Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The Little Blueprint? - thinking about Librettos

In the early 2000s, I wrote the libretto for a musical adaptation of  T.G.H. Strehlow's Journey to Horseshoe Bend. The novel is an account of a young boy and his family's attempt in 1922 to flee their home in remote, inland Australia and get to the coastal city of Adelaide where his desperately-ill father can receive medical attention. As the family travels through Australia's desert regions, the boy Theo becomes aware of his missionary father's mortality even as their Aboriginal guides awaken him to the totemic significance of the landscape. The work that Andrew Schultz and I wrote, based on Strehlow's novel, therefore blends Aboriginal lore, language and vocal-style with the European orchestra and European choral tradition.   

As I have again been thinking about the nature of libretto-writing lately, I thought I’d reprint this article which first appeared in 2007 in the Manchester University Press/Open University publication: Music, words and voice: A reader.

The Little Blueprint? – an amplification of the meaning of ‘libretto’ 


A lyricist once couldn’t help himself when he heard someone whistling a Tom Jones hit. ‘I wrote the words,’ he skited. Annoyed at being interrupted, the whistler said, through clenched teeth, ‘I wasn’t…whistling…the words.’  Does this sum up the problem for lyricists, and by extension librettists? Should we expect people to pay more attention to the words?

Actually, you’ll get a much better sense of what makes a libretto if you see it as more than merely ‘the words’, or the ‘words on the page’. In its largest sense a libretto is a suggestion to the composer of what s/he should achieve dramatically. That’s not to say that a libretto can’t possibly have its own reading pleasures. Many of the examples below are drawn from the libretto for Andrew Schultz’s and my Journey to Horseshoe Bend which to a greater-than-usual extent betrays its origins in a book, the book of the same name by T.G.H. Strehlow[1]. Of course Journey to Horseshoe Bend (JHB) is not an opera either, and it could be instructive to wonder why not. But a libretto, whether to an opera, oratorio or cantata, should only really be fully assessed alongside the music that it leads to.

When colleagues of mine derided the libretto of La traviata as ‘terrible writing’ I suspect they had mistakenly judged it as armchair reading or playscript. But were they reading it for the aurals and visuals suggested by the text, that is, testing to see if it contained what Verdi called ‘scenic’ words? Were they reading it to see what musical product Verdi could make of it?

I sense that much of the underestimation of libretti relates to an overestimation of the importance of words in theatre. Being able to write good dialogue does not necessarily make a good playwright. This is to miss the other essential dimensions that make good theatre. It’s probably best not to think of words as the basic unit in a libretto either. What’s more important is something bigger – a physical action, a use of the space, a psychological beat – albeit all with musical resonance. You can of course suggest action and shape with any number of words. To produce something as refined as 20 pages of libretto requires precision and control as well as powers of suggestion.

Is Piave’s libretto to La traviata really so poor? It sets up strongly contrasting characters in strong situations reflected in different settings. It provides good opportunities for contrasting music, but guaranteeing a forward flow. This text may be sparse – and when you read it aloud you get through its transitions quicker than spoken dramatic development should let you - but the point is it is text waiting to be sung, action waiting to be set to music. When performed it is complete. Librettist and composer have contributed. They were both creators; they were each other’s first audience.

It should be said that Journey to Horseshoe Bend was the result of a true collaboration. While Andrew and I didn’t do each other’s jobs, we discussed the work for a good two years, shared ideas, felt comfortable making suggestions about either libretto or score and mostly found ways to incorporate each other’s suggestions, even if there were initial doubts. There was a vigorous to-and-fro.
--

Opera reformers have often started with the words. Wagner’s theoretical text, Oper und Drama promoted a relationship between words and music. Wagner is thought to have backed down when he came to write Tristan und Isolde, under the influence of the philosopher Schopenhauer, who had put music on a pedestal. We have in Tristan and Act III of Siegfried moments of pure sound, melismas on single syllables even, which the younger Wagner had derided. The music clearly comes first – or does it? After Oper und Drama, as Jack M Stein pointed out years ago in Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, Wagner wrote an essay called Beethoven, in which he lit on another opposite partner to music, what he called ‘pantomime’.[2] It was music and action that he paired in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the other work (besides Tristan) that he took time out to write before returning to the Ring and the dramatic high pressure of Götterdämmerung.

