During the discussion of Rebekah Scott's paper on 'Britten's drops':
"Auden through the Thirties was preoccupied with things falling, like bombs and leaves and Rome."
Saturday, 10 September 2011
"Literary Britten" (3-4 September, Cambridge)
Last weekend I was lucky enough to be able to attend the conference on "Literary Britten" at Girton College, Cambridge. It was interdisciplinary and deeply thought-provoking, with very many interesting people in attendance. And a great concert included in the price of attendance! I was so happy to get the chance to get to share some of my enthusiasms with people in person, rather than just through the medium of the internet.
Lucy Walker's talk on "Britten's early texts" introduced many of the conference participants to his classic early composition, "The rabbits stand around and hold the lights". Possibly those from the Britten-Pears Library were less enthusiastic, having had to listen to this and other juvenilia on loop for the six month span of their recent exhibition on Britten's childhood works. Still, "Rabbits" seemed to keep getting brought up in comments for the rest of the weekend.
Among other things it was mentioned in the discussion of Rebekah Scott's fascinating talk on "Britten's Drops." She explored instances of rain, tears and other droplets in the texts set by Britten, discussing his musical responses to this imagery, which seems to have fascinated him almost as much as that of sleep and dreams. You might think that this would be a limited topic but let me echo Flora's riposte regarding the pond at Bly: "Small? It's huge!" Someone whose name I didn't catch brought up Britten's childhood compositional fondness for cascades of notes linked by curving lines (to paraphrase his own description) and wondered about the idea of music as a metaphor for droplets merging into lakes and seas. A topic that deserves further exploration. "Deliquescence" is without a doubt my favorite word of the conference.
Will May gave a great talk on Britten, Austen and Mansfield Park, which you might be surprised to learn was one of the operas that Britten very seriously considered creating (but, obviously, didn't). We heard about the penumbra of uncreated works that inevitably hover around any creative artist, and about the textual links that connect Britten and Austen (they were both fans of Crabbe, for one thing). In discussion the main question at issue was: what attracted Britten to Mansfield Park and to the determinedly unartistic and unmusical Fanny Price? Performance is a theme in the story, to be sure, but was the possible immorality of performance really a subject of concern for him? It was Alison (?) who cracked this conundrum, pointing out that the issue that Fanny and Edmund have with the proposed amateur theatricals is the sexual content of "Lover's Vows," and in particular the way in which its themes threateningly echo the private lives and loves of the young would-be performers. Oh. Suddenly Mansfield Park sounds so much more Brittenish.
One of the great joys of the conference for me was getting the chance to meet John Bridcut, whose "Britten's Children" is in my opinion the single best piece of biographical writing on the composer, despite the limited scope of its topic. Among other things we discussed the recent Christopher Alden production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" at ENO, which I seem to have liked much more than everyone else did. Even so I was struck by Bridcut's suggestion that the production would have made more sense if all of the fairies had been schoolchildren, with Oberon as a sixth former infatuated with a younger boy. It makes so much sense to position the fairies as symbolizing the different world of childhood; I wish I'd thought of it myself. I would pay good money to see… well, any Bridcut production of a Britten opera, really.
Inevitably there are going to be corners of the topic that don't get covered. I was not the only one who thought it would have been nice to hear more explicitly feminist and/or queer readings of texts. I may have been the only one to feel the gap left by limited discussion of the role of Peter Pears in all of this. He did, after all, claim to be the literary one in the partnership. And Britten was so focused on writing for performers that a focus on his relationship with texts in isolation with no discussion of the instantiation of those texts in practice seems rather unsatisfying to me.
Hopefully there will be more work on "Literary Britten" in the future because it felt as if we only scratched the surface here. Everyone was overflowing with ideas and new angles to discuss. I hope to be able to post about further Brittenish excursions in the future!
