More Feeling than Painting

Music by Hosokawa, Britten, and Beethoven

Gavin Plumley

Beethoven’s declaration that his “Pastoral” Symphony was more “the expression of feeling than painting” has been taken many ways. Some commentators have pointed to musical concerns overriding anything programmatic, often in fear of being sullied by such associations. Others, meanwhile, have pointed to the title of the Symphony’s first movement as indication that any program is more experiential than actual. Nonetheless, a narrative is presented, distinctions between movements are blurred, and one of the most associative works that Beethoven created remains evergreen.

A Symbolic Flower

So does the symbiosis of experience and feeling found in Toshio Hosokawa’s Blossoming II. Written for chamber orchestra, the work was first performed at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival. It followed a similarly entitled string quartet by the Hiroshima-born composer, who now splits his time between Japan and his adopted hometown of Mainz, as well as a horn concerto, subtitled Moment of Blossoming. Together, the works point to a prevailing focus at that point in Hosokawa’s career: “Over the last few years, I have composed on the theme of ‘flowers.’ My grandfather was a master of Ikebana (the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement);

Zeami, the original practitioner of the traditional Japanese theater form Nō, considered the best performer a ‘flower.’ The deep roots of flowers in Japanese aesthetics and spirituality led me to them as the subject of this work. The flower I’m imagining in this work is a lotus, which is the symbolic flower of Buddhism. The flower and I are one; the blossoming of the flower represents my shedding of my skin, my self-discovery.”

Blossoming II begins with a single note, albeit one that pulses and surges. This, in turn, gives way to associated sounds—whispers, feints, penumbra—all focused on that initial note. Eventually, however, the center cannot hold and, instead, gives way to new notes, “blossoming” in their own way, and in turn illuminating the point of departure, as well as delivering quietly violent results. The journey to self-discovery is not, just as in Beethoven’s “Pastoral,” without its storms and sorrows—hence the cadaverous tamtam—or without moments of ravishing beauty, yet the evanescent stillness that is found at the close is all the richer for it.

Coming Out

A different kind of resolution is sought in Benjamin Britten’s 1939 song cycle Les Illuminations. The young composer had struggled to reconcile himself to his homosexuality, which had become a point of tension with his artistic collaborators during the 1930s. W. H. Auden, for instance, had, in poetic form, bidden Britten to resolve the matter. “Underneath an abject willow, / Lover, sulk no more,” it began, before offering a final command: “Walk then, come, / No longer numb / Into your satisfaction.” Away from Auden and his joyfully promiscuous friend Christopher Isherwood, Britten had nonetheless embarked on physical relationships of his own, including with Wulff Scherchen (son of the conductor Hermann) and, most famously, Peter Pears.

By 1939, however, a future with Pears seemed most likely. In the spring, the pair fled Britain, fearing another world war, and followed Auden and Isherwood’s route across the Atlantic. Arriving in Canada, the couple soon made their way to New York. And while Young Apollo, the first work Britten composed in North America, had Scherchen as its muse, as with the song Antique in Les Illuminations, Pears entered the frame with the resolutely erotic Being Beauteous

The choice of Rimbaud’s poetry—another Auden introduction —was fitting, given the Frenchman’s unashamed homosexuality.

Similarly apt was the location of the poems’ creation—London— thereby creating a rich symbiosis of poet and composer in exile, as if they were exchanging ideas across the decades. Yet it was the simultaneous allure and disgust of the urban, couched in many of these verses, that doubtless inspired Britten while experiencing the buzz and brutality of New York City. It was a far cry from rural Suffolk, though Britten and Pears soon preferred to spend time in the Catskills or on Long Island, rather than among the madness of Manhattan.

Beginning with a fanfare, as in other early song cycles such as Our Hunting Fathers and On This Island, Britten reveals an extended if surreal vision of city life. Strident and sassy, Villes offers more than a hint of his later friend Poulenc’s mélodies, notwithstanding the palpable American drive. Finally, the song skulks into the distance and gives way to the eerie Phrase, recalling Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, before a more tenacious diatonicism emerges in Scherchen’s song Antique.

A courtly, Rameau-esque mood continues in Royauté, with a heavier dose of irony that undermines the claims in Rimbaud’s text. Something of the “Sunday Morning” interlude from Britten’s later, post-war success Peter Grimes is then summoned in Marine. But despite its spirit and spray, it proves as febrile as what has gone before, hence the somewhat confused repetition of “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (I alone have the key to this savage parade).

There is no doubt that the emotional core of the cycle is Being Beauteous, which, along with Marine, was performed at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert in London on August 17, 1939—its composer and dedicatee absent. The cycle was then finished just weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. But it was only in May 1941, at the complete work’s U.S. premiere, that Pears performed his musical portrait in public. Tender, daringly intimate, it marked Britten’s coming out, not only in terms of his sexuality, but also in providing a platform for the man who would remain his companion for nearly 40 years.

Furtive paranoia infects Parade, as if the vision revealed might be compromised by rogues both young and old, though the triumphant repeat of the refrain makes it clear that their assertions are baseless. Instead, the rapt Départ turns away from the city’s “violent paradise” and leaves “into new affection and noise.” Auden’s command to Britten had finally been answered.