Kevin Laskey
MUS 242
11/10/11
Because They Could Not Stop for Death
Meditations on mortality in Britten’s “Death Be Not Proud” and Igor Stravinsky’s “In
Memoriam Dylan Thomas”
A young girl dances herself to death. A troubled, old sailor sinks his own ship. Two
indelible images of 20th century concert music. These images of death come from Igor
Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet “The Rite of Spring” and Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera “Peter
Grimes.” Two of the most visible composers of the 20th century, Stravinsky and Britten never
shied away from grappling with issues of tragedy and mortality. Britten probed the inner mind of
the torturer and the tortured in operas such as “Peter Grimes” and “Death and Venice,” as well as
meditated on the horrors of the battlefield in his “War Requiem.” Stravinsky took a more surreal
and dispassionate view of death with his interest in black parables (“L’Histoire du soldat,”
“Petrushka” and “The Rake’s Progress”). Despite these differing interests, Stravinsky’s and
Britten’s dealings with mortality exhibit a sense of philosophical removal from the subject
matter. The plots and characters of these pieces are of the composer’s creation (or appropriation),
devised to explore mortality as a concept, rather than a specific, personal instance.
But when Britten and Stravinsky were forced to confront death outside their composition
studio, their musical responses to it shift fundamentally. Britten’s “Death Be Not Proud” and
Stravinsky’s “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas” show the composers brought down from their ivory
towers, meditating on mortality with a striking sense of intimacy and vulnerability. Written
during a bout of extreme productivity during the waning weeks of World War II, “Death Be Not
Proud” finds Benjamin Britten appropriating the scalding, spiritual poetry of John Donne to
express a complex feeling of rage, mourning, and hints of quixotic optimism in an uncertain
time. Stravinsky’s “In Memoriam” is both an ode to a friend and would-be collaborator, and a
spell to conjure the very spirit and voice of the poet after his passing. These two pieces are not
meant to explore death as it relates to a universalizable human condition, but are ways in which
the composers come to grips with being a witness to tragedy.
Musical Postcard from a Scarred Europe – Britten’s “Death Be Not Proud”
In April 1939, Benjamin Britten left his home in London for what proved to be an
extended hiatus in the United States. During the years before, Britten had burrowed himself into
W.H. Auden’s circle of artists, writers, and musicians. Auden’s circle fostered in Britten a sexual
and political awakening. Not only did Britten soon meet his life partner, singer Peter Pears, he
became a staunch pacifist. With the threat of total war looming over Europe, Britten sought to
avoid the plight of a pacifist in a mobilized society and followed his friend Auden to New York.
Upon returning to the United Kingdom in 1942, Britten faced a military tribunal for his position
as a conscientious objector. Originally called for non-combatant duties, Britten (as well as Pears)
was able to go free on appeal.1 For nearly the entire duration of the war, Britten was able to
avoid dealing with the atrocities on the continent firsthand. He remained productive throughout
the war, eventually completing “Peter Grimes,” the work that cemented his position as English
composer-as-public-figure along with Ralph Vaughn Williams.
But in the summer 1945, Britten got to see the devastation of the war firsthand. On about
July 15, Britten met violinist Yehudi Menuhin at a party thrown by the publisher Boosey and
Hawkes.2 Menuhin was about to go on a tour of Europe to play for survivors of the concentration
camps and Britten was enthused at the idea of using music as a healing gesture. Britten
1
Philip Brett, et al. "Britten, Benjamin." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
Online,http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/46435pg2.
2
Yehudi Menuhim, Unfinished Journey, London: Macdonald, 1977, p. 178.
convinced Menuhin to take him along as his accompanist and the two left a week later.3 Britten
described the trip as both a “terrific & horrific experience,”4 having seen the conditions of the
concentration camps and architectural skeletons of bombed-out towns.5 Upon his return from the
tour, Britten came down with a feverish response to post-tour inoculations and proceeded to
write nine settings of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne for voice and piano in a week while
bedridden.6 Britten had discussed setting some of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne with his
partner Pears a few years prior, but had not gone much further.7 The terrifying experience of his
tour caused Britten to revisit the poems, as he dryly recounted in a 1963 interview that “the
connection between personal experience and my feelings about the poetry was a strong one.”8
Britten could not have picked a series of more appropriate poems with which to express
his complicated feelings of anguish, anger, and duty to live despite it all. Donne’s Holy Sonnets
are highly personal poems, all written in first person. They are likely autobiographical, part of
him coming to grips with the death of his close friends and in the case of his most famous sonnet,
“Death Be Not Proud,” his own looming end. “Death Be Not Proud” is marked with an
indignant, accusatory tone. The speaker claims to have no fear of death. He says that death is
weak, a slave to fate (like accidental death), kings (who can order executions), and desperate
men (murderers and suicide victims). In a final middle finger-gesture, the speaker says that death
itself shall die.
