11 July 2013
Oral History of Glyndebourne opera
In 1990 the British Library initiated its Oral History of Glyndebourne project. For the next seven years 68 interviews were conducted, not just with singers, but with a whole range of people connected with Glyndebourne and the running of the annual opera festival. Among the musicians can be found singers Janet Baker, Ian Wallace and Elisabeth Söderström as well as instrumentalists Philip Jones, Jack Brymer and Evelyn Barbirolli (Rothwell) who tells how she joined the very first orchestra in 1934. The history of the running of the opera company is recounted by administrators, finance directors and producers while insights into other areas are provided by gardeners, stage technicians and day to day staff.
Some of the interviewees recall their experiences before the War and, twenty years on, many of them are no longer with us, so this is not only a comprehensive record of the microcosm that is Glyndebourne Opera, but a record of some people who may not otherwise have been recorded in interview.
09 July 2013
War and peace in Britten
This is the second of our posts highlighting some of the themes of the British Library exhibition Poetry in Sound: the Music of Benjamin Britten. Today, Britten's pacifism comes under the spotlight.
Britten developed an anti-war stance well before the outbreak of World War II, involving himself with the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s. The Union was formed in 1934 by Dick Sheppard, a popular Anglican priest, in response to the growing threat of war in Europe. It quickly became one of the most prominent organisations in Britain committed to peace, commanding the support of many writers and thinkers, including Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Siegfried Sassoon. Britten and Michael Tippett were among the musicians attracted to its cause. During World War II, the Peace Pledge Union published booklets and leaflets encouraging people to shun the war and become conscientious objectors. This flyer was issued in about 1939.
Britten composed a marching song, Pacifist March, for the Peace Pledge Union. It appears to have been modelled on the political propaganda songs popular in mainland Europe. Britten intended it to be performed by two-part choir and orchestra but - although the words and music for the chorus were printed in 1937 - Peace Pledge Union members apparently disliked the piece, and it was quickly withdrawn. A rare surviving copy is on display in the exhibition. The words are by Ronald Duncan (1914-1982), author of a pamphlet entitled The Complete Pacifist. Duncan's lyrics begin with the lines 'Blood, mud and bitterness have been used in painting our history, That's been smudg'd with the stain of war. Empire we've stolen, swollen, Our imperial greed for more.'
In April 1939 a left-wing 'Festival of Music for the People' was held in London. It included a pageant for 500 singers and 100 dancers featuring the American singer Paul Robeson as soloist, a balalaika orchestra playing Russian tunes, music by the communist composer Alan Bush, and Britten's Ballad of Heroes. The Ballad, with words by W.H. Auden and Randall Swingler, was performed by 'Twelve Co-operative and Labour Choirs'. Britten had been horrified by the bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War and wrote: 'It seemed natural to choose a piece which could express my sympathy with the beleagured Spanish Republic and honour a brave, unhappy people'.
Britten left the UK for America just before the start of World War II, for which he was roundly criticised in the British press. An overwhelming longing for home led him back to England in 1942, where he faced a tribunal as a conscientious objector. In 1945, he gave two concerts with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin at the newly liberated Belsen concentration camp, an experience that would colour his later works.
The wartime destruction and subsequent rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral provided the impetus for Britten's War Requiem, which he composed for the reconsecration of the cathedral in 1962. In it the text of the Latin Mass of the Dead is interspersed with and transformed by the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Britten's powerful musical response to Owen's poems reflected his deep admiration for the poet. 'Owen is to me by far our greatest war poet, and one of the most original and touching poets of this century', he wrote.
Posted to France in 1916, Owen had returned to Britain in 1917, diagnosed with shell-shock. At hospital in Edinburgh he met fellow patient and poet Siegfried Sassoon, who later edited his works for publication. Owen wrote or revised most of his poems shortly before his return to France – where he was killed days before the Armistice.
