [bear] anything after – “how long, how long”. How long? – only till Dec. 20th – I think I can just bear it But I love you,

    I love you,

    I love you —— B.

    Britten's appeal ‘how long, how long’ echoes the concluding cry in ‘Before Life and After’, from the song cycle of Thomas Hardy poems Winter Words, a work that he and Pears first performed together in October 1953 and which had become an established part of their recital programme. The phrase conveys a longing for the return of a mythical past, an ancient world that came before the corrupt one, an impression that Pears described as Hardy's ‘most personal and consistent view of the universe’. Removed from this context, it offered Britten a more intimate meaning and he employed Hardy's words to put across his more immediate longing – 20 December was the final New York performance of Death in Venice after which Pears would return home.

    Britten's valedictory question was a familiar way for him to end a letter to Pears. A plea for his partner's swift return had become a frequent closing sentiment in his correspondence during their periods of absence from one another. What was different in this case, though, was Britten's awareness of the grave state of his health.

  • III - ‘I don't know why we should be so lucky, in all this misery’: July 1945 to April 1949: Letters 71–125

  • from THE LETTERS
  • Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer
  • Book:
    My Beloved Man
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 89-148

  • Summary

    Although the war officially ended in Europe in 1945 on 8 May, its effects nonetheless persisted. The Allied victory brought rejoicing and an end to the nightly blackouts, the constant whine of sirens and the threat of air raids, but the return to ‘normal’ life was tempered by the scale of devastation and a profound sense of loss. Britten and Pears were among the fortunate, having come through the war unharmed. Moreover, they were able to carry on with their music-making. Britten had time to compose, largely uninterrupted, giving him the space needed to work on Peter Grimes.

    He completed the opera, still under the shadow of war, in February 1945. Rehearsals began almost immediately and despite some tensions that arose around the work's suitability for the reopening of Sadler's Wells, there was in the press a sense of excitement about the prospect of an English opera by an English composer. Grimes was premiered on 7 June and propelled Britten and Pears to new heights, solidifying their reputations both at home and abroad. In July 1945 the composer embarked on a tour with violinist Yehudi Menuhin to play for the survivors at Bergen-Belsen and other German concentration camps. Upon witnessing the most appalling consequences of the war, he acknowledged his and Pears's good fortune, mixed with a sense of guilt and disbelief: ‘I don't know why we should be so lucky, in all this misery’ (Letter 72).

    Ultimately, their efforts to produce Grimes and the operas that followed led to the founding of their own opera company in December 1946, the English Opera Group (EOG) and the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts (1948), in which their musical partnership was a central focus. The Festival was Pears's idea, the fruit of discussions following a financially disastrous July 1947 tour by the EOG to Holland and Switzerland, in which the group lost around £3,000. In response, Pears brought up the idea of a homegrown festival: ‘Why not make our own festival? A modest Festival with a few concerts given by friends? Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival?’1 The questions were timely, for the EOG was in need of a home base.

  • Preface

  • Michael Hampe
  • Translated by Chris Walton
  • Book:
    The Crafty Art of Opera
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp ix-ix

  • Summary

    Do you love opera?

    I love it and hate it.

    You hate it? And yet you …?

    I love the genre, the works, the possibility of depicting the world through music.

    But I hate the institution – the opera business that's supposed to bring these works to life in the manner they deserve. Instead, it's been treating them badly – albeit with some notable exceptions – for over four centuries. Regrettably, we use the same name for both the works and the institution: opera.

    But you've been running opera houses and festivals yourself for decades!

    Out of opposition! I wanted to change the institution. Sometimes I succeeded – for a short time, when the conditions were right. But then the natural inertia of the institution overpowered everything again. In brief: I have won battles, but lost the war. Opera cannot be changed.

    So why this book?

    The works don't stop asking for answers. Perhaps this book can prompt opera the institution to take a more serious approach to opera itself.

  • The heart

  • Michael Hampe
  • Translated by Chris Walton
  • Book:
    The Crafty Art of Opera
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 11-14

  • Summary

    How does theatre actually exert its impact? This happens on two different time levels: in the moment of performance, and in the memory. When I was a young actor, older colleagues of mine told me of their times spent working for Max Reinhardt in his legendary productions. Their memories were so powerful that they had tears in their eyes and could barely continue to speak. After more than half a century! Reinhardt had left a mark on them for the rest of their lives. I even suspect that time had intensified their emotional response, far beyond the original impression.

    And am I any different? One of the most beautiful performances I have ever seen was Giorgio Strehler's production of Goldoni's Le baruffe chiozzotte (Brawling in Chioggia). I vividly remember the end of it – the reconciliation among the poor fishermen after all the commotion and the quarrels, illuminated by the light of simple lanterns while night descends over the autumnal, misty-grey Adriatic; and then there was the Cogitore, representing Goldoni himself as a junior lawyer, dressed in a wine-red coat (the only colour in the otherwise grey image), slowly drawing the curtain on it all. And when I describe it, I too am overwhelmed again and again by the sheer emotional power of the performance, even though it now lies almost fifty years in the past.