3
Ibid.
Benjamin Britten, letter to Jean Hamilton, August 10, 1945. In Letters from a Life: The Selected
Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, ed. by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991, vol. 2, p. 1278
5
Britten, letter to Montagu Slater, August 28, 1945. In Mitchell & Reed, vol. 2 p. 1279
6
Brett, “Benjamin Britten.”
7
In a 1943 letter to his American host Elizabeth Mayer, Britten mentioned that he and Pears
were reading and re-reading Donne’s Holy Sonnets. A sketch of Donne’s “Stay, O Sweet, and do
not rise” for voice and piano dates to about 1941. In Mitchell & Reed, vol. 2 p. 1277.
8
Schafer Interview. 1963.
4
Britten set “Death Be Not Proud” on August 19, 1945, the last of the sonnets in his set.
His setting is peculiar in how it alters the tone of the speaker through its musical content. In the
other eight sonnets, Britten’s musical gestures amplify the speaker’s mood and tone. In “Batter
My Heart,” the speaker’s spiritual anger is heightened by the flurrying triplet figures in the
piano. In “Since She Whom I Loved,” the shift of the speaker from tenderness to contempt is
mirrored by a shift from glassy consonant chords, to dense and dissonant ones. Based on these
earlier settings, one would expect “Death Be Not Proud” to sound more like “Batter My Heart”
than “Since She Whom I Loved,” with the speaker’s threats toward death spilling over in heavy
cluster chords and jagged vocal contours. However, the piece opens with a soft, spare, icy D#
minor chord. The piece is in the form of a passacaglia with a trudging, repeating bass figure
throughout. That moving bass line eventually reveals that the piece is in B major, rather than D#
minor. Yet it is a fragile B major, teetering on the edge of falling into G# minor. This effect is
achieved through the bass line that projects a triple meter on top of the four-four time signature.
The superposition of meters causes chords to resolve in unexpected places, further compounded
by the emphasis on weak notes of chords (3rds and 5ths) in octaves in the bass. These gestures
undermine the confidence of the poem’s speaker. In Britten’s setting, he is no longer the fearless
accuser of death. Instead, the speaker is meek and overwhelmed in the face of it. The poem
becomes a pep talk to one’s self, the speaker trying to deal with the tragedy he would like to
avoid, but is all around him.
As the piece continues, the musical material strengthens the resolve of the poem’s
speaker. When he says that death is slave to fate, kings, and desperate men, the tenor voice is in a
meaty part of its range, surrounded by bell-like chords with harsh half-note dissonances. Then
when the speaker says that drugs (poppie or charmes) can make humans sleep as well, the vocal
line becomes brassy, like a fanfare, with dotted eighth and sixteenth rhythms. After this build of
strength, the original placid theme returns. The speaker is still uneasy, but calmer in the face of
death now. The piece ends with an unabashedly tonal, yet expressively ambiguous gesture. The
tenor holds a high F# for nine beats on the word “death,” while the piano oscillates between G#
minor and B major 6/4 chords underneath. The piece then ends very bluntly on a classic
dominant-tonic cadence, as the tenor sings “thou shalt die” in quarter-note rhythmic unison with
the piano. One would think that this sort of gesture would suggest an ultimate victory or closure
for the piece, but the oscillating bass figure before it subverts its usual effect. The gesture does
not build to the cadence. Rather, the cadence seems to interrupt the oscillating figure. The
speaker in Britten’s setting does not achieve total victory over death, but a smaller victory – the
ability to live on for the time being, even in the midst of suffering and death.
In most of his work, Britten uses musical gestures that pulls the meaning out of the text
rather than forces a new meaning on it. For example, in the climactic downfall scene of “Peter
Grimes,” the eerie offstage choral effects give life to the inner demons implicit in the title
character’s ravings. Gestures like these show Britten the musical craftsman at work, as he molds
a soundscape to fit with the textual meaning that already exists. “Death Be Not Proud” shows a
different Britten at work. The way in which Britten subverts the aggressive tone of the poem
shows he has a different motive than crafting an outwardly expressive piece. He is not translating
Donne’s words into musical form, but rather appropriating them to express his own sentiments
after witnessing the horrors of genocide and war in Europe. The more complicated speaker in the
musical “Death Be Not Proud” is Britten himself. It would be impossible for Britten to
completely adopt Donne’s view of death after witnessing it on such a massive scale, hence the
teetering major key and dirge-like tempo, rather than a declamatory march. And while Britten
was horrified at what he saw on tour, he also wrote that bringing music to the suffering was very
important and should be continued.9 This attitude of moving forward in the face of adversity is
revealed in the cautious optimism of the final crescendo. The perfectly imperfect cadence
expresses the difficult duty that survivors have to not necessarily destroy death, but prevent it
from being a paralysis in their daily lives. Instead of hiding behind his music, expressing the
feelings of others through craftsmanship, Britten lays bare his own soul in “Death Be Not
Proud.”