We have here a clue to what else the libretto is besides a ‘little book’. It’s a little springboard for musical action. The libretto is, in addition to words and perhaps more importantly, the larger plot movements, sequence, scenes, mise-en-scène, characters, numbers, a suggestion of duration, proportion and pace. It might even hint at a compositional scheme. J.D. McClatchy (1984, An American Tragedy) tells of how he first presented a libretto A Question of Taste, to William Schuman, who said ‘they [the words] don’t do anything for me.’[3] McClatchy tried to point out that ‘the image in line 3 links up in line 6,’ but Schuman cut him off: ‘I told you it [the libretto] didn’t do anything for me.’ McClatchy went back and introduced a new character to add a tenor voice, formulated more solos, duets and choruses, and thought less ‘of the dramatic unfolding and more of the musical progression.’

Early on in the creation of JHB (at libretto stage) I developed a sense of musical numbers that Strehlow’s work could be broken into. This partly determined the means of making the adaptation from T.G.H. Strehlow’s 220-page novel. Bringing the chorale Wachet auf in as soon possible meant fast-forwarding through the first 22 pages of Strehlow’s text. Indeed the first pages of Strehlow’s book were rethought to provide musical opportunities – sunrise, chorale, travelling music. Andrew and I discussed the idea of the three significant stopping places in the novel (Henbury, Idracowra and Horseshoe Bend) being ‘camps’ or points of rest, defining three Acts, or the parts of a broadly ternary form. Notwithstanding the fact that Andrew agreed early on that the work would be through-composed (and this accounts greatly for the inexorability of the work’s progress to Pastor Carl’s death), I am convinced that thinking the libretto in terms of set numbers also helped crystallise the moments.

The first draft of the libretto for JHB is very like prose, a cut and paste from the novel to work out what more to cut. The cantata was initially conceived as a work for narrator, chorus and orchestra. To study the various drafts is to follow the course of a piece of writing towards the status of a libretto. Of course our JHB doesn’t become a fully-staged opera, but subsequent drafts took on more musico-dramatic aspects. At first there was no boy soprano Theo, and passages such as the third scene’s night journey through the desert oaks were conveyed more prosaically:



Journey to Horseshoe Bend, scene 3 - 1st draft[4]

CHORUS
Friday, 25 October.

NARRATOR
‘It was half past two next morning when Theo was wakened by the sudden blazing of the restoked campfire and the talking of Njitiaka and Lornie, who were rolling up their blankets (87).’
They broke camp ‘and the van moved away from the cheery blaze of the campfire into -’

NARRATOR & CHORUS
 - ‘the moonlit sandhill silence (87).’

Processional (Brittania Sandhills) music: the ‘sighing of casuarinas’. Sandhill music.

NARRATOR
‘The resinous scent emanating from the bulging tufts of spinifex…was not as overwhelming in the cool night air as it had been in the heat of the previous evening; but it nevertheless pervaded the whole atmosphere with the unmistakable menace of its aroma. For here as elsewhere in the Centre this resinous fragrance drew attention to the deep loneliness and the dangerous waterlessness of the huge inland sandhill regions (87).’
‘[The] continual sighing of the magnificent desert oaks in the soft night breeze indicated the extraordinary length to which their jointed needle-like leaves had grown (88).’
Theo thought of the iliaka njemba, the emu-like phantom that terrified Aranda children.
‘The black forests of desert oaks, whose moon-silvered crests were shimmering so brightly, kept on exciting Theo’s intense admiration (90);’ ‘Talpa, not taia,’ said Njitiaka, correcting Theo’s western Aranda word for ‘moon’….He pointed out some of the prominent sites.

‘NJITIAKA’[5]
Nakua potta kuka [   ], raka kngara [  ]

NARRATOR
‘Gradually the dark eastern horizon became tinged with grey. The blurred and shapeless tree forms began to reveal their limbs with increasing clarity. The eastern sky became overspread by a reddish-yellow tinge, and finally the spinifex tips on the crests of the sand-dunes began to glow in the first rays of the rising sun….the sudden burst of warmth that accompanied its full revelation foretold that the day…would be, in local terms, a “real scorcher” (90).’

CHORALE
CHORUS
(O Sacred Head sore wounded) [1st verse]
Aka tjantjurrantjurrai, Ilkaartapartangai....[6]

NARRATOR
‘About midday they reached the end of the Brittania Sandhills (97).’