On display is Britten's draft manuscript of his War Requiem, alongside one of the Library's literary treasures, a manuscript of Owen's poems in the poet's own hand. We have chosen to display his poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', which Britten used in the War Requiem and which, in its published version, opens with the following lines:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
The manuscript on display is an early draft of the poem, bearing annotations in the hands of both Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The manuscript reveals that Owen originally called the poem 'Anthem for Dead Youth'.
In our next exhibition-related post we'll be exploring the poems that inspired one of Britten's best-known works, his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.
28 June 2013
Library acquires George Lloyd's music manuscripts
The British composer George Lloyd was born one hundred years ago today. On his centenary - and at a time when his music is experiencing something of a renaissance - we’re very pleased to announce that the British Library has just acquired all of George Lloyd’s autograph music manuscripts.
Lloyd studied at Trinity College of Music in London, and before the outbreak of World War II had already composed three symphonies and two operas, Iernin and The Serf. During the war Lloyd served as a bandsman in the Royal Marines.
On the notoriously dangerous Arctic convoys, Lloyd’s ship HMS Trinidad was struck by one of its own torpedoes, which had veered off course and returned to strike the ship. Lloyd was one of just a handful of survivors.
George Lloyd composed his Fourth Symphony in 1946 as he struggled to come to terms with his experience, describing it on the title-page as “A world of darkness, storms, strange colours and a far-away peacefulness”. You can now see the autograph manuscript of this symphony on display in the British Library’s Treasures Gallery.
Despite the physical and mental scars, Lloyd went on to complete 12 symphonies, 7 concertos, three operas and many other vocal and instrumental works. Although for some years his music was little played - it was considered too tuneful by some - the last 20 years of Lloyd's life saw a revival of interest in his music, and this has continued in the years since his death in 1998. This week, he has been featured as BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week, and there are two performances of his music at the BBC Proms: his Requiem and, on the Last Night of the Proms, the orchestral version of his HMS Trinidad March, which only turned up while the collection was being sorted prior to its arrival at the British Library.
The George Lloyd Collection, now available for researchers and musicians to consult at the British Library, includes early sketches and drafts of many of Lloyd's compositions, as well as the autograph ‘final versions’. For researchers, such sketches and drafts are invaluable, as they shed light on a composer’s approach to writing and creative processes. Even what appear to be the final versions of a work are not always that: like many other composers, Lloyd sometimes made changes to his works after they had been copied by a professional copyist in preparation for performances of the music, or even during rehearsals. Copyists' scores with autograph annotations can therefore contain important information on the composer's afterthoughts. A number of copyists' scores with Lloyd's annotations are included in the collection. Many of the scores were used by George Lloyd when conducting concerts or recordings of his music, and they frequently contain markings that provide valuable information on the performance.
You can find out more about George Lloyd and his music on the webpages of the George Lloyd Society and Lloyd Music Ltd.
12 June 2013
Poetry in Sound exhibition: Britten and Auden in the spotlight
Following the launch of the new British Library exhibition Poetry in Sound: the music of Benjamin Britten, we’ll be putting the spotlight, on this blog, on some of the themes we’ve chosen to explore in the exhibition. I hope these posts will tempt you to come and discover the manuscripts, unpublished recordings, rare printed materials and photographs we’ve selected from our archives.
At the start of the exhibition we focus on one of the most important of Britten’s early relationships: his friendship and collaboration with the poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973). Britten and Auden attended the same school, Gresham’s, in Norfolk, but Auden was six years older, so their paths didn't cross until the mid-1930s, when both began working for the General Post Office Film Unit. Britten confided in his diary that Auden ‘is a remarkably fine brain’. Auden was struck by Britten’s sensitivity in setting the English language to music.
