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The Murdered Self: John Ireland and English Song 1903–13
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
‘An obsessive investigation of desire… a perpetual elegy on the death of possibility’ was a judgement made of Thomas Hardy's life and art, but it is no less exact a description of John Ireland's conscious or unconscious creative impulsions. Obsession and elegy may be traced in Ireland's vocal music from the early settings published as Songs of a Wayfarer in 1912 through the ‘out-of-door’ songs such as When lights go rolling round the sky (1911) and the first Hardy cycle (1925) to the bleak introversion of the second Housman cycle (1926–7), no less than in the fastidious selection of poets whose ‘uncoloured truth[s]’ were most clearly able to express them.
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References
1 And those of Benjamin Britten, a lineal descent as yet largely unremarked. Richardson, James, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity (University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 15 Google Scholar.
2 Memory (before 1905), When daffodils begin to peer, English May (c. 1905), I was not sorrowful (1903), I will walk on the earth (1911, all dates of writing unless otherwise stated).
3 Less inhibited than eg. Warlock's Mr Belloc'sfancy (1922/30) but not immune to Hardy's whistling-in-the-dark mendacity, a ‘roistering-pastoral’ attitude whose influence in THS is malign (for song/set sigla, see Table I).
4 WW; see Docherty, B., ‘English Song and the German Lied’, Tempo 161/162 (06 1987), pp.82–3Google Scholar.
5 Banficld, Stephen, Sensibility and English Song: Critical of The Early Twentieth Century (CUP, 1985), p. 175 Google Scholar. Britten showed comparable discernment, as did Gerald Finzi, although with a more circumscribed choice of poets.
6 Flower, D., The Poetical Works of Ernest Dowson (Cassell, 1934, quotations from the 3rd edn, 1967Google Scholar).
7 Flower, , op.cit., p. 20 Google Scholar.
8 Table II analyses an extract from Period (2) in detail.
9 Britten, 1937, unpublished.
10 The final setting in Britten's, Les Illuminations (1939 Google Scholar). Brontë's, Emily Love andfriendship (ThS(1926 Google Scholar)) has similar importance.
11 At present only adduced; Lewis Foreman's forthcoming biography will be very welcome since Searle, Muriel (John Ireland: The Man and His Music, Midas Books, 1979 Google Scholar) tends to uncritical admiration, Banfield (op.cir.) to critical prurience. Longmire (Notes 27, 45, 52) is very perceptive, but has written only a sketch of the life.
12 Cf. the succession Rimbaud, Donne – Hardy, Owen – Soutar, Eliot – in Britten's vocal oeuvre.
13 Blind, The cost (poems published in 1915); The soldier. Blow out, you bugles (poems published in 1914).
14 Seven of the Mother and Child poems were published in 1872; ‘Blind from my birth’ (Ireland's The blind boy) was added to the Sing-Song collection some time before the poet's death in 1894.
15 The adoration, The rat, Rest (poems written in 1899,1896,1899).
16 The LC settings are drawn from A Shropshire Lad (1896), those of WW from Last Poems (1922). The trellis was published in 1918.
17 The first setting in Period (2(a)); the poem is from Blake's Songs (n.d.). The fifth setting from Period (1), of E.A. Poe's Annabel Lee, remains unpublished.
18 Expressing a distaste for the public's preference for ‘affliction… hell itself [turned to] prettiness’ by the poet ( Marsh, E., Memoir, Rupert Brooke: The Collected Poems, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918, p.lxix)Google Scholar.
19 Banfield, , op.cit., p.162 Google Scholar.
20 Marsh, , op.cit., apropos of Brooke's attitude to writing poetry (p.xli)Google Scholar. Memory is a study for songs such as Youth's spring-tribute, If there were dreams to sell (Period (2)), and FSTH in Period (3). When daffodils begin topeer is a first attempt at the big ballad-parables such as When lights go rolling round the sky. Sea fever. Great things. English May leads to THS and LC, I was not sorrowful to Penumbra, Spleen and WW.
21 ‘Song’, from Blake's, William Poetical Sketches (1783)Google Scholar.
22 Only I was not sorrowful approaches the intensity of Somervells White in the moon or There pass the careless people, or the philosophical depths of William's, Vaughan Songs of Travel (published 1905–12; 1960 Google Scholar); see Docherty, , ‘English Song and the German Lied’, p.76 Google Scholar.
23 The syntactical elements in a poem which a composer may override or observe ( Docherty, B., ‘Sentence into Cadence: the Word-setting of Britten and Tippett’, Tempo 166 (09 1988) pp.3.9)Google Scholar.