‘Njitiaka pointed out a dune which overtopped all other sandhill crests by scores of feet –




And suddenly the sense of climax is interrupted, and we are still travelling…

It was only later that much of that information was transformed into a duet between Njitiaka and Theo, raising the dramatic, and at the same time, musical profile of the work. As the frequency of Theo and Njitiaka’s exchanges increased so action took over from narrative:


Journey to Horseshoe Bend, scene 3 - final version

T.G.H
It was half past two next morning when I was wakened by the sudden blazing up of the restoked campfire. Njitiaka rolled up the swags and untethered the donkeys.

NJITIAKA
Keme-irreye tangkey ngkerne lhetyenele![7]

T.G.H.
And we moved away from the cheery blaze of the campfire into the moonlit sandhill silence.

NJITIAKA
Unte irnterneme urnpe lhanhe? Lhanhe yurte-ipne urnpe. Unte irterleretyeke kwatye kweke ware nemenhe nhanerle.

THEO
Spinifex tufts -
Kicked up by donkeys -
Have such an odour,
a certain smell?

Strange, lonely, dry;
Moonlight, sandhills, silence

NJITIAKA
Werlethenaye werinerle irrkepe ngketyeke ingkwarle mpareme. Ilpele thwerte-nirre ngkeleme.

THEO
Desert oaks,
Sighing,
Their long needles swishing,
Sighing, crying, calling…

NJITIAKA
(pointing it out) Pmere ngkweke lanhe, Kwatye pmere. Karte ngkwekeneke pmere.

THEO
Kwatye?


NJITIAKA

Ya, pmere ngkweke

THEO
Your home?

NJITIAKA
Leyeke pmere.

THEO

Taye parrtyeme

The moon is shining -

NJITIAKA

Terlpe!


THEO
What?

NJITIAKA
Terlpe parrtyeme!

THEO
Terlpe parrtyeme?
Showing our way

NJITIAKA
Unte arrtye irrtne ilmeletyeke? Lanhe renye ‘terlpe’ itye ‘taye’. (Dismissively) Western Aranda!

THEO
Terlpe larnnga-larnnga…

NJITIAKA
Awa!

THEO
Shadows, moonlight, sandhills
Terlpe imerneme nwerneke.




You’ll notice that in the first draft there was the suggestion of another chorale to be used in the musical texture. The repertoire of chorales was reduced as work proceeded. Andrew rightly sensed that too many chorales would create an excess of material to shape while having to stick to our brief for the duration of the work. But it is important to note that these decisions came out of discussions at the libretto-writing stage.

It has been said that music has a degree of persuasiveness that words can only aspire to. The completion of the chorale at the end of JHB is more moving than a mere spoken rendering would be. Music can even, handily sometimes, lead us up the wrong emotional path. So what do we miss if we don’t know the words?

At the end of Das Rheingold, there is a shimmering and swelling in the music which finally blazes forth in a proud, even harsh, assertion of triumphal power. The Gods are finally crossing the rainbow bridge into their citadel Valhalla.

This is the most wonderful example of pure, unalloyed ‘rubbing-the-loser’s-nose-in-it’ victory. An audience may even hate themselves for feeling excited, associating Wagner’s music with Nuremberg Rallies and sheer unconscionable arrogance!

But the thing is: the ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ can only have this meaning when you’ve paid no attention to the storyline; when you’ve ignored the dramatic context. Because when you finally hear this passage in the theatre, or at least as part of the music drama, to use Wagner’s term, you realise that the gods are entering a kingdom that has been doomed; that Wotan and the other gods are blind, as Loge says, ‘to the end towards which they are heading’. He says it, but we even see them step over the dead body of Fasolt or freeze momentarily at the sound of the Rhinemaidens keening below. It is the most spectacular example of irony in the history of… well, what is it? Music or Drama? But one thing’s for sure. You need the drama to ‘get’ this irony. The combination of both elements together creates an emotional nuance that libretto and music wouldn’t be able to achieve on their own. And it’s not just Loge’s words that fulfil the whole condition of undermining. We have just watched two hours of Wotan tieing himself in knots, back-pedalling and swindling. You can twig, even without selecting the subtitle option on your DVD.[8]

True, we can be mightily swayed by music, but even misinterpreting depends on knowing what is conveyed by the sounds. Never having read the surtitles at the beginning of Madama Butterfly, we may overlook Pinkerton’s bastardry (the fact that he is calculating the length of the marriage contract) because the opening of this opera is what romantic music sounds like to us; we know from a thousand contexts. Do we know enough about Inuit music to know what is moving in it? The opening bars of Tristan – what do they mean? Without the context – in this case 100 years of tonality – do we know that a minor 6th in 19th century Romantic music denotes yearning?

