Uttered music

David Wright reviews Britten’s musical language (Cambridge UP, £50, $75) by Philip Rupprecht

‘The most telling moments in Britten’s work are just that — moments, single utterances whose uncanny reverberating force springs from a careful ‘staging’ in relation to larger dramatic unfoldings, as well as on the distinctive profile of local gesture.’ The perception that Britten’s operas turn on epiphanic moments in which music and drama seem to fuse into a single dimension is one that enthusiasts for Britten’s music are certainly likely to share. And from the early stages of Britten’s career, critical commentaries of the music, such as those by Henry Boys and Erwin Stein drew attention to the outstanding qualities evident in the composer’s approach to word setting, perhaps best conjured up by Edward Sackville-West’s wonderfully suggestive phrase, ‘sensibility, quick as a fish’s fin, to a poetic image’. But Rupprecht’s purpose in writing about Britten’s musical language is to go beyond a conventional assessment of text-setting, expressed as an appreciation of the moment-to-moment enhancement of individual words or phrases through musical imagery. Instead, Rupprecht uses models taken from literary theory to examine how, in linguistic terms, the verbal text functions in the operatic context and from that basis he then explores the capacity of music to relate explicitly to this in its own terms and in ways that establish a deeper, structural, fusion of music and text. The literary model with which Rupprecht initiates his investigation is JL Austin’s concept of performative language, in which, as Austin expresses it, ‘to say something is to do something’.

A scene from Britten's Curlew River. Peter Pears, as the Madwoman, collapses at the foot of the Cross

JL Austin gives a familiar example of how performative language works, using the ‘I do’ of the wedding ceremony, as an example in which, as the respondent, ‘I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it’, or, in effect, using words in such a way that they are understood in the sense of performing the action that is so signalled. Because this linguistic type depends for its understanding entirely upon the context in which it is generated and received, it is, necessarily, contingent and (because it forms part of a verbal exchange) socially ordered. But while JL Austin’s own division of language into ‘performative’ and ‘constative’ functions (the latter being statements that are, essentially, either true or false) ultimately became difficult to maintain as distinct categories, Rupprecht’s approach, as illustrated by his discussion of Peter Grimes, identifies and isolates for examination those particular moments upon which the opera may be said to turn, and to relate them to the unfolding of the work, tracing the progress of a particular musico-dramatic theme as it develops. Rupprecht’s argument — as is shown by the quotation heading this review — is that such moments, which carry deep structural significance, are only able to function in this way because of the fusion of verbal and musical utterance. His conclusion is that at the heart of Britten’s musical language lies the composer’s ability to achieve a degree of musical-verbal integration that is more complete, and therefore more significant for his purpose, than can be conveyed by a conventional discussion of text setting. Rupprecht’s main themes, as revealed by his chapter headings, are: ‘Peter Grimes: the force of operatic utterance’; ‘Motive and narrative in Billy Budd’; ‘The Turn of the Screw: innocent performance’; ‘Rituals: the War Requiem and Curlew River’; and, ‘Subjectivity and perception in Death in Venice’.

The Peter Grimes chapter provides a good illustration of Rupprecht’s approach and his range of reference. In particular, it shows the working out of two of his primary concerns, of looking at ways in which ‘music can articulate the basically social, interpersonal force of all utterance’, and its ‘ability to confer ritual status on collective acts of song’. He first calls attention to the function of the opera’s opening words, Hobson’s abrupt command ‘Peter Grimes’, as the fisherman is called to appear before the court. As Rupprecht expresses it, Britten sets this in a way that is ‘mechanical in rhythm and monotone in pitch, yet these features are not based in imagery or prosody but in social relations’. Hobson’s order is, by its nature, an assertion of power that simultaneously signals Grimes’s want of it, so establishing the context for an opera that Philip Brett has described as a study in ‘the social experience of oppression’. This event is also the first occurrence of the iteration of Grime’s name, something which functions through a variety of contexts to form a significant point of the drama’s articulation. Rupprecht’s reading traces the musical treatments that accompany the successive acts of ‘naming’ across the opera: ‘Naming provides the mechanism by which Grimes the individual is defined, publicly, within the opera and the means by which he is isolated by the collective. The Grimes drama is pervaded by moments when the simple utterance of Peter’s name assumes a remarkable power to coerce, to wound and — finally — to destroy.’ This discussion relates explanation of the idea of ‘naming’, as something familiar from literary theory, to an illustration of the range of musical characterisations of Grimes’s name that Britten employs across the opera, a variety of differently weighted treatments that ensures the continued potency of this as a device that eventually climaxes in Grimes’s final scene, with his despairing cry of ‘Do you hear them all shouting my name?’.