Their most famous collaboration was Night Mail (1936), a GPO documentary depicting the Postal Special train puffing its way from London to Glasgow. There's a clip from the film in the exhibition (the final section, where Auden’s famous verse ‘This is the Night Mail crossing the border’ is heard to Britten’s evocative accompaniment of sandpaper, wind machine and a side drum representing the sound of the train). Alongside is a leaf from Britten’s handwritten score, showing those unconventional musical forces.
Although Britten is probably best known today for his operas, songs and music for children, he spent much of the 1930s composing for film, radio and the theatre. He was involved with the Group Theatre, an experimental theatre company which presented plays by T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, Auden and Isherwood and staged lectures, exhibitions and debates. Britten composed music for five productions between 1935 and 1938, including Auden and Isherwood’s plays The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier.
The Ascent of F6 features the song ‘Funeral Blues’, which, with its opening line ‘Stop all the clocks’, later became more famous as a poem - reaching an even bigger audience after its appearance in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Among the many rare or unique recordings in the exhibition is Britten and Auden’s song ‘Stop all the clocks’ performed by Peter Pears (tenor) and Britten (piano) in an unpublished test pressing made for Decca in 1955.
Auden and Isherwood travelled to the USA shortly before the outbreak of World War II, and Britten followed soon afterwards with Peter Pears. In America, Britten and Auden collaborated on a rather unconventional operetta, Paul Bunyan. The character Paul Bunyan was a giant lumberjack of American legend, who had a blue ox called Babe as a travelling companion. The operetta was first performed at Columbia University, New York in 1941.
Whether through annoyance at the Englishmen for attempting a work on such an all-American theme, or dislike of the piece itself, the critics were overwhelmingly hostile. ‘As bewildering and irritating a treatment of the outsize lumberman as any two Englishmen could have devised’, wrote Time magazine. A ‘musico-theatrical flop’ was the verdict of composer and critic Virgil Thomson.
The piece was seemingly much too long. Milton Smith, the director, told Britten’s biographer Donald Mitchell of his unsuccessful attempts to persuade Britten and Auden to make cuts. After the first night, he was begged to make the cuts he'd long been advocating but by then, he said, ‘the boat had sailed’. Paul Bunyan was withdrawn, and only revived in 1976, in a much amended version. In the Donald Mitchell Archive at the British Library, and featured in the exhibition, are some rare colour photographs of the première and a recording of part of it. Although the sound quality of the recording is quite poor, it gives us a tantalising glimpse of how Paul Bunyan sounded before Britten revised it, and how it was received in 1941. Even if the critics remained unmoved, it's clear from the laughter and applause that the audience members were enjoying themselves.
As well as composing for the cinema and theatre, Britten also provided music for nearly 30 UK and US radio productions in the 1930s and 1940s. The Rocking-Horse Winner was a radio play adapted by W.H. Auden and James Stern from D.H. Lawrence's short story of the same name, first broadcast by CBS in 1941. Britten composed eight numbers, which were conducted by Bernard Herrmann. The score doesn't seem to have survived, but the annotated script, on display, is preserved among the James Stern Papers at the British Library.
Britten’s last major collaboration with W.H. Auden is also one of his best-known pieces, the Hymn to St Cecilia, for unaccompanied chorus. The pair worked worked together closely on the text while Britten was still living in the USA. In March 1942, homesick for England, Britten left America on a cargo ship to return permanently to the UK with Pears, and during the return voyage completed the music. It was first performed in November 1942, in a radio broadcast by the BBC Singers. The first page of Britten’s autograph draft, on display, reveals that he originally called the work ‘Song for St Cecilia’.
Auden remained in the USA, and with the closing of this chapter in his life, Britten abruptly cut his ties with the poet. Like many people who upset Britten or outlived their usefulness, Auden became one of his 'corpses', former friends and associates who were banished from his life.
In my next Britten post, I'll be focusing on the composer's attitude to war, his stance as a conscientious objector and his mighty War Requiem.