Context is all important. In JHB I was able to convey the outcome of the story of the crow of Mbalka; how he was drowned by the rain women of Erea, in few enough words to allow the music to continue unimpeded, because the story had been previously established. Super-structure. Context. And sequence!

Thinking any of this has much to do with the beauty of the words is a bit of a furphy. The words in fact should probably be as simple as possible. The score can pinpoint the exact shade of emotion; the libretto has an anchoring, orientating primacy.  Be careful of being too flash.

I find John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Nixon in China exceptionally, even movingly clear, so it may seem churlish to pounce on this next example. But I remember being impressed by certain lines in Act I, the chorus singing:

The people are the heroes now

The heroes pull the peasants’ plow


I thought ‘what a nice Shakespearian duality’, and one that you could deduce easily sitting in the theatre. It was only when I read the libretto that I discovered that it was ‘Behemoth’ who was pulling the peasant’s plough. It’s nice poetry, but I couldn’t help but feeling sorry for the poor audience-member sitting in the theatre trying to decipher ‘behemoth’ as the word being defined by that particular combination of vowels?

And on top of that in opera you’ve got the particular challenges to clarity posed by polyphony, melisma, and sopranos. Best to make sure the story’s clear from your large structure, and set up strong, dramatic, character-driven situations that convey a larger message. You’ve got to make sure that the conflicts and crises of the plot have safely been established and resolved.

Of course, a successful libretto should provide the composer with musical opportunities that enhance the dramatic flow. It is an absolute masterstroke in the libretto of Verdi/Boito’s Otello to begin with Shakespeare’s second act and therefore give the composer and the drama a storm to start with.

Journey to Horseshoe Bend fast forwards through the preparations and background to the journey to light on a chorale which arises, as if spontaneously from the voices of the Ntaria women. The first pages draw from the novel to create a couple of musical situations – sunrise and chorale. It was a libretto-stage decision to leave out T.G.H. Strehlow’s impressive ten page description of the massacre history of Irbmangkara, even though it may be the most virtuosic piece of writing in the book. We had to get moving.

A libretto is a blueprint for musical action. If the job has been considered well enough, the composer can sit down and see the musical form inherent in the material. The libretto is good insofar that you can judge by the intelligence of its suggestion of actable music: momentum, weight, musical numbers (who sings what), purely musical segments, and, at the level of detail, what I call its ‘play with specificity’.

JHB is a cantata. It is meant to be a concert work. This was the result of a number of decisions taken at the libretto stage. If JHB had been fully sung it would of course have been twice as long, but speech allowed us filmic pacing, a directness and spontaneity; to move quickly through concepts that don’t normally make it into opera. We were aiming for a certain richness and at the same time intelligibility. We rejected the idea of the narration being sung in recitative (although recognising that the narrator fulfilled some of the function of an Evangelist in a Bach passion), partly to broaden the work’s appeal, but also because we needed another speaking role to pair with Njitiaka. Nevertheless, it is worth testing this theory of libretto writing by examining the proximity of each cantata scene to completely dramatised opera.

Scenes 3 and 4 are arguably the most fully-dramatised. Strehlow’s descriptions of conversations between Theo and Njitiaka as they travel at night through the sand-dune country are turned into duet. In scene 4 Carl’s struggles with his faith, described in third person by T.G.H. Strehlow in his novel, are turned into an aria with responding chorus. This aria is juxtaposed with a cinematic cutaway to Theo’s ditty-like listing of sights around Idracowra station. I particularly love the melody that Andrew came up with when he arrived at what I considered the heart of the scene, and perhaps of the philosophy of the work:

But God cannot be known
Nor made to answer men.
No use in us demanding
The meaning of our pain.

Action and music?  In Journey the ongoing movement of the music was complemented by verbal pointers to direction: ‘…25 miles to the north west rugged Rutjubma…’; ‘…already moving through the…saltbush flat which spread south…’; ‘…turned in a more easterly direction...’[9] Njitiaka gives many of the directions. But these examples are taken from TGH, the narrator.

Journey to Horseshoe Bend stayed a cantata in some ways to preserve the flavour of Strehlow’s original novel. But that meant particular problems. One of the big hazards for libretto writing is leaving too much ‘on the page’. I say that having written a wordy libretto, and having early on tried to force Andrew into setting TGH’s denser and slower-moving sentences. This example is from the third draft. The party have arrived at Horseshoe Bend.