A notable aspect of this book, and one that provides solid underpinning for its argument, is the quality of Rupprecht’s musical analysis. The degree of refinement he brings to his readings of the musical situation lends support to his ability to demonstrate that while in principle performatives function in linguistic terms as much on the operatic stage as they do off it, their force within the operatic context is entirely dependent upon the quality and the weight which is accorded to their musical realisation. In his discussion of the Act 2 Scene 2 duet between Grimes and Ellen, which results in his striking her, Rupprecht considers that it is Grimes’s prayer (or ‘actional’ speech), ‘So be it, And God have mercy upon me’ rather than the physical violence of the blow that marks the pivotal moment of the drama, because ‘As an utterance that can’t be taken back, the prayer marks the beginning of Peter’s own end’. But the basis of his argument is that the moment in which Grime’s prayer is uttered in fact represents the culmination of a range of forces acting upon him, and this moment is so powerful precisely because of that multiplicity and the resonance set up by those earlier acts. In consequence, Rupprecht argues that ‘taken together, the various illocutionary forces encapsulated in this single moment confer upon it the weight of a quasi-ceremonial utterance’, one that has an obvious allusion to the judicial formula used to pronounce death, and which Rupprecht accordingly describes as Grimes’s ‘self-sentencing’, also relating back to his phrase in the Prologue, ‘Let me stand trial’. The musical relationships that are drawn out in this passage, with the inversion of Grime’s prayer phrase as a basis of the repetitions of ‘Grimes is at his exercise’ in what Rupprecht describes as the ‘choral hate speech’ which follows, indeed demonstrate the quality of the creative musical process that marked Britten’s intuitive response in his treatment of the text.

Rupprecht’s book represents an important contribution to Britten scholarship, in which multidisciplinary points of reference open up new avenues of investigation and interpretation, not only in respect of the work of this particular composer, but for opera studies more generally. Some readers may feel that the book’s relationship to literary theory will inevitably make it irredeemably alien, obscure or just condemnable as ‘new musicology’. That would be a pity, for the quality of its musical perception, and the clarity with which the whole approach feeds into an interpretative purpose, means that the book has riches to offer readers who just wish to deepen their engagement with Britten’s operas. Essentially, Rupprecht proceeds from the basis of perceptive critical observation whose engagement with literary theory and other disciplines gives an added dimension to our understanding of why Britten’s operas work in the way that they do. His discussion of Curlew River, for example, provides another example of how a more widely-considered approach results in a penetrating discussion of the work’s ritual element in a way that offers an illuminating perspective to its reception and understanding.

In addition, the development of new critical contexts for exploring Britten’s operatic writing and the composer’s use of the genre as the means to the metaphorical treatment of taboo subjects are also likely to suggest fresh perceptions of Britten’s relations within his own society. For what comes through with renewed force in Rupprecht’s reading of Peter Grimes, is the suggestion that a deeper sense of alienation between the homosexual composer and the ‘official’ society to which, by his own wish, he undoubtedly belonged, is being worked through in the opera; more so, perhaps, than even such a brilliantly evocative musical surface as this can hint at.