24 Frank Bridge and Britten by contrast created ‘syllogistic’ structures that subvert the prosody but are purely musical analogues of the poem's emotions (cf. Bridge's, Go not, happy day (1916) and ‘Sentence into Cadence’, pp.9–11 Google Scholar);
25 In prosody, two consecutive equally-stressed syllables; in music often approximated by double crotchets, cf. late bird, black heads ( Britten, , At day-close in November, Winter Words, 1953)Google Scholar; see Dochcrty, B., ‘Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text’, Contemporary Music Review, vol.5 (1989) p.43 Google Scholar; and ‘Sentence into Cadence’, Ex.I, pp.4–5.
26 Come, stream; notes, song; wind, dream;floats, (a)long; stream, go.
27 Longmire, John, Preface and Notes, Galliard vocal score of LC (1976) p.ii Google Scholar; cf. Britten, The choirmaster's burial (Winter Words). Ireland's ‘spondees’ (red blood, we lie, etc.) are moral realities still within reach, or already out of it.
21 Cf. the resonance of ‘rain’/‘pail’ in the drop on blood/reigns and blood/pale; the lark's downward glissade (chants); the recapitulation of the opening With heigh! in stanzas 1–3. The setting conflates 3 songs from A Winter's Tale, Act iv, scene iii, omitting the second stanza of But shall I go mourn.
29 The line to Gustav von Aschcnbach is more direct than one might at first suppose.
30 English May is from ‘Change and Fate’, the second section of Rossetti's, D. G. The House of Life sonnet sequence (written 1847–1981)Google Scholar; I was not sorrowful (Dowson's, ‘Spleen’) is from Verses (1896 Google Scholar).
31 Oscar Wilde, defining a credo as explicit in Rossetti's poetry as in Ireland's and Britten's compositional mores ( Stevenson, L., The Pre-Raphaelite Poets, University of North Carolina Press, 1972. P.54)Google Scholar.
32 Stevenson, , op.cit., p.56 Google Scholar.
33 May/Should be; facel Abroad; seel The garland, for example.
34 Op.cit., p. 162.
35 Its weakness underscored by the reiterated quaver figure (and her song is weak in (shade); faint a (lay)), and the barely audible failing pulse.
36 Flower, , op.cit., p.16 Google Scholar.
37 Did Ireland's settings lead Britten to Verlaine (1928) and Rimbaud (1939)?
38 Spleen (M3) (‘After Paul Verlaine, III”), If we must part (‘A Valediction’), composed in 1929 but published only in 1976.
38 Feet that are units of emotion and time, creating an effect by contrived stress patterns and musical alliteration; in the example, and below, m = minim, c = crotchet, q = quaver, sq = semiquaver.
40 See Docherty, , ‘Syllogism and symbol’, p.44 Google Scholar.
41 Only heart in the entire vocal line has a note-value longer than c, though points of longer-breathed emotion are created by the cqc(q) (white and strange, watched it change), sqsqc(q) (I desired) and cqc(c) (evening came, (in)clined to weep) feet.
42 Compounded by the implacable 6/8 4sq + q of rain on glass in the accompaniment, pointing the way to Britten's rhythmic/harmonic analogues for Donne's conceits, and making the places where the veil is lifted (tired, eyes, hunger, heart) more terrible.
43 Op.cit., p.27; by 1899, when Decorations was published, ‘winter’ able accent on home and duty.
44 From The Sailing of the Long-Ships and Other Poems (1902)
45 Longmire, (John Ireland, Portrait of a Friend, Baker, John, 1969, p. 5)Google Scholar notes the polarized fastidiousness and conviviality in Ireland's nature, apparent both in the poets he set and the settings he made from them.
46 Whose two notes echo each other.
47 Tippett's practice when acting as ‘composer-poet’ ( Dochcrty, ‘Syllogism and symbol’, p.52 Google Scholar).
48 Cf. Auf der Bruck (D.853) or Abschied (Schwanengesang, D.957). What could be done with such a reveille can, however, be seen from Gurney's setting of Housman's ‘Wake: the silver dusk returning’ (The Western Ptayland, 1926, but with many of its songs composed before 1908).
49 Op.cit., p. 162.
50 From Songs (n.d.).
51 From Ludlow Town (1920). Finzi's, Budmouth Dears (A Young Man's Exhortation, 1933 Google Scholar) and Britten's, The Children and Sir Nameless (1953 Google Scholar, unpublished) arc comparable; Banfield, (op.cit., p. 162 Google Scholar) invokes Sullivan's and Stanford's shades.
52 Longmire, , Preface and Notes, p.v Google Scholar, thinks this is subjective joy ‘“his” Molly’; I hear an objective ‘to each [but not all]’ of a man who has witnessed but not shared (cf. and a woman's care, Britten, Peter Crimes, Act ii, scene ii).
