Elgar Commission of the Three Choirs Festival, Worcester, 1999 For information on the score and parts of this work (including chorus parts with orchestral reduction for piano), please visit the Contact page of this website.
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A note provided by the composer for the programme of the Three Choirs Festival at Worcester, 1999, where the
work was first performed. This
work was conceived many years ago as a Requiem alternating poetic texts
with those of the Mass. Much changed in the making, A
Song on the End of the World now takes from liturgical sources only
the Agnus Dei and Recordare, Jesu Pie. Our
pre-Millennial media, however, present us daily with inextricably linked
images of communal mourning and the incitement to ethnic vengeance
(drowning the pleas for peace of those who have not so suffered).
Inasmuch as A Song on the End of the World both embodies these and presumes by
its choice of texts to articulate a renewed protest against the horrors
of our age, it remains a Requiem of sorts. As such it cannot avoid
superficial and unenviable comparison with the War
Requiem by Benjamin Britten. Technical features and attainments
aside, the differences of intent between these two works may therefore
serve to focus a helpful introduction to the newer one. Britten
equalled his chosen poet in elevating the echoes of particular time and
place to a condition of universal protest ('My subject is ...the pity of
War', wrote Wilfred Owen). Nonetheless the specific type of conflict
evoked differed from that of the World War following (when a less
visible enemy awakened less 'pity' and, despite Lewis, Douglas, Keyes,
less poetry). It has remained largely remote also from late twentieth
century Western experience until the horrors of the nineties; but, with
the disintegration of a Communist superpower and the jostling for
identity of a host of would-be nations, we can now see things turning
full circle: a nuclear warhead launched from the other end of the earth
might now travel the skies above parochial atrocities enacted among the
ruins of small provincial 'communities' slipping from prosperity back
into a primitive dark age. In Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, the whites of the
enemy's eyes are once more visible, the participants again men who in
another life gossiped and played football together, as on Christmas Day
in the trenches. As with Owen, 'the poetry is in the pity', and again
flowering from the pens of those dumbfounded by the sanctity and madness
of human life, such as the Bosnian Serb poet Goran Simić. Our television screens bring such madness to us,
showing also the women and children fleeing from razed villages or
picked from collapsed buildings as they did not and were not in 1914-18.
Improbably, the end of our century is perhaps best captured by familiar
words of Dickens in quite another context: '...it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, ...it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before
us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the
other way'. These
necessarily sombre reflections show that Britten's shadow is not to be
so easily escaped. But Britten's War Requiem achieves its terrible spell
by juxtaposition: the theatrical ritual of the established church is
disembodied, drowned out, powerless to intervene redemptively amid the
invincible reality of earthly carnage. Therein lies its (literally)
crucial difference from A Song on
the End of the World, which is entirely about the 'everything ./
nothing before us' expressed by Dickens. If we accept Shostakovich's
moral imperative to 'look truth right in the eyes', then those eyes
-gazing again out of our televisions -demand that the Christian seek the
suffering Christ where he may be found. The present work attempts
accordingly, as others have done, to discover a suffering God both
without and within his creation, and hence also a Christ perpetually
crucified in the atrocities, privations and terrors of each succeeding
age. To this extent Christ is also Everyman, as he always was. Listeners
may find it helpful not to attribute inflexible identity to the vocal
soloists and chorus: the latter offers a disembodied commentary which -
much like its Ancient Greek counterpart - conveys an impotent remoteness
from what it describes, while the former are now the protagonists and
victims of war, now the infant Christ and his mother, now those same
figures brought to Golgotha (where by poetic licence their verbal roles
undergo ironic reversal). Reference
has been made above to the killing of children in Kosovo and elsewhere.
