War and Peace
Paul McGann (reader)
Joanna David (reader)
(photographer Sven Arnstein)
Producer's note
Words and Music: War and Peace
The eternal struggle between conflict and concord is the theme of tonight's sequence intertwining poetry by William Blake, Emily Dickinson, George Herbert, John Milton, Wilfred Owen, Edith Sitwell and Walt Whitman with music by Bartok, William Lawes, Monteverdi, Purcell and Bach. The readers are Joanna David and Paul McGann.
William Blake's starkly terse poem The Poison Tree sets the scene, describing, with Biblical overtones, how human hatred and animosity lead to war. Blake and Beethoven both died in 1827, and the two men also shared a defiant, revolutionary spirit, hints of which can be heard, contained within the elegant framework of a dance, in the Menuetto from Beethoven's Piano Trio Op.1 No.3.
Emily Dickinson's poem It feels a shame to be alive describes with prophetic vision the cost of human life in terms of a stack of dollars. Dickinson lived through the American Civil War and, just as Blake and Beethoven were united in their death, she died in the same year that Franz Liszt passed away, 1886. The American poet and the Hungarian pianist-composer were in many respects poles apart: Dickinson was reclusive, she never travelled, never married and enjoyed no fame in her lifetime, while Liszt was a cosmopolitan romantic, a dazzling pianist and celebrated performer, though he became devoutly religious in his late years. It was the ardent young man, whilst travelling with his lover Marie d'Agoult in Italy, who set Petrarch's sonnet 'Pace non trovo', a poem that exploits the poetic antitheses of war and peace: "I find no peace, nor do I wish for war, I fear and hope and burn and am full of ice". Later in the sequence, we'll hear Monteverdi's setting of another poem from Petrarch's Canzonieri which also plays on the contrasts (and, indeed, similarities) of love, war and peace - Hor ch'il ciel e la terra.
The poetry produced by those who lived, fought and, indeed, died during the Great War is often strikingly at odds with much of the music of the period. So, while in 1918 Charlotte Mew poignantly reflects on the waste of young life in The Cenotaph, popular songs like 'O what a lovely War' cheer the troops and rouse jingoistic sentiments. Similarly, as Wilfred Owen describes with chilling vividness the horrific scenes of men dying from exposure on the Front, the contemporary ballad 'In Summertime on Breedon' (from Housman's famous collection A Shropshire Lad) suggests the nostalgic longing of those same lads for their homeland and for the simple pleasure of peacetime.
The wistful intimacy of Marin Marais's Chaconne and its hypnotic rhythm over a repeated ground bass serve to pre-echo the mesmeric rhythm of Edith Sitwell's celebrated poem 'Still falls the rain' which describes the bombing of London during the Blitz in 1940. Sitwell hauntingly compares the rhythm of life's heart-beat with the hammer-beat of death:
"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".
A year earlier, 1939, Bela Bartok wrote his 6th String Quartet, at once a personal lament on the death of his mother and an elegy for the loss of peace in Europe. The onset of war is suggested in the march rhythms of the 'Marcia' which turn into a distorted, grotesque 'Burletta' in the following movement, included in this sequence.
Ezra Pound's elliptical poem 'An image of Lethe' uses a highly distilled language to describe Hell's river Lethe, the Elysian fields and an image of Actaeon, the huntsman who stumbled across the beautiful Artemis bathing naked in the woods. She transformed him into a mute stag and he met a horrific end, ripped to pieces by his own dogs. Pound creates a sense of time suspended, an idyllic moment before the violence to come. Throughout his writing, he constantly draws inspiration from the Italian trecento poets, above all Dante but also Petrarch, and I have followed this verse from the Cantos with Monteverdi's setting of Petrarch's Hor che'l ciel from the Madrigals of Love and War. As the poet describes how the intensity of his love has brought him to a state of war, the stillness of the opening music is brilliantly offset with the stile agitato ('agitated style') that follows.
"Now that heaven and the earth and the wind are silent / And sleep reins in the beasts and the birds / Night drives her starry chariot around / And in its bed the sea lies without a wave / I am awake, I think, I burn, I weep; and she who destroys me / Is always before me, to my sweet pain."
Just as George Herbert finds peace through his faith in the final reading of the sequence, in a similar way death and union with God represented the ultimate peace for two of the composers whose music we hear - Purcell, whose serene 'Evening Hymn' takes the theme of night as a metaphor for death, and Bach, whose Cantata Vergnugte Ruh, Beliebte Seelenlust ("Contented rest, beloved soul's desire") is a divinely sublime acceptance of death. Here, beyond 'repugnant life' lies the only true peace. Kate Bolton
Details of Readings and Music
22:45:00
CHRISTOPHER TYE
Crye
Concordia
Metronome METCD 1020, track 3
22:46:38
WILLIAM BLAKE
A Poison Tree
Paul McGann (reader)
22:47:20
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Trio in C minor Op.1 No.3: Menuetto
Beaux Arts Trio
Philips 438 948-2, CD 1, track 7
22:51:00
EMILY DICKINSON
It feels a shame to be alive
Joanna David (reader)
22:52:15
FRANZ LISZT
Sonetto 47 del Petrarca ('Pace non trovo')
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon 435 591-2, track 11
22:58:30
JOHN MILTON
From Paradise Lost Book 1: 'What though the field be lost'
Paul McGann (reader)
22:59:48
WILLIAM LAWES
Fantasy from Consort Set in C minor
Concordia
Metronome METCD 1020, track 12
23:03:55
J.P. LONG, MAURICE SCOTT
Oh, it's a lovely War!
The Jolly Old Fellows with unnamed band
Pearl Gemm CD9355, track 6
23:04:37
WILFRED OWEN
Exposure
Paul McGann (reader)
23:07:50
GRAHAM PEEL, A.E. HOUSMAN
In Summertime on Bredon
Gervase Elwes (tenor), F.B. Kiddle (piano)
Rec. 1916, Columbia 1101
23:10:30
CHARLOTTE MEW
The Cenotaph
Joanna David (reader)
23:12:31
PURCELL
Evening Hymn
Gerard Lesne (alto)
Il Seminario Musicale
23:16:00
WALT WHITMAN
Bivouac on a Mountain Side
Paul McGann (reader)
23:16:40
GUSTAV MAHLER
Symphony No.5: Adagietto
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein (conductor)
Sony Classical GBS 10985, CD 2, track 13
23:28:00
EMILY DICKINSON
After a hundred years
Joanna David (reader)
23:28:32
MARIN MARAIS
Chaconne from Suite in G major, 5th book of Viol Pieces
Paolo Pandolfo (viol)
Glossa GCD 920406, track 20
23:33:35
EDITH SITWELL
Still Falls the Rain. The raids, 1940. Night and Dawn
Joanna David (reader)
23:35:53
BELA BARTOK
String Quartet no.6: Mesto-Burletta
Takacs Quartet
Hungaroton HCD 12502/04-2, CD 3, track 8
23:42:47
EZRA POUND
An image of Lethe
Paul McGann (reader)
23:43:35
CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI
Hor che'l ciel e la terra
Concerto Vocale, Rene Jacobs
Harmonia Mundi HMC 901736-37, CD 1, track 2
23:51:00
GEORGE HERBERT
Peace
Joanna David (reader)
23:53:00
J.S. BACH
Cantata 170: Vergnugte Ruh, Beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170
Andreas Scholl, Orrchestra of Collegium Vocale, Philippe Herreweghe
Harmonia Mundi HMC 901644, track 1