53 From Stevenson, R.L., A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)Google Scholar.
54 Stevenson's verses, like those of the 1918 Coleridge settings, are from Ireland's own childhood decades (poems written 1880–4); MC does not escape the retrospective shadow although Youth's spring-tribute (written 1870, see below) contrives to do so.
55 A Child's Garden of Verses (Penguin, ed, 1952) p. 14 Google Scholar.
56 Perhaps hinting at the poet's invalid childhood but contriving to sound merely petulant; the one genuine touch is the musical elision over Jeet/Still going, which clearly depicts the wakeful hours endured while hidden life still stirs outside.
57 Brooke's term for the school of poets led by Frances Corntord ( Marsh, , op.cit., p.lvii Google Scholar).
58 Youth's spring-tribute ( Sonnet, XIV, A House of Life, 1870 Google Scholar) and Penumbra (c. 1860), both D.G. Rossetti; Spleen( Dowson, , a translation ofa Verlaine poem in Romances sans Paroles (1874 Google Scholar) using the French metre, published in Decorations (1899)).
59 [S]weet bank/sweet and dear, (de)bateab/e/bor(dersy, approximate rhymes such as spray/(casta)way and imagery that finds pentameters too strait a medium (dear/lay; biss/Creep, etc.) and resorts to assonantial anapaests (of the year, still is clear, etc.) to cram the sentiment into the form.
60 As in Bed in summer, arising from the text's physical not emotional resonance; cf. Britten's images of ‘aural physicality’ – the sun's chariot lugged down the hill in Cotton's, Pastoral (Serenade, 1943)Google Scholar and the apprentice's fall (The other slipped, Peter Grimes, Act iii, scene ii) being only two examples.
61 A mendacity retrospectively confirmed in Penumbra and Spleen (see below).
62 Ireland's setting omits the fourth stanza.
63 The mm on warm lips protests so much we may conjecture that the reality (confirmed by the unvarnished bleakness of cold (hearts)) is that they were, and remained, unkissed.
64 The qqqc figure (I did not look, upon her eyes, etc.) falls out of use in the fourth stanza, when the heart has gone beyond half-knowledge.
65 In Ireland's stanza 5 cry = mq, the tears almost wept dry; All in Ireland's stanza 4 has the resonance of Allen eine gute Nadu (Schubert, Die schöne Müllerin, 13.79s).
66 The reappearance of the qsqq figure (nightfrom stars, listening, etc.) at register is an echo of former control.
67 The parlando in stanza 4 prefigures Britten's, in Owen Wingrave (1970 Google Scholar). Cf. also Dal vostr' arbittio (Michaehngelo Sonnets), Be so good as to leave me! (Billy Budd, A et ii, scene i), and only we two left alive (Death in Venice, Act ii, scene 16).
68 sb = scmibreve.
69 Cf. His folly has not fellow (Somcrvcll, There pass the careless people, see note 22); death's unquenchable wisdom ( Tippctt, , The Heart's Assurance, 1951 Google Scholar), for example.
70 Cf. Dochcrty, , ‘Sentence into Cadence’, E::.2, p.6 Google Scholar. Cf. also Pears's comment on the Donne settings' unrelaxed tension (Mitchell, D. and Keller, H. (eds), Benjamin Britten: a commentary on his worksfrom a group of specialists, Rockliff, 1952, p.70)Google Scholar.
71 Op.cit., p. 169.
72 From Salt-Water Ballads (1902).
73 The ‘domestic-rural’ poets anthologized by Marsh before 1914.
74 Mascfield felt that Ireland's lento pesante diminished the restless urgency of the poem ( Banfield, , op.cit., p.161 Google Scholar).
75 Heightened by the cycles of fifths, perhaps derived from Stanford's 1904 setting of Newbolt's ‘Drake's Drum’ (Songs of the Sea).
76 Vigils, 7 (1934); Sassoon was born in 1886. (I am currently exploring the striking parallels in Sassoon's and Britten's vision of their adolescence, when both found it necessary that their fathers’ values should be wronged and slain.)
77 There was no alteration in life's pattern (such as that which occurred between On this Island, 1937, and Les Illuminations, 1939. in Britten's vocal writing) to produce a new emotional dimension in ‘sensibility-exprcssed-as-song’.
78 Particulary since Butterworth's important vocal music was the product of only six years (1908–14) and Vaughan Williams and Bridge turned increasingly to choral and orchestral/chamber music after 1918. A direct (and in Britten's view, undigested) Ireland influence appears in A song of enchantment (1929), Vigil (1930, which also has archetypal Bridge mannerisms), and Autumn 91931), the first, fourth and second songs of the Tit for Tat set (revised 1969). Autumn's accompaniment owes a conspicuous debt to On the way to Kew, from Buttcrworth's, cycle - Love Blows as the Wind Blows (1911–1912 Google Scholar) for voice and string quartet, the forces for which Autumn was originally written.