Faculty Scholarship
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
Summer 6-11-2017
Abstract
Britten wrote a number of vocal works that compose bouquets of poems around a central theme. In these themed song cycles, he often uses motives to forge connections between different poems, suggesting intertextual relationships that transcend the original meaning of the poems, but render the song cycle more cohesive by underscoring its thematic unity. This chapter focuses on the motif of the semitone, which I nickname Britten’s Slippery Semitone. This motif is not unique to Britten, but he masterfully manipulates it in his music. I show that the Slippery Semitone underlies some of the most characteristic features of Britten’s music, and that it permeates his music, from his juvenilia up to works that he composed in his final years, thus evincing its dominance in Britten’s musical thought. I then discuss Slippery Semitone in The Poet’s Echo, op. 76 (1965) and Serenade, op. 31 (1943), and examine how the motif creates meaningful intertextual relationships in both song cycles. In The Poet’s Echo, I consider motivic recollection and transformation in the framing songs, “Echo” and “Lines Written during a Sleepless Night,” and suggest that they create coherence in the form of a single poet persona whose experiences unify the texts of the song cycle. I consider the same issues of motivic recollection and transformation in Serenade, but on different levels of the work and in relation to texts of disparate authorship. Specific moments discussed come from the songs, “Elegy” and “Dirge,” as well as the work’s Epilogue. In both analyses, besides addressing motives’ melodic and harmonic aspects, as well as relationship to text, I also address certain physical performative aspects, building on Stephen Rodger’s recent discussion of the “fourth dimension” of song. In the closing section, I explore the semitone’s extra-musical significance, suggesting that the philosophical concept of ambivalence, first defined in Frankfurt (1999) as a problem, but whose value and validity have been defended by others, notably Marino (2011), can help us understand Britten’s enduring engagement with the motif. Instead of being a sublimation of guilt or tensions between moral and less-moral desires, the motif is a musical representation of Britten’s lifelong meditation on divisions that are internal and yet integral to his self and personal identity.
Description
A chapter from Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium (ed. Quinn Patrick Ankrum, David Forrest, Stacey Jocoy), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.
Recommended Citation
“Britten’s Slippery Semitone and Motivic Intertextuality in The Poet’s Echo, op. 76, and Serenade, op. 31.” In Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium, edited by David Forrest et al, 145–180. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.