Preserving the Voice of a Poet – Stravinsky’s “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas”
The early 1950s were a relatively fallow time for Igor Stravinsky. After conducting the
premier of his opera “The Rake’s Progress” in Venice in September 1951, he did not compose at
all for six months, finally finishing up his “Cantata” in July 1952.10 During his European visits in
that period, Stravinsky was surprised to find that young composers were looking to the serialists
Schoenberg and Webern as models rather than Stravinsky.11 Stravinsky’s next piece, the 1953
Septet, marked his first use of the serial techniques pioneered by Schoenberg.
While he was finishing up his Septet, Stravinsky met the poet Dylan Thomas in a Boston
Hotel room on May 22, 1953. Stravinsky was familiar with Thomas’s work, and the English
movie director Michael Powell had suggested in 1952 that the two work on a film project based
on a scene from Homer’s Odyssey; a project that never materialized due to a lack of funding.12
Stravinsky later recounted that in their first meeting, Thomas was chain-smoking the entire time
9
Britten, letter to Jean Hamilton.
Stephen Walsh. "Stravinsky, Igor." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52818pg9.
11
Ibid.
12
Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979, p. 477.
10
and looked that he had already had too much to drink.13 Yet, the meeting went very well,
Stravinsky reporting that, “As soon as I saw him, I knew the only thing to do was to love him.”14
The two discussed a potential opera project based on Thomas’s idea of a rebirth of language and
myth in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust and agreed to meet again at Stravinsky’s home in
Hollywood that autumn to begin planning.15 When Thomas arrived in the United States that
October, he looked very ill. His immune system weakened by alcoholism and the New York
smog, Thomas died of pneumonia on November 9th in Greenwich Village. He was supposed to
have met with Stravinsky later that month.
Thomas’s death hit Stravinsky hard. “This was a terrible blow to me as well as to all
those who knew Dylan Thomas’s genius,” Stravinsky later wrote.16 Over the next few months,
Stravinsky considered composing a short piece in Thomas’s memory. He eventually chose to set
the words of Thomas’s most iconic poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” conversely
written in memory of Thomas’s own father. The poem’s setting for tenor and string quartet was
then bookended by a set of what Stravinsky called “Dirge-Canons,” for the string quartet and
four trombones playing antiphonally. Coming on the heels of his first serial experiments in the
Septet, “In Memoriam” utilizes a five-note tone row to derive its melodic material. While much
serial music has the reputation of being academically rigorous rather than poignant and
expressive, “In Memoriam” proves very affecting, as if Stravinsky chose this mode of
composition because it fits the piece’s mood and purpose.
13
Ibid.
Qtd. in White, p. 477.
15
Walsh.
16
Igor Stravinsky, Program note from In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, New York: Boosey &
Hawkes, 1954.
14
So why did Stravinsky choose to use a serial method in composing “In Memoriam,” and
why did he build the piece on a five-note row, rather than six or ten or twelve? First, it is clear
that Stravinsky was more concerned with the craft of music rather than its expressive qualities or
inspiration (he the composer that said, “I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially
powerless to express anything at all,”).17 Considering his current preoccupations with the serial
method, it would make sense that Stravinsky would want to explore it, regardless of the piece’s
purpose. However, the effusiveness of Stravinsky’s program note shows how personal the work
is. It is not a commission; it is a piece Stravinsky wished to write on his own. Also, Stravinsky
was never totally beholden to serial techniques in his later music. In his subsequent ballet Agon,
he freely put serial movements alongside movements more in his neoclassical style. If Stravinsky
thought another mode of composing was more appropriate for this intimate piece, he would have
composed it in that way.