05 June 2013
Dramatised reading of Wagner's Ring cycle, Sunday 9 June
Rehearsals are continuing apace for the dramatised reading this Sunday of Richard Wagner's entire Ring cycle in the British Library Conference Centre. The reading takes its cue from Wagner's own practice of reciting from the libretto in public or to guests after dinner, providing a rare opportunity to experience the richness and subtlety of Wagner's writing and to thrill to the drama of the text as poetry.
Directed by William Relton, the 'British Library Ring Cycle' will be more than a simple read-through. Judging from today's dress rehearsal, the audience can look forward to an enthralling and dramatic semi-staging with a cast of outstanding recent graduates of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Presiding throughout the performance as narrator will be the great operatic bass and linchpin of Wagner productions at the Bayreuth Festival, at Covent Garden and at opera houses around the world over the past two decades, Sir John Tomlinson.
An integral part of the performance will the projection of early pictorial interpretations of scenes from the Ring on the big screen, adding visual expression to the dramatic experience. The illustrations will be drawn from the work of artists including Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), Josef Hoffmann (1833-1904), and Igance Fantin-Latour (1836-1904). We'll also be showcasing the work of contemporary artist Phil Redford, whose amazing hand printed linocut books of illustrations of the Ring and Tristan und Isolde produced between 1992 and 2005 are held at the Library.
The full cast details are as follows:
Sir John Tomlinson (Narrator)
Gethin Alderman (Wotan)
Rebecca Dickson-Black (Brünnhilde)
Mathew Foster (Siegfried/Donner)
Daryl Armstrong (Alberich)
Jason Broderick (Mime)
Kane Surry (Loge/Gunther)
Sara Hirsch (Fricka/Helwige/Gutrune)
Maryanna Hedges (Wellgunde/Sieglinde)
Matt Beveridge (Froh/Siegmund)
Simon Lyshon (Fasolt/Hagen)
Mischa Resnick (Fafner)
Emily Jane Kerr (Erda/Schwertleite)
Paula Carson (Waltraute)
Julia Jade-Duffy (Freia/Siegrune/Second Norn)
Pernille Haaland (Rossweise/Woodbird/Third Norn)
Melissa Ulloa (Woglinde/Grimgerde)
Lauren Osborn (Flosshilde/Gerhilde)
Lucy Bairstow (Ortlinde/ First Norn)
William Relton (Director)
Truly Lin (Assistant Director)
Tickets are available via the BL website: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event145303.html
Approximate timings:
11.00 The Rhinegold
12.10 Break
12.20 The Valkyrie
13.45 Lunch break
14.45 Siegfried
16.25 Break
16.35 Twilight of the Gods
18.00 End
04 June 2013
Benjamin Britten exhibition launched at the British Library
On Friday we launched a new exhibition on Benjamin Britten in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Library. This free exhibition runs until 15 September 2013 and is part of the international Britten 100 festivities marking the centenary of the composer's birth.
In the exhibition, Poetry in Sound: the music of Benjamin Britten, we explore the literary influences on Britten's music, from William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, as well as some of the political and musical influences that shaped his work.
In addition to several of Britten's own draft manuscripts, including The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and War Requiem, we've included photographs, rare literary and historical printed material and unpublished sound recordings. Over the coming days, I shall be blogging about some of the key exhibits on display.
To mark Britten's centenary, we have also digitised all 42 of the autograph manuscripts of Britten in the British Library's collection. The manuscripts are now freely available for everyone to see and study on our Digitised Manuscripts website. (You just need to type 'Britten' in the search box to find them.) We are very grateful to all the copyright holders for allowing us to make the manuscripts available online.
The Library is also staging a series of related Britten events and performances. For more details of the exhibition and events, please see www.bl.uk/britten.