Journey to Horseshoe Bend, scene 6 – 3rd draft


CHORUS (continuing under)
Horseshoe Bend is the eye of a flame
Horseshoe Bend is the eye of  a fire

T.G.H.
Horseshoe Bend had been remarkable for its cruel heatwaves for as long as human memory went back.

NJITIAKA
Atua Rubuntjaka janha ntoaka. Pota urbula arei. Itne uralalanga.

T.G.H
(Translating) Everywhere the Rubuntja men vomited they left black pebbles whose heat essence is evoked to this day in freezing weather.

CHORUS (continuing under)
Horseshoe Bend is a fiery place
A land of burning cliffs

NJITIAKA
Nana pmara uraka. Nakua ngapa nama. Era ura taka, altjiraka.

CHORUS (continuing under)
Horseshoe Bend is a fiery place
A land of burning cliffs

NJITIAKA
Nana pmara uraka. Nakua ngapa nama. Era ura taka, altjiraka.

CHORUS
Of searing plains

T.G.H
(As if translating for Njitiaka) ‘The main totemic sites in the region were all associated in some way with fire or with the scorching heat of the summer sun. Worst was Mbalka, the home of a malicious crow who had flitted over the landscape at the dawn of time, lighting fires.

CHORUS
Fire
Exploding spinifex
Shrieking over sandhills
Shooting from branches screaming
Writhing from mulga, like pillars of
Fire,
Crackling torches of flame
(Continuing)
NJITIAKA
Erea tara rana rranthaka, rana lakarlalaka…

T.G.H.
(Translating) At last, two rain ancestresses from Erea surprised the crow and drowned him. The lake of fire became a sea of water. Clouds of steam hissed up from sizzling tree stumps and charred stumps.



Listen to the music as it is now and you can hear that TGH’s and Njitiaka’s words would have impeded the flow. As a solution Andrew went ahead and composed music for this scene using only bits of the text. Only after the music had been freed in this way did I go back to make sure that the characters told the same story in telegraphic form.



Journey to Horseshoe Bend, scene 6 - final version


NTARIA LADIES CHOIR (very quietly)
Kaartai, nurna-nha wurlathanai (Father, hear our prayer)

CHORUS
Horseshoe Bend is the eye of a flame
Horseshoe Bend is the eye of  a fire

NJITIAKA

Urte Rubuntja ntwe-irrke nhakeke.


T.G.H.
The Rubuntja men vomited over there.


NJITIAKA

Perte urrpwerle raye…


T.G.H.
Yes, the black stones.

NJITIAKA

Itne metyepenhe…


T.G.H
They’re from fire?

CHORUS
Fire
Exploding spinifex
Shrieking over sandhills
Shooting from branches screaming
Writhing from mulga, like pillars of
Fire,
Crackling torches of flame

Horseshoe Bend is a fiery place
A land of burning cliffs

NJITIAKA
Nhanhe metyeke pmere.

T.G.H.
This is fire country.

NJITIAKA

Ngkape nhakele…


T.G.H.
That crow over there…

NJITIAKA
metye itekele,...

T.G.H.
He set all this country alight…

NJITIAKA
itekele ntgkerrnhe.

T.G.H
in the beginning.

CHORUS
Horseshoe Bend, etc…



A libretto needs to be able to turn on a dime. While composing, the composer may ring up and say, ‘I need eight syllables in the following rhythm’. The librettist knows s/he has to tie up three or four plot points in that space as well. There is so much more to appreciate if the libretto is examined hand in hand with the music.

I mentioned before the play with specifity. The relationship between text and music is far more fascinating than a side by side comparison would suggest.

Andrew often says that the music is the poetic element, and that’s true. But well-placed words can enhance a poetic moment. ‘The smell of rain-soaked earth fills the air…’, sings Theo, as his final notes ring out.

I have myself tried to explain the relationship between music and text in terms of the text being the noun and the music the verb, but sometimes the text, acting as context, can be adverb. And sometimes the music is the noun. Andrew’s chorale harmonies and counterpoint give reality to JHB’s Lutheran setting. Is the libretto here the adjective? Can the music be the subtext revealing the text’s true concerns?…[10]

Journey to Horseshoe Bend ends with a storm. Music does storm beautifully. It can convey a storm without a word in sight. Think Beethoven, Rossini, Britten. Think Otello. But it’s important for the audience in JHB to know that that storm confirms Theo’s decision to make his future in Central Australia by corroborating for him the reality of a storm that took place in the mythological era at the beginning of time. That’s the reason for the verbal exchanges between Njitiaka and TGH at the beginning of the third part (the arrival at Horseshoe Bend), and for this exchange towards the end:

NJITIAKA: Kwatye ngkarle arpenhe petyeme
TGH: More clouds?
NJITIAKA: Itne renhe nyenhe inetyeke.
TGH: Those rain-women get that crow always.
NJITIAKA: Ngampakala. Finish him.

