I used to be a bit sniffy about poems being turned into songs or cantatas or whatnot: if the poem was good enough, I’d argue, the words should generate their own musical accompaniment. Of course, words and music in conjunction are often sublime: church music, film dialogue accompanied by background music, opera, words written as song lyrics etc. All potentially wonderful.
But a composer taking one of your favourite poems and attempting to somehow transform it – or, worse, improve it - by harnessing their own genius to that of the composer, struck me as at best futile, at worst a damned cheek.
Of course, as I’ve got older, I’ve realized what puritan nonsense that all is. English music sparkles with examples of successful – albeit non-contemporary - collaborations between poets and composers.
Today I’d like to mention three examples.
My favourite is Vaughan William’s setting of six poems from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. I had read the poems before hearing these musical settings, but hadn’t been that enamoured of them. Every time Housman uses the word “lad” in that horribly inauthentic way, you can’t help imagining some weedy aesthete lusting after muscular young rustics. And the death toll mounting inexorably as in a Spaghetti Western just becomes comic after a while. (Hugh Kingsmill’s parody, which begins: “What, still alive at twenty-two,/A clean upstanding chap like you?” is accurate and amusing.)
But Vaughan Williams’s superbly sensitive renderings are more than sympathetic - they strip the poetry of its unintended comic and phony undertones and invest it with the seriousness and sprightliness it would no doubt have conveyed to Houseman’s contemporaries - and to more sensitive readers of this era.
All the settings are superb, but my particular favourite is the glorious “On Wenlock Edge” where the music perfectly evokes the febrile turmoil of Housman’s “wind through woods in riot”.
Thanks to Vaughan Williams, I now read Housman frequently, and with great pleasure.
Delius’s Sea Drift is a setting of Walt Whitman’s masterful “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking”. This, the most poignant poem I know, tells the tale – seen through the eyes of the poet as a young boy – of a pair of mockingbirds who arrive in May to nest on the coast near Whitman’s home:
Once Paumanok,
When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this seashore in some briers,
Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.
One day, the she-bird disappears, “nor ever appears again” and Whitman observes, hears and understands the terrible sorrow that engulfs the he-bird as he searches for his love or, baffled, simply waits for her to return:
Yes, when the stars glisten’d,
All night long, on the prong of a moss-scallop’d stake,
Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.
He call’d on his mate;
He pour’d forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.
The poem is so moving, it’s hard to see what music could add to it, except to embarrassingly overstate emotions so delicately handled by Whitman (for instance, when he echoes his earlier description of the birds by describing the lonely male as “the solitary guest from Alabama”). And, in truth, Delius doesn’t enhance the poem: his own genius is so distinct, so un-Whitman like, that he manages to create a whole new entity which can be judged entirely on its own merits - and which, importantly, doesn’t debase the original work in any way. It doesn’t attain the heart-piercing poignancy of the poem - nothing could - but it is a glorious piece of music.
(Vaughan Williams - again - is more successful at using his gifts to capture Whitman’s essential spirit in his treatment of three of his poems in Donna Nobis Pacem: his handling of the lines “That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly/wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world...” from“Reconciliation” is particularly fine. This may be because Vaughan Williams is more in tune than Delius with Whitman’s brand of muscular, energetic mysticism.)
W.E. Henley, who died in 1903, is currently in the spotlight thanks to the title of his most famous poem, “Invictus”, having been appropriated by Clint Eastwood for his recently released film about Nelson Mandela (for whom the poem acted as a source of strength during his years in prison).
One of my favourite song-poems is based on Henley’s “On the Way to Kew”, about a familiar walk evoking memories of a lost love. It’s an enjoyable poem, but not a great one . I was unfamiliar with it when I first heard the setting by that delightful English composer, George Butterworth. The song is quite beautiful, and has a greater emotional impact than the poem. The singer is more immediately present and his sadness and yearning more intense than the poet’s. (Maybe I would have felt differently had I encountered the poem before hearing the song.)
So, for me at least, musical settings of poems can work. Nevertheless I’ve assiduously avoided hearing any interpretations of my favourite poem, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” - I’d never forgive anyone for mucking that up.
No comments:
Post a Comment