What a pleasure it was, in the week straddling February and March, to re-visit two favorite pieces of music! Both recall the second decade of the twentieth century.
Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” which builds on a poetic text by James Agee, never fails to move me with its bittersweet memory of child-hood. As sung by soprano Jayne West and played by the Boston Philharmonic under Benjamin Zander’s direction, this work stirred up the vision of a different America, yet one where the familiar deepest questions about life arise.
An autobiographical fragment from Agee, the text, as set to music by Barber, conveys the feeling of a summer evening and the varied noises of a neighborhood. People sit on their porches rocking back and forth; both people and things go by. This peaceful atmosphere is interrupted by a streetcar “raising its iron moan.”
The child, his parents, uncle, and aunt lie on quilts spread in the back yard. They talk quietly while under the stars that seem very near. Among the voices the child hears are those of his mother “who is good to me” and his father of whom the child uses the same words.
And, yet, “who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,” the narra-tor asks himself. Thinking of his parents, he asks God to “remember them kindly in their time of trouble and in their hour of taking away.”
Finally, he is put to bed and “soft, smiling sleep” approaches. But he wonders about those who love and care for him “but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”
The life-long quest for self-identity is a theme many of us older people re-flect upon. We think back to our childhood and evoke scenes like that drawn by James Agee. The sounds of our early years form part of this recollection, those noises characteristic of the places where we grew up.
Though Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” recalls the same historical era, it differs sharply from “Knoxville.” Britten chooses texts from the Latin Requiem Mass and from the anti-war poet Wilfred Owen. He weaves the two in and out, using the poet’s words as a commentary (often ironic) on the liturgical text.
The oratorio was written to mark the consecration in 1962 of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, England. The original building had been largely demolished by German bombers in1940.
As performed by the Boston Symphony with outstanding soloists Chris-tine Goerke, Ian Bostridge, and Thomas Quasthoff, and both adult and children’s choruses, the work received a fervently appreciative response from audience members. Its skillful mix of so many musical and linguistic forces stirred us listeners to admiration.
For critic Michael Steinberg, the collision between innocence and corruption runs through all of Britten’s work including the “War Requiem.” In the Of-fertory of the requiem, for instance, after the chorus sings of God’s promise to “Abraham and his seed,” the words of Wilfred Owen come as a shock. In Owen’s text, as in the Bible, Abraham is told to sacrifice a ram in place of his son Isaac: “But the old man would not do so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”
In the liturgical poem Dies Irae, the sinner asks Jesus for mercy and ap-peals to his forgiveness of Mary Magdalen and the Good Thief. In response Wil-fred Owens pessimistically prays for deliverance from the arrogance that causes war: “Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm / Great gun towering toward Hea-ven, about to curse; / Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm, / And beat it down before its sins grow worse; / But when thy spell be cast complete and whole, / May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!”
The bitter catastrophe that was the first world war polluted the first part of the century just finished. The memory of how it destroyed a civilization and prepared for the horrors of the second world war only thirty years later must have impressed itself deeply on the parents and grandparents of today’s old people.
If, as a Swedish scholar has observed, it is a mark of later life to experience an “increasing sense of connection to earlier generations,” artistic works like the two cited here enhance that connection. They remind us both of a different world that existed before America’s entrance into the Great War and of the loss of innocence brought on by that war.
The musical artists, Britten and Barber, and the poetic artists, Owen and Agee, enable us to enter into both experiences. The one set of events, taking place on a world stage, was epic in its effects. The other, a domestic scene that focuses on the microcosm of one man’s life, raises deep questions about who each one of us is.
Richard Griffin