Lucy Walker's talk on "Britten's early texts" introduced many of the conference participants to his classic early composition, "The rabbits stand around and hold the lights". Possibly those from the Britten-Pears Library were less enthusiastic, having had to listen to this and other juvenilia on loop for the six month span of their recent exhibition on Britten's childhood works. Still, "Rabbits" seemed to keep getting brought up in comments for the rest of the weekend.
Among other things it was mentioned in the discussion of Rebekah Scott's fascinating talk on "Britten's Drops." She explored instances of rain, tears and other droplets in the texts set by Britten, discussing his musical responses to this imagery, which seems to have fascinated him almost as much as that of sleep and dreams. You might think that this would be a limited topic but let me echo Flora's riposte regarding the pond at Bly: "Small? It's huge!" Someone whose name I didn't catch brought up Britten's childhood compositional fondness for cascades of notes linked by curving lines (to paraphrase his own description) and wondered about the idea of music as a metaphor for droplets merging into lakes and seas. A topic that deserves further exploration. "Deliquescence" is without a doubt my favorite word of the conference.
Will May gave a great talk on Britten, Austen and Mansfield Park, which you might be surprised to learn was one of the operas that Britten very seriously considered creating (but, obviously, didn't). We heard about the penumbra of uncreated works that inevitably hover around any creative artist, and about the textual links that connect Britten and Austen (they were both fans of Crabbe, for one thing). In discussion the main question at issue was: what attracted Britten to Mansfield Park and to the determinedly unartistic and unmusical Fanny Price? Performance is a theme in the story, to be sure, but was the possible immorality of performance really a subject of concern for him? It was Alison (?) who cracked this conundrum, pointing out that the issue that Fanny and Edmund have with the proposed amateur theatricals is the sexual content of "Lover's Vows," and in particular the way in which its themes threateningly echo the private lives and loves of the young would-be performers. Oh. Suddenly Mansfield Park sounds so much more Brittenish.
One of the great joys of the conference for me was getting the chance to meet John Bridcut, whose "Britten's Children" is in my opinion the single best piece of biographical writing on the composer, despite the limited scope of its topic. Among other things we discussed the recent Christopher Alden production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" at ENO, which I seem to have liked much more than everyone else did. Even so I was struck by Bridcut's suggestion that the production would have made more sense if all of the fairies had been schoolchildren, with Oberon as a sixth former infatuated with a younger boy. It makes so much sense to position the fairies as symbolizing the different world of childhood; I wish I'd thought of it myself. I would pay good money to see… well, any Bridcut production of a Britten opera, really.
Inevitably there are going to be corners of the topic that don't get covered. I was not the only one who thought it would have been nice to hear more explicitly feminist and/or queer readings of texts. I may have been the only one to feel the gap left by limited discussion of the role of Peter Pears in all of this. He did, after all, claim to be the literary one in the partnership. And Britten was so focused on writing for performers that a focus on his relationship with texts in isolation with no discussion of the instantiation of those texts in practice seems rather unsatisfying to me.
Hopefully there will be more work on "Literary Britten" in the future because it felt as if we only scratched the surface here. Everyone was overflowing with ideas and new angles to discuss. I hope to be able to post about further Brittenish excursions in the future!
Monday, 5 September 2011
Overheard at Glyndebourne
Q: "Are you a music student?"
A: "No! God, no. They're all gay. Gay and talented. I'm a historian."
Rejecting the binary: "If I had to choose between standing through four hours of Wagner and sitting in the stalls for two hours of that, I'd shoot myself in the face."
And from the department of You Could Have Looked It Up on Wikipedia: "That was a whole opera about a pedophile ghost!"
(Actually all three of these may have been the same person...)
A: "No! God, no. They're all gay. Gay and talented. I'm a historian."
Rejecting the binary: "If I had to choose between standing through four hours of Wagner and sitting in the stalls for two hours of that, I'd shoot myself in the face."
And from the department of You Could Have Looked It Up on Wikipedia: "That was a whole opera about a pedophile ghost!"
(Actually all three of these may have been the same person...)
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