Predominantly comic music theatre piece
for soprano and baritone soloists, 2 trumpeters (doubling as occasional
chorus / spoken parts) and pianist/speaker. Duration: ca 34 minutes.
Commissioned for London City Churches Week, October 1987, and first
performed by the composer (pianist/speaker) with members of the Wren
Consort. The piece tells the cautionary tale of Michael Wise, composer and
sometime Organist of Salisbury Cathedral, having originally marked the
tercentenary of his death. For information regarding the score of this
work please visit the Contact page of this site. 'Wise after the Event':
Composer's Note
In the small hours between the 24th and
25th of August, 1687, a furious altercation occurred between one Michael
Wise, Organist at the Cathedral Church in the Diocese of Sarum, and Mrs
Wise, his spouse. Master Wise's bibulous career had, it appears, already
earned him a reputation for what an Episcopal Visitation in 1683
identified with lapidary disapproval as 'profanity, drunkenness and other
excesses in his life and conversation'. On this later occasion, such
mildly deplorable propensities were to conjure his undoing. Much the worse
for a lengthy sojourn in a local alehouse, Wise ended the disagreement
with his wife by rushing away down the street, declaring loudly that he
would there assault and slay the first person whom he might encounter.
This proved unfortunate, inasmuch as the prospective victim thus presented
for his homicidal attentions proved to be an Officer of the Watch, armed
with an exceedingly solid billhook. In the words of the celebrated
contemporaneous scholar, Anthony Wood, the murderous composer was himself
'knocked on the head and killed downright by the Night Watch at Salisbury
for giving stubborn and refractory language to them'. His place of burial,
like that of a rather more celebrated Austrian composer just over a
century later, remains unknown.
When, in 1987, Martin Elliott (Artistic
Director of the Wren Consort) approached me with a commission to write a
piece for London City Churches Week, I was cheerfully informed that An
Organist Of Repute had been asked to suggest a composer likely to become
inspired by the theme of Drink. The said organist had barely hesitated,
-so would I do it? Armed thus with a grievance against the organ-playing
world at large and at one of its number in particular (now fixed in my
mind as the O.O.R.), I began to seek out a suitable subject…
When all else had failed and I was
beginning to be worried, the cautionary tale of Michael Wise presented
itself after my mother had asked whether 1987 offered any propitious
centenaries. Not only did it rise admirably to the challenge of 'getting
one back' at the mysterious O.O.R; it also threw to the surface several
felicitous touches. Wise expired in the early hours of the 25th of August,
-my own birthday. …Reincarnation??? The thought was distinctly
uncomfortable. Then a rummage in the British Museum exhumed a once-famous
song or round by Wise entitled Old Chiron, the words of which take on a
curiously prophetic resonance in relation to its composer's fate: Chiron,
tutor to the young Achilles, foretells his pupil's death beneath the
hostile walls of Troy, but bids him therefore drink to his heart's
content, since what the gods have ordained can be neither averted, on the
one hand, nor hastened, on the other. Such a philosophy very probably
appealed to Master Wise, who could hardly know that, having drunk his fill
for many years, one day he himself would lie slain beneath the rather
homelier walls of Old Sarum (one may be forgiven for indulging the fancy
in a less than strictly accurate parallel). Finally, there is a pleasing
near-consonance between Chiron and the proprietor of the 'Stygian ferry'
invoked at the end of Wise's song, who answered to the name Charon. It
began to seem that Wise after the Event had in some sense been
predestined.
For the sake of an acceptable story I
have indulged in a little make-believe, whereby, when Wise meets his
Nemesis, he is interrupted in the process of composing some new and
wondrous air. In the absence of any such material or circumstance, I have
enlisted Old Chiron, which makes a number of fragmented appearances in the
course of the piece.
The 'argument', then, is as follows:
1. After a slow 'symphony' (in the old,
Purcellian sense) which scarcely deviates from the general style of the
English late 17th century, a Vivace leads us straight into a vocal duet
introducing Wise and commenting unflatteringly upon the formidable
personage to whom he finds himself conjoined in largely unholy matrimony.
The style has by now begun to fluctuate deliberately between the sounds of
Wise's day and something noticeably more contemporary. The singers digress
to introduce a modern confrère of Wise's, discovered at his piano and
attempting to respond to a dubious commission which has come his way from
a sinister organisation calling itself The Wren Consortium.
2. The modern composer is stuck. In his
tortured imagination arise dreams of the avant-garde masterpiece which he
had hoped to create; but these run amok, tormenting him and compelling him
to banish them from his mind. A fragment of a tune in an older style keeps
returning to him unbidden; this is, of course, our first encounter with
Old Chiron. Wondering aloud what manner of thing it can be and whence it
has come, our composer begins to accompany it on the piano. The shade of
Wise now materialises, genie-like, from behind the instrument. The modern
composer's abode was once that of the Wise ménage, he announces to his
astounded counterpart, and he has been summoned by the strains of his own
unfinished work; until it is complete, his immortal rest must be denied.
Wise proceeds to tell his sorry tale, rudely ordering the affronted modern
composer to accompany him as he does so.
3. We are taken to an inn where Wise is
attempting with some determination to achieve blessed forgetfulness of his
appalling trouble-and-strife. After an increasingly brainless drinking
song (fairly randomly enhanced by vocal and other contributions from all
the performers), Wise falls insensible upon the ground, but through the
mists of oblivion his guardian Muse somehow manages to breathe sweet
strains upon his musicianly inner ear. Upon waking, he is possessed by the
desire to write down what he remembers, and sets off hastily for home.
4. Arriving at his front door and finding
it locked, Wise disturbs his lady wife, who has long since retired to her
(single) bed. She appears upon the balcony above, berates him for his
drunkenness, refuses to admit him and eventually inverts a loaded chamber
pot above the hapless miscreant. In a delirium of fury, Wise storms off
into the darkness for his fatal assignation with the trusty billhook…
5. Wise lies slain in the first light of
a Wiltshire dawn. The Muse laments over him before departing in sorrow
back to Parnassus. Now the wondrous song may never be heard, …unless the
modern composer will consent to take it down and implement it within his
own unfinished piece? Wise threatens that, unless he submit to this
proposal, the modern composer may expect to find himself haunted
throughout eternity, saecula saeculorum, Amen, by the shade of Mrs Wise.
Knowing a good deal when he hears one, the modern composer responds with
the comment that, seeing he was stuck anyway, he might as well write
whatever wretched tune he can get his hands on. The bargain is struck.
Hands are shaken across the centuries (an image once happily coined by
Gerald Finzi about the setting of 17th century poets). Wise at last wins
his heart's desire and, with it, his quietus. There follows…
6. A finale in which tedious moralising
about the evils of the demon drink fade into a reasonably complete
apotheosis of Old Chiron and the respective styles of the two composers
are more or less fused into one acceptable language. After a final and,
perhaps, inevitable reminder that 'tis folly to be Wise, the piece ends
riotously in general rejoicing. For its text (a bizarre gallimaufry of
debased pentameters, hopeless puns and sundry rantings) this modernday
composer bears entire responsibility, except in the case of a few
redeeming lines from Chiron.
© Francis Pott, 1987
|