Readers will perhaps forgive the intrusion of a personal note: the death
in 1995
of my mother and birth months later of my son heightened the sense that
we go whence we came, and that the newborn are our clearest messengers
of Yeats' 'uncontrollable mystery'. Because the nadir of physical
horror attending child murder represents also an ultimate brutalised
deafness to any such mystery, Christ the babe in arms is here more than
ever indivisible from his predestined later self: the vision of Golgotha
is born at Bethlehem and chillingly prophesied from the manger. These
last remarks explain much of what remains to be said about A Song on the End of the World. The metaphor of the 'timebomb'
suggested itself, its ticking potentially embodying both a narrative
'treadmill' of events bearing their hostage along his eternal road from
Bethlehem to Golgotha, on the one hand, and our omnipresent image of the
modern-day terrorist, on the other. This is insinuated musically by a
noticeable recurrence throughout the work of grouped 'pizzicato'
(plucked) string sounds, of which further mention follows. The music
falls into seven movements (a number not without symbolic relevance to
the Crucifixion), about which the following comments may prove helpful: [I]The
opening bars present a rising and falling motif (subconsciously stolen
from the Third Symphony of Sir Arnold Bax but with very different ends
in mind). This pattern generates a great deal of what follows. Another
rising phrase occurs whose later significance will be its attachment to
the final words of the extraordinary poem by Czesław Miłosz (movement three; q.v.). A central baritone solo
section is announced by the first incidence of the ticking bomb ['The
deer runs on...']. This is framed by hushed chorus passages. The music
sinks back into the silence whence it arose. [ii]
A tortuous descending motif introduces the movement and is a recurrent
presence throughout. For the most part the orchestral ensemble is scaled
down (in any case trumpets have yet to appear in the work) and extensive
use is made of the harp. The mediaeval text is collated from more than
one poem. The music seeks to respond to the co-existence of maternal
devotion, progressive alarm and, inexorably, horror as implacable adult
words of prophesy begin to tumble supernaturally from the lips of this
very babe and suckling. (Again, the 'ticking' strings.) The chorus
enters with a subtext of its own. These words of William Blake were
chosen for their curious 'echoes' both of the Psalmist (pressed into
service elsewhere) and of the Mervyn Peake text in movement six ['The
cities are burned and consumed from the earth' becoming later a vision
inspired by the horrors of the Blitz]. Crucial also is the
acknowledgement of the seeds of self-destruction present in all
humanity. Mary's refrain to the numbly repeated words 'great heaviness'
meanwhile becomes a type of soliloquy, a lament turned inward and
seemingly oblivious of its surroundings. This movement too ends in
near-silence. [iii]
This poem is central to the conception of the work and lends its own
title to it, a fact of which grateful acknowledgement is made elsewhere.
This was the first part of the music to be written and orchestrated.
Czesław Miłosz was born in 1911. He was active
'underground' in Warsaw during the horrors of the early nineteen-forties
and wrote this poem there in 1944. Settling eventually in the USA, he
collaborated with a small group of academics in translating his past
work into English. The present poem speaks entirely for itself, and is
set for soprano solo and a reduced orchestra dominated by woodwind. The
music seeks to mirror the text's kaleidoscopically somnolent, Bank
Holiday/ late afternoon ambience, at the same time allowing chill
shadows to play transiently upon its surface. Only at the end is a sense
of menace explicit, as arguably befits the strange meeting in Miłosz of the apocalyptic and the whimsical. [iv]
The fourth movement arises from the ashes of its predecessor without a
break. The motif from
the opening of the work now generates a sullen Allegro before the chorus
enters (its opening words an alarming parody of Christian faith in the
resurrection). If the work is a Requiem this movement may be seen as an
alternative Dies Irae. The
original German texts actually predate the Great War and their air of
acute foreboding is authentic, just as the neurasthenic poetic tone is
true to its Expressionist epoch. This movement draws also upon the
psalms, the selected lines from which teach that, in war, little
changes. Their words are plaintively sung at intervals by the three solo
voices. Isaac Rosenberg's harrowing lines might seem to bring back the
trenches after all, but were in fact chosen for seeming entirely
non-specific to time and place. The overall effect of this movement is
of isolated tableaux of war (as if caught in the zoom-lens of
present-day reportage) where the tone becomes more personal than
collective. Around these move in fitful waves the sound and fury of some
timeless, dehumanised military machine. The march-like symphonic manner
of Mahler came to mind at such points, and there are a couple of very
brief but deliberate near-quotations in the course of the work. [v]
The fifth movement, principally for soprano solo, discovers the Christ
figure far advanced on his journey from Bethlehem to Calvary. Gethsemani
[sic] is the name of the Trappist monastery in the United States where
Thomas Merton was a brother for twenty-eight years, and this poem had
for him more than one shade of meaning. It owes its partial presence
here to its evocation of a spectral, hypnotic apparition moving through
the garden before dawn, embracing all the despair of human suffering.
This poem was of equal importance in another composition, the Passion
Symphony Christus for
organ (1986-90), where the same musical starting point was used as a
notional wordless 'setting' of the repeated word 'slowly'. Here the word
actually is thus set. Reduced forces are again used: the music is
string-dominated, but there is a significant role also for the tuba, an
instrument whose quiet melodic properties are often overlooked. The
psalm text featured in this movement is sung by a semi-chorus as a
remote backdrop to the soprano's lament. Her insistence on the word
'slowly' perhaps echoes the 'great heaviness' of movement two. The
poem's final line conveys with nightmarish certainty an ineluctably
human sense of frailty and defeat, - the slender hairsbreadth of our
salvation which Christian perception of the resurrection as 'fait
accompli' tends largely to obscure, but which is central to the theme of
this work. [vi]
This is the longest movement. Snatches from three poems by the American
Randall Jarrell tell of bombing missions over Europe during the Second
World War, but have their place here through their moral numbness before
an enemy who is never seen; whose annihilation is no more than a finger
on a button, the compliant disappearance of a pinprick light ahead in
the darkness, as remote as if on a radar screen. The setting for
baritone solo encompasses a stark contrast between the above (complete
with a passing impression of the Doppler effect) and the frenzy of what
occurs in the cockpit of a stricken enemy aircraft. 'Is there no thread
to bind us...?' follows as a soprano solo until at the words '0 Mother
of wounds' the chorus re-awakens. These lines come from two poems by
Mervyn Peake, much better known as the author of the picaresque 'Gormenghast'
trilogy and as an artist than as a poet. Later he was present ar1he
opening of concentration camps in Europe, an experience from which he
never fully recovered and which may have hastened the onset of the
nervous degenerative illness from which he died in his fifties. And
Jarrell took his own life in 1965. The anguish of both resonates with
latter-day echoes, but Peake's invocation of a 'mother of wounds' (an
image seemingly prophetic of Iraq half a century later) blurs the
vision: over what may be a ruined metropolis falls the shadow of the
Madonna at the foot of the cross. Abruptly, therefore, the music breaks
off from an angry climax. As Mary laments the former roles are reversed:
it is now the suffering Christ who beseeches 'say thou not so', and his
mother whose words cannot be stemmed. The music employs increasingly
detailed ('melismatic') writing to suggest the predestined course of
events imposing a kind of trance into which all humanity becomes locked.