22 May 2013
Wagner goes online at 200
22 May 2013 is the 200th birthday of probably the most influential composer ever to have lived, Wilhelm Richard Wagner. The British Library is celebrating this anniversary with a study day on Wagner the Writer as well as a complete performance of the Ring cycle – without music! We have also taken the opportunity to publish those of Wagner’s original manuscripts which happen to reside in the Library on our Digitised Manuscripts website. Since many of them are extremely fragile and cannot normally be issued in our Reading Rooms, we are delighted to make high-resolution digital images of them freely available on the internet. They include some pivotal works in the development of Wagner’s career, and shed fascinating light on the working practices of the master of the music drama.
The British Library’s collection of printed editions of Wagner’s music is near comprehensive, with more than 2000 publications at the last count. Put together with a similar number of books about him, and perhaps 20,000 recordings, this makes the Library a major research resource for anyone with a serious interest in Wagner.
In this context, the Library holds only a minute amount of original material written in Wagner’s own hand, and most of it comes from early in his career. Nevertheless, it sheds much light on the way in which Wagner composed, and the means by which he honed his genius as a writer and a composer.
The earliest manuscript in the Library’s collections is a draft piano score of an orchestral Overture in E minor, composed when Wagner was 18 years old. It is one of his very first surviving compositions: although it is number 24 in the chronological catalogue ‘WWV’, many of the earlier pieces (from the age of 13 onwards) are now lost. It was performed in the Hoftheater in Leipzig on 17 February 1832 as the overture to King Enzio, a play by Ernst Raupach.
Other very early works include an Entr’acte tragique in D major (WWV 25 no.1), for which there is a draft in short score as well as a fragmentary full score. In November 1832, Wagner’s first symphony was performed in Prague. His full score of the work is lost (though a copyist’s score survives at Bayreuth, and the work was published after his death), but Wagner made a piano duet version of the first movement. Incidental music for a festival play to welcome in the new year of 1835 was performed in Magdeburg and provides further evidence of Wagner’s early involvement with the stage.
Wagner’s three early forays into the medium of opera show us the starting points of the process which was to develop into the masterworks of his maturity. Die Feen (The Fairies) is based on a play by Carlo Gozzi and fits very much into the German Romantic tradition of Weber and his contemporary Heinrich Marschner. Already we see the composer working on drafts of the text separately from the music. Das Liebesverbot (The Love-Ban) derives from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and is modelled much more closely on French and Italian opera, especially Auber and Bellini. The opera was first performed in Magdeburg on 29 March 1836, and Wagner subsequently revised his German libretto in a densely-written French translation, in the hope of securing a production in Paris: this manuscript includes the draft of a letter to Meyerbeer (now lost) asking for his help in doing so. As well as the almost complete libretti in both languages, there is a draft score of the Overture and sketches for several later sections, some in pencil and others in ink, usually conceived on one or two staves. These initial ideas were later worked into a draft score, which in turn led to the complete full score. For his next stage work, Wagner turned more directly to Meyerbeer for inspiration: Rienzi is grand opera writ large. Although intended for the Paris stage, it eventually received its first performance in Dresden on 20 October 1842. The staging requirements were too onerous for the Hoftheater, and this detailed memorandum suggests means of coping with a smaller chorus. Unfortunately the full scores of all three of these operas are now lost: they were among the manuscripts acquired by Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday.
Wagner’s compositional journey towards the Gesamtkunstwerk was gradual, and these early operas were followed by other occasional pieces, including his Overture ‘Polonia’, written in 1836 as a reminiscence of his time as a student in Leipzig when he befriended Polish soldiers fleeing from the fall of Warsaw to the Russians in September 1831, who passed through Leipzig to exile in France.
Another nationalist overture was written in 1837, this time for the Philharmonic Society in London, which declined to perform the work on grounds of its ‘being written on a Theme which is here considered common place’: Rule Britannia. Other curiosities include settings of poems by Victor Hugo, a chorus for a vaudeville and an instrumental arrangement of a popular number from an opera by Halévy.
