by Daniel Hathaway
The celebrated British tenor Ian Bostridge will bring the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 65th subscription series to a conclusion on Tuesday, April 21 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, when he joins pianist Wenwen Du in a program entitled “Music of the Great War.”
Despite its title, Bostridge’s musical agenda moves well beyond a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. That conflict was called “the war to end all wars,” but we know now that it was nothing of the sort. While Tuesday evening’s program includes songs by two composers who perished early in The Great War — Rudi Stephan of Germany (who died on the Ukrainian Front in 1915) and George Butterworth of England (who was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916) — Bostridge will also visit poetry set to music by Gustav Mahler, Kurt Weill and Benjamin Britten that deals with war and its ravages in several generations.
To set the stage, here is an excerpt by Wilfred Owen, the most prominent poet of The Great War. Together with Siegfried Sassoon, he was among the first writers to buck the wave of patriotism and begin to tell the truth about the horrors of armed conflict. Owens’ “Parable of the Old Man and the Young” uses the Hebrew scriptural story of Abraham and Isaac to drive his point home:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Owen died in action in France exactly a week before the Armistice was signed in 1918. His poetry provided ample material for Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, commissioned for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962 (the old cathedral was bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1940). For that work, Britten interleaved Owen’s poetry with the Latin texts of the Requiem Mass to powerful effect, appropriately incorporating Owen’s “Parable” into the “Offertorium.” This musical excerpt features Ian Bostridge and Simon Keenlyside with Gianandrea Noseda and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Bostridge will open his recital on Tuesday with three songs by Gustav Mahler written between 1898 and 1900. Revelge, Der Tambourg’sell and Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen predate the Great War but anticipate its horrors. All three texts are drawn from Youth’s Magic Horn (Das Knaben Wunderhorn), a book that Goethe said should be found in every German household. Here are the first few stanzas of Revelge (“Revenge”) and an excerpt from a recording featuring Thomas Quasthoff with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic.
Between three and four of a morning,
we soldiers have to march
up and down the alleyway;
tralalee, tralalay, tralala,
my love looks at me from her window.
‘O comrade, I’ve been shot,
the bullet’s wounded me badly,
carry me back to the camp,
tralalee, tralalay, tralala,
it isn’t far from here.’
‘O comrade, I cannot carry you,
the enemy have routed us,
may dear God help you;
tralalee, tralalay, tralala,
I must march on to meet my death.’
‘Ah, comrades, you pass me by,
as though I were done for,
tralalee, tralalay, tralala,
you march too close to where I lie.’
‘I must now start to beat my drum,
tralalee, tralalay, tralala,
or else I’ll be lost forever,
tralalee, tralalay, tralala,
my comrades strewn so thick
lie like mown grass on the ground.
In the rest of the song, a gruesome army of skeletons arises to defeat the enemy and finish off the battle.
Six songs by Rudi Stephan gathered under the title, ““Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied” set texts by Gertrud Emily von Schlieben that are reminiscent of the ripe, sensual poetry of The Song of Solomon. The fourth, In Nachtbars Garten, is particularly striking for the ambiguous harmonies of its accompaniment, as well as for its Joseph von Eichendorff-like stinger in the final line. Here is a translation and a performance by tenor Robin Tritschler and pianist Malcolm Martineau.
In the neighbour’s garden the linden blossom gives forth its sultry fragrance,
Yet beneath its heavy branches is a cool dusky seclusion.
In the neighbour’s garden the linden branches cast a deep shade
as if a sweet secret slept hidden in its leaves.
In the neighbour’s garden the tops of the linden trees are sighing and stirring
as if one heart were beating in time with another to the cadence of the storm.
Today I saw two lovers entwined under the linden tree.
Why then do my eyes overflow in burning pain?
George Butterworth left very little music behind when he was slain in the Great War, but his most enduring — and most endearing — songs are his settings of A.E. Housman’s 1896 poetry from A Shropshire Lad. Housman’s verse was extremely popular both with the public and with composers. Ralph Vaughan Williams set “Is My Team Ploughing?” for tenor, string quartet and piano as part of a suite entitled On Wenlock Edge. Like so many of Housman’s poems, the theme is the transience of youth, made more poignant by death in war. Here is a recording of that song by Ian Bostridge in a version for full orchestra. Bernard Haitink conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
“Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”
Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.
“Is football playing
Along the river-shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?”
Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.
“Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?”
Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.
“Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?”
Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.
It’s affecting, but I think even more so in the much simpler setting by George Butterworth that Ian Bostridge will perform on Tuesday evening. Here’s how Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten performed the last of the six songs in A Shropshire Lad.
The German-American composer Kurt Weill wrote Four Walt Whitman Songs in 1942 and 1947. They take us back another fifty years before the Great War to the American Civil War — at the very moment when we’re celebrating the end of that devastating conflict between North and South. It was a war that impacted more than one generation of soldiers, as the “Dirge for Two Veterans” points out. Here is a performance by Simon Keenleyside with pianist Simon Martineau.
The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.
Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.
I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they are flooding,
As with voices and with tears.
I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.
For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)
And nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.
O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
Finally, we come back full circle to Benjamin Britten — who was a child during World War I and became an ardent pacifist well before World War II broke out. His 1969 settings of verses by the Scottish poet William Soutar take note of the effects of war on children. Britten was devoted to children, which makes these songs are especially gripping. On Tuesday, Ian Bostridge and Wenwen Du will perform the four English language poems from Who Are These Children? — the other songs in the set are in Scots dialect. Here is the performance of “Nightmare” that Bostridge recorded with pianist Antonio Pappano. Its references are eerily reminiscent of Wilfred Owen’s “Parable.”
The tree stood flowering in a dream:
Beside the tree a dark shape bowed:
As lightning glittered the axe-gleam
Across the wound in the broken wood,
The tree cried out with human cries:
From its deepening hurt the blood ran:
The branches flowered with children’s eyes
And the dark murderer was a man.
There came a fear which sighed aloud;
And with its fear the dream-world woke:
Yet in the day the tree still stood
Bleeding beneath the axe-man’s stroke.
Daniel Hathaway will give the pre-concert lecture at 6:30 on Tuesday evening.
Translations courtesy of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com April 20, 2015.
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