    The fact that I came to opera was also thanks to such an experience. I was still in acting school and was auditioning in Berlin for a well-known theatre intendant (that's a title in Germany given to the administrative/artistic manager of a theatre or opera house). Obviously I wasn't too bad, because his assistant said he had two free tickets for an opera that same evening and asked if I would join him. Opera – what a dreadful thought! For a would-be actor to be interested in opera was something totally unfitting. But I wanted to be hired, so I said yes. And then, to my surprise, after a long opera performance I found myself breathless, with my heart pounding, right on the edge of my seat in the stalls.

  • Foreword by Fiona Shaw

  • Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer
  • Book:
    My Beloved Man
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp xiii-xiv

  • Summary

    All artists share a longing for what Yeats called ‘the heart and the hearth’… the desire to be home, but blessed and cursed by the need to communicate with the world. These letters show how two huge artists who were so often parted, survived. There is no question of either of them changing their natures, one an extrovert performer, the other a quiet composer – scruffed necks pulled apart by their gifts which were their attraction – and both paying the price, dealing with the necessity of long parting with an unrestrained frankness that allowed them to be together, intimately creating a hermetically sealed world.

    To read these letters is to climb up a wall and peer into the secret garden of two giants. You expect to hear the roar of their success and achievements but instead you read the timpani sound of their affections. It is the terms of endearments, the ‘Honey buns’, the ‘My darlings’, that remind us we have encroached on their lives. Many of the letters have our text message modernity and brevity. Some are like email as they send short hand requests for times of trains, whinging about touring and the disorientation of endless hotels, asking for scores to be found on top of cupboards, passing love from mutual friends. The quarrels too are immediately recognisable, reprimands for mistimed calls and bad moods, the vibrant, intense need to make up, and heart-stopping, delightful, random declarations.

    It is astonishing that these men created a totally realised domestic relationship that has remarkable contemporary immediacy during a period when it was illegal to love someone of your own sex. To me their lives seem an act of huge integrity. It shocks us into admiring the clarity of their affections. Here we see the secret, brave counterbalance in this fulcrum of daily love as it beams light into the seam of desolate ostracisation that runs through Ben's work.

    Letters are fragments. The act of parting and re-meeting which of course we never read would hold a different vocabulary. This throws up the interesting hunt in the mystery of creative invention.

    In my experience of creative enterprise and relationships, new work is the art of pushing each other's abilities. Practical experiments occur in the rehearsal room, the piano room for Britten.

  • I - ‘When I am not with you’: August 1937 to January 1941: Letters 1–12

  • from THE LETTERS
  • Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer
  • Book:
    My Beloved Man
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 19-36

  • Summary

    ‘He's one of the nicest people I know, but frightfully reticent,’ Britten wrote in his diary after a night of playing and singing his songs with Pears in October 1937. Already acquainted, they got to know each other properly following the death in April of mutual friend Peter Burra, who had been killed in a plane crash. On 6 May they had travelled together to Burra's cottage in Berkshire to help sort through some of his possessions. Although they were each involved with their own social circles at this point, they gradually built a friendship through shared interests: going to concerts and films, dinner and weekend parties, playing tennis and impromptu late-night song recitals. Their earliest letters show that music was central to the growing connection between them. In August 1937 Pears reports on the first concert performance at Salzburg of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which Britten had completed the previous month. He offers his impression of the Boyd Neel Orchestra's interpretation and suggests how the performance might be strengthened. These first letters also demonstrate how each encourages the other in their respective professions, with Pears reassuring Britten that his work is the best in the programme and Britten promising to compose more songs for Pears to sing.

    In March 1938 they rented a flat together in London at 43 Nevern Square, SW5, after the marriage in January of Britten's sister Beth, with whom he had shared lodgings since the early 1930s. Britten was now also the owner of the Old Mill, in Snape, near the Suffolk coast, which from April he shared with fellow composer Lennox Berkeley. Although he and Pears had clearly become close and enjoyed one another's company, their lives remained separate, as did their careers. Between late 1937 and March 1939, Britten supported himself by composing incidental music for the BBC and for the stage. He worked for the Group Theatre who produced plays by young, left-leaning writers like W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, with whom Britten found much common ground, personally and politically.

  • II - ‘My life is inextricably bound up in yours’: May 1942 to November 1944: Letters 13–70

  • from THE LETTERS
  • Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer
  • Book:
    My Beloved Man
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 37-88

  • Summary

    The freighter MS Axel Johnson reached the port of Liverpool on 17 April 1942. Its five-week journey across the Atlantic had, for its passengers Pears and Britten, been a frightening and uncomfortable experience. The ship had made its way by crawling up the coast of New England to Halifax, Nova Scotia, before a perilous twelve-day crossing of an ocean filled with submarines. Somewhere along the way, one of the vessel's funnels caught fire, apparently causing their protective escort to move on and leave the Axel Johnson to complete its voyage alone and unguarded, but fortunately without further incident. To make matters worse, the company on board the ship was, in Pears's estimation, ‘rather desolate’.1 He was unable to sing during the journey, but Britten, despite competition from people whistling in the corridors, and the ship's refrigeration unit right next to their cabin, was actually quite productive. His music manuscripts had been confiscated at the customs screening in New York, so on board he finished the Hymn to St Cecilia (text by Auden) and wrote out the portions of his Clarinet Concerto that he had completed prior to the voyage (eventually left unfinished). During the ocean crossing, Britten also composed A Ceremony of Carols for treble chorus and harp, inspired by finding a book of early English poems during the stopover in Halifax.