A hushed chorus begins 'Recordare, Jesu Pie' in the background, while
the ticking which has predictably begun again gathers apace. Gradually
the two soloists are subsumed into the collective and increasingly
urgent voice of universal prayer. This, too, evaporates suddenly to
reveal an interloper in its midst: for some time the refrain from the
poem of Miłosz has been repeating in the eye of the threatened
storm. Now it is heard nakedly, intoned like an innocent nursery rhyme
against the final seconds of the 'timebomb’ motif. The genetic
cinematic memory of the audience is presumed upon: perhaps we have all
seen some film in which the bomb stops and that final instant before its
detonation is the longest and most silent ever counted. Accordingly the
ticking ends abruptly here with the prosaic intervention of an
orchestral 'temple block'. The solitary voice attempts one final
refrain, but is engulfed by the full force of both orchestra and organ.
The climax of the entire work disintegrates at length into a numbed
silence. [vii]
This 'end of the world' waits in the future, to be hastened or averted
(Dickens, again). Accordingly the last movement serves as a kind of
moral Epilogue, with the words of the poet Charles Causley providing a
reply to the cry 'Who art thou?' heard at the end of the previous
section. Causley saw active service in Normandy. From the heat of battle
he found himself suddenly in a churchyard into which only the noise of
distant conflict penetrated. The poem set here was born as he gazed up
at a stone cross with those sounds filling his ears. It is one of those
rare things which are liable to strike dumb all who encounter them, and
the danger is freely acknowledged that it may speak more volumes to the
human condition than anything to which it is here attached. The initial
three quatrains of the sonnet are given to the three soloists one by
one, punctuated by a choral setting of Agnus
Dei. In due course roles are again reversed, and a varied choral
statement of the quasi-processional melodic subject is punctuated by
increasingly agitated solo invocations from the Mass. As if in final
warning, the ominous ticking re-awakens yet again in the final pages,
attenuating as it rises in pitch. This time the temple block signals not
a bang, but a whimper: for "there will be no other end of the
world". It
is a risk for a composer rooted partially in Romanticism to become
mouthpiece for the harshest of human realities, which may seem to elude
the scope of his language and invite a charge of ‘vaulting ambition'.
One's reply must be that the relative 'normality' of this music,
commonplace for some, seeks to address a grasp on forbearance, charity
and reverence for the sanctity of life which precarious civilisation
stands perpetually to lose: without mundane reason there could be no
recognition of insanity. Reminded only of evil, not of what must be
protected from it, we must become brutalised, and the message of more
abrasive, anarchic artistic voices be blunted. Within its own modest
compass A Song on the End of the
World seeks to acknowledge opposite extremes of looking truth 'right
in the eyes'. Tribute is due to the words of those on whose shoulders I
have uncertainly clambered; not least to a departed poet whose surviving
son courteously forbade use of one text for reasons which may be
surmised: proof, if it were needed, that some wounds will never heal,
some hands never be clean. As we stand at the gate of a very particular
year, such voices insist that we leave it open behind us, and that,
unlike Orpheus, we gaze backward to preserve, not lose forever. A Song on the End of the World is variously dedicated to my wife (sine qua non Pott est); to the memory
of John de Cormainville Guillaume [1920-98], one of whose lesser
attributes was to be my uncle, -among whose others, music, courage,
faith, hope, charity, - laughter even unto tears; also to the older
blessed memory of my parents. Ave atque vale. - FP. © Francis
Pott,
1999.
The Times Thrilling music, ...contemporary and original, ...impressive and profoundly affecting
Church Times Intense, involving and inventive
Birmingham Post Wonderful… A stunningly impressive première, ...apocalyptic and luminous
The Organ A deeply serious piece, ...intensely, almost overpoweringly dramatic, ...[ending] with a radiantly beautiful setting of Causley's I am the Great Sun Let us hope Pott will create more works of this profundity
Hereford Times A vast canvas used to great effect, ...will be taken up both in this country and abroad, ... great music |
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