The only work of Wagner’s maturity for which manuscripts are kept in the British Library is The Flying Dutchman. One consequence of the revolutionary principle of organic unity which Wagner first displayed in this work was that the overture continues straight into the music of Act I, as the curtain rises. In order to make the overture performable as a separate concert piece, Wagner therefore wrote an alternative ending, which he attached to this copy score of the overture. He also planned French translations of some of the work.
Finally, there are various letters by Wagner in the Library’s collections. Among these one stands out in particular: it is a letter written in January 1849 to Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld. Wagner outlines his belief in the interdependence of poetry and music, the natural consequence of which is that music drama is the highest possible form of art. These ideas were to find more extended exposure in his famous treatise on The Artwork of the Future — and of course would be manifested in the great works of his final years.
Almost all of these manuscripts were apparently collected by Leopold, Graf von Thun und Hohenstein (1811–88), Austrian minister for culture and a keen musical amateur. In 1887 they were acquired by the collector Albert Cohn, and in 1937 were sold to the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. His magnificent collection of musical, literary and historical autographs was presented to the British Library by his heirs in 1986, and this is the first stage in a project supported by the Derek Butler Trust to make all of the manuscripts in this remarkable collection freely available online.
To see a full list of all the digitised Wagner manuscripts, search for "Wagner" on www.bl.uk/manuscripts. For more information on other bicentenary events, including the British Library Study Day and complete reading of the Ring cycle, visit www.wagner200.co.uk.
16 May 2013
Wagner weekend at the British Library, 8-9 June
Saturday 8 June
Study Day: Wagner the Writer
British Library Conference Centre, 10.30-17.00
Wagner's writings range widely over subjects as various as race, climate, vegetarianism, aesthetics and modern science. Above all he was formulating ideas that would take dramatic shape in his operas. Distinguished musicologists, literary historians, and translators speak about Wagner's immense literary output with opportunities for discussion and debate. The day will include sessions on Wagner as Librettist, Wagner's Paris writings (1840-42), the Later Aesthetic Essays, and a roundtable discussion on translating Wagner's prose and poetic texts. Speakers include Roger Allen, Hilda Brown, Bojan Bujic, Katharine Ellis, Tash Siddiqui, David Trippett, and Emma Warner. The study day is presented in association with The Wagner Journal and the Wagner 200 Festival, and coincides with the digitisation of the Library's Wagner holdings.
Tickets and further details: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event145295.html
Sunday 9 June
Wagner's Ring cycle: a complete reading
British Library Conference Centre, 11.00-18.00
A reading of the entire Ring cycle, in English, featuring Sir John Tomlinson and a company of young actors from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, directed by William Relton. This event provides a rare opportunity both to experience the richness and subtlety of Wagner's writing and to thrill to the drama of the text as poetry. The reading will be illustrated with scenes from the Ring, by artists including Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), projected on the big screen.
Tickets and further details: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event145303.html
Music blog recent posts
- Frédéric Kastner’s singing flames
- Elgar’s musical sketches reunited at the British Library
- Nino Rota’s I due timidi - an opera for radio transmission
- Beethoven and Zweig
- Update on Music E-resources
- The Susan Bradshaw Papers: Archive of an Insightful Communicator
- William Byrd, catholic composer
- Welcome to Discovering Music
- Chopin First Editions available online
- More Digitised Music Manuscripts available online
Archives
Tags
- Acquisitions
- Africa
- Americas
- Classical music
- Contemporary Britain
- Digital scholarship
- Digitisation
- East Asia
- eResources
- Events
- Film
- Georgians-revealed
- Germanic
- Humanities
- LGBTQ+
- Literature
- Manuscripts
- Medieval history
- Middle East
- Music
- Newsroom
- Philatelic
- Popular music
- Printed music
- Projects
- Rare books
- Recordings
- Research collaboration
- Russian Revolution
- Slavonic
- Sound and vision
- South Asia
- Visual arts
- World and traditional music
- Writing