    Upon disembarking at Liverpool, the two made their way to London together, but until they could find a flat to share they now had to separate. Pears made his home base with his parents in Barnes while Britten stayed with his sister Barbara in Chelsea. By September they found lodging with Ursula Nettleship at 104A Cheyne Walk, a situation less than ideal for privacy, so five months later they moved to a maisonette in St John's Wood High Street, keeping this as their London base. They would later share this with Britten's publisher Erwin Stein, his wife Sophie and daughter Marion. In December 1943, Britten returned to his pre-war composition retreat, the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk, joining his sister Beth and her family (husband Kit Welford and children Sebastian and Sally). There, despite the sound of military aircraft (the ‘bloody, bloody’ aeroplanes – see Letter 48) he was able to complete Peter Grimes.

  • IV - ‘You are potentially the greatest singer alive’: Late 1949 to January 1954: Letters 126–88

  • from THE LETTERS
  • Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer
  • Book:
    My Beloved Man
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 149-202

  • Summary

    The early 1950s found Pears and Britten both flourishing with success, bolstered by an increase in commissions for new works from Britten and demand for Pears as a soloist, both in the UK and abroad. In addition to the hard work of composing and performing, they continued to oversee the English Opera Group, which experienced numerous financial and administrative difficulties, and to develop and expand the Aldeburgh Festival in keeping with their own standards and philosophical outlook. However, there came expectations of even greater achievement from audiences, critics, fellow musicians and, most significantly, from themselves.

    By this time, Pears was in demand as both a concert artist and on the operatic stage, but with increasing pressures to perform he began to suffer from throat problems. Not surprisingly, he felt insecure about being unable to sing at his best before an audience. Thus, Britten's letters during this period are filled with reassurance; for example, after listening to a broadcast of Bach's St Matthew Passion, he writes ‘The voice sounds so full & so rich, & with so much variety, & this glorious musical phrasing […] There can never have been an Evangelist like you – it's wonderful to be born in your lifetime to hear you do it’ (Letter 158). With the weight of such high standards, it is no wonder that both men became so critical of their individual abilities and relied upon their appraisal of one another to ease their doubts. Britten acknowledges this in a letter of March 1951: ‘It was lovely to play [Billy Budd] to you, & you gave me back my confidence which had been slowly ebbing away. In a work of this size & tension that is one of one's greatest problems. I believe that is yours too – if one aims high (& you achieve your aims so often) one is so desparately ashamed when one knows one is missing them’ (Letter 157).

    In truth, both men were working themselves to the point of exhaustion. Britten's physical ailments, coupled with the time constraints from working on two complex and significant operas – Billy Budd for the 1951 Festival of Britain and Gloriana, composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 – resulted in his being unable to give recitals with Pears as frequently as in the past.

  • Le physique du rôle

  • Michael Hampe
  • Translated by Chris Walton
  • Book:
    The Crafty Art of Opera
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016, pp 47-50

  • Summary

    Having the right body for a role is vitally important, as is knowing how to move it. This is called: ‘le physique du rôle’. I'm almost tempted to regard this as the most important aspect, even more important than the voice. Because the body was the first and earliest instrument of expression. When casting a role, both aspects should be treated at least equally, also with regard to the other roles involved. It's not just the voices that have to fit together, it's their bodies too. Only under this condition can opera attain fulfilment. When this is not the case, hopes of success are stymied from the outset. However beautiful the singing, and however honest the efforts of everyone involved – not least the costume designer – one will always come up against the original defect. And one will always end up dissatisfied. Many opera houses pay far too little attention to this aspect when casting roles. It's not just a big mistake: it's one of the main reasons for the widespread dissatisfaction with opera.

    Different languages also produce different attitudes and patterns of movement. One can observe it when children play. Without the slightest knowledge of languages, they use gibberish and mimicry to ape a gangling, gum-chewing American, a wildly gesticulating Italian, a rigid German or a blasé Frenchman. And in opera, too, the cast should be chosen in such a way that the language employed emerges idiomatically and credibly from the physical behaviour and social status of the character.

    At this point it can be profitable to consider the world of cartoons. Mickey Mouse and Co. often apply the principles of opera far more consistently than opera does itself. Cartoons offer a perfect transformation of music into physical expression. Of course, cartoon characters can be drawn by hand or in the computer according to the needs of the music. Or, conversely, one can compose the music according to the cartoon characters. This is easier than embarking upon a tiresome search for a real living person able to create movement and music in a single action. And yet opera can learn a lot from cartoons. If roles have been cast with the right vocal and physical characters, the mechanical effect of cartoons can even be recreated on stage. The following episode can prove it.

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