In a 1985 article, the musicologists Robert Gauldin and Warren Benson posited that “In
Memoriam” used mathematical proportions as an organizing principle. The poem itself is in
iambic pentameter, meaning there are five two-syllable sets per line. The poem setting is for five
musicians (string quartet and tenor), is 55 measures long, and roughly divides into important
sections of fifteen bars each, or five times three (delineated by important structural transitions in
measures 10, 25, and 40).18 If Stravinsky did plan out the piece in such a way, it would be an
appropriate homage to Thomas’ work. Thomas usually worked in very strict metric forms. “Do
not go gentle,” for instance is a villanelle, a 19th century form consisting of five tercets (3 line
sections) and one quatrain (four line section). Stravinsky’s use of a consistent mathematical form
17
Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 1936, p. 53.
Robert Gauldin and Warren Benson, “Structure and Numerology in Stravinsky’s In Memoriam
Dylan Thomas,” in Perspectives of New Music, vol. 23, no. 2, 1985 p.169-173.
18
could then be construed as an extended musical metaphor. Much of Thomas’s poetry was also
concerned with the unity of all life, and how biology creates unity from diversity. The various
processes that Stravinsky used for “In Memoriam” could then be the composer’s way of enacting
these biological processes in musical form.
However, while Stravinsky was definitely familiar with Thomas’s work, it is unlikely he
had the expertise or desire to parse the poet’s complex symbols and forms. In the program note
for “In Memoriam,” Stravinsky does not speak of Thomas’s powerful symbolism or use of strict
form. Stravinsky simply comments on “Do not go gentle’s” beauty of verse. From this
perspective, Stravinsky’s use of serial composition methods stem from a much simpler purpose –
they focus the listener’s attention on the beauty of the verse rather than distract from it with earburrowing melodies.
In addition to the emphasis strict forms and imagery of unity, Thomas’s work had a
strong vocal quality. He wrote short scripts for radio and film, usually reading them himself. His
Welsh accent became almost as famous as his poetry itself. This particular quality of Thomas’s
work would show itself more readily than his forms or images, particularly to a composer like
Stravinsky. As an artist working in the medium of sound, Stravinsky would have likely been
more interested in preserving the vocal quality of Thomas’s poetry, rather than its more cerebral,
symbolic aspects. If one listens to the recording of Thomas reading “Do not go gentle” right
before Stravinsky’s piece, one will hear some striking resemblances between the contours of
Thomas’s voice and the contours of Stravinsky’s vocal line.19 For example, the highest “pitch” of
Thomas’s reading is about the E above middle C. The highest note in the tone row that
Stravinsky uses to construct the melody is also that E above middle C. Next, Dylan reads the line
19
This idea was suggested by Prof. Paul Lansky in a lecture on October 5, 2011.
“Old age should burn and rave at close of day;” going up slightly on “age,” then back down for
“rave at close,” then sticking to the same pitch for “of day.” This contour is translated almost
directly into Stravinsky’s vocal line. After hearing these similarities between the Thomas reading
and the written vocal line, it becomes clear why Stravinsky chose to write in a serial fashion with
only a five-note row. Generally, the frequency contours of human speech are much more
constrained than the contours of song. Restricting the main vocal theme to the range of a major
third (C to E) gives the theme a more spoken quality, a sort of anti-aria. The serial mode of
composition also has the effect of highlighting the natural contours of and beauty of the text. If
Stravinsky chose to set “Do not go gentle” as a romantic, lyrical art song, the listener’s attention
would be drawn to the tune itself rather than the poem. “Do not go gentle” is certainly a powerful
work, able to stand on its own unadorned, and so an ornate, musically direct setting would
compete for the listener’s attention too much. The piece would be less than the sum of its parts,
an improper memorial to a friend and titanic artist in his own right. Stravinsky’s setting works so
well because it does not draw attention to itself. When the piece is over, the listener does not
think, “Wasn’t that a great tune,” and then hum it all throughout intermission. The listener
instead thinks, “Wasn’t that a powerful poem.” By translating the natural cadences of Thomas’s
speech into melodic contours and keeping the music simple and abstract, Stravinsky preserves
the very voice and spirit of Dylan Thomas. It is as if the poet is resurrected each time the piece is
played.
While both Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten were never afraid to deal with issues of
mortality in many of their pieces, the character of their music takes a decided turn once they used
composition to deal with death and destruction in their own lives. After Britten witnessed the
horrific aftermath of World War II, including bombed-out cities and concentration camps, he
appropriated and subverted the words of John Donne to express his paradoxical emotions of utter
despair and sense of duty to live on, not paralyzed by war’s deadly consequences. When
Stravinsky’ fast friend would-be opera collaborator died unexpectedly, he sought to a way to
keep his friend’s spirit alive. “Death Be Not Proud” and “Do not go gentle” show two masters of
grand gesture brought down to their most vulnerable.
This is my own work in accordance with University regulations.
Kevin Laskey