Which brought all the elements to a point, after the score was completed - after Andrew had been set free to follow the course of the dramatically-generated music.[11]

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A libretto may mask a great many decisions. It needs to be thin. But one decision taken at the libretto stage can say heaps. Strehlow spends many paragraphs describing Pastor Carl’s character.[12] We needed an authoritative voice. As a bass-baritone Carl had for me associations with a Wotan or a Boris Godunov and in that one decision was all that we needed to say about that ‘rockplate’ clergyman who threw the murderous Constable Wurmbrand off the mission property and who stood in the path of a party of Kukatja avengers. I remember being fascinated by the changed significance that could be achieved merely by assigning words to different characters. Imagine the quite different cast of meaning if you assign the chorus’s words: ‘But God cannot be known…’ to one of the other parts.

All this information can be encompassed by the libretto. And some of a libretto’s achievement may literally be invisible, left to the composer or left out. It may only be realised on stage (another’s job). But let’s go back to the libretto as words, since that is the level on which the debate is usually waged.

The libretto is important. The words are significant. The librettist J.D. McClatchy’s name was left off the CD cover for Emmeline (composer: Tobias Picker). I would have been peeved. And librettos and programs and texts can push composers in directions they might not have explored if left to their own devices. I think of the soundtrack to Bullitt and compare it with Lalo Schifrin’s more recent recording with the West German Radio Big Band[13]. To me the version made to showcase the music lacks the rhetorical pointedness of the soundtrack. It seems to lack the gestural definiteness, seems less urgent.[14] Could it be that ‘text’ (the action) forestalls a converging on purely musical elements, a narrowing of meaning? And yet so often we read in annotations: ‘The composer sensed rightly that the music was coherent in its own terms, and did not need the added literary explanation,’ or ‘We may disregard the program. For the work stands as music.’

Charles Rosen speaks of music’s ‘emancipation from the word’ in a recent New York Review of Books article on Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Music; and of how that emancipation enabled sophisticated absolute structures.[15] True, but are they better or worse than texted musical works; there is a pleasure to be had from the way the words and music mesh and collide in Pitjantjatjara chant, for example. Perhaps annotators should accord the libretto and its relationship to the music the same subtlety of understanding that they plead for in relation to absolute music.

But to come back to the words, because I dispute (even discounting larger plot movements, sequence, scenes, mise-en-scène, characters, numbers, a suggestion of duration, proportion and pace) that the words are inferior or weaker carriers of meaning.

A colleague once cited Some Enchanted Evening to me as an example of the primacy of music: it’s the music that we carry away from the performance. Now I guess we don’t go out whistling the words, but even if you only know the first lines of hundreds of songs, the general sense and situation reinforces the message to be taken from the melody, harmony, pace and orchestration, and I doubt if music would be as meaningful if judged, as Stravinsky may have wished, ‘powerless to express anything other than itself’. After all, what is Some Enchanted Evening in musical terms: tonic chord with a melodic turn on the fifth followed by a downward drop, the sharpened fourth in the turn undermining stability; that turn repeated followed by an upward lift to the leading note, but this time with the harmony shifting underneath to the dominant; the turn again, this time followed by a lift to the tonic, but with a sharpened fifth underneath preparing the way to a supertonic 6/5 harmony... Certainly the harmony creates an urging forward and there is a poignancy often found in Richard Rodgers’ chordal progressions one step beyond the harmonically obvious, but does that fully explain the emotional resonance?  I suppose my words prove the lack of music’s poetry. But I still think you at least need to know that the song is about an enchanted evening where you may meet a stranger across a crowded room; what any of us would bring to that love at first sight; words and sentiments that preclude being set to a ‘rumpty-tumpty’ melody.

But don’t take my word for it. Get an audience of Americans to stand with hands over their hearts and sing:

To Anacreon in heav’n, where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of Harmony sent a petition,
That He their Inspirer and Patron would be;
When this answer arrived from the Jolly Old Grecian:
‘Voice, Fiddle, and Flute,
no longer be mute,
I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot,
And besides, I’ll instruct you, like me, to entwine
The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.’

and I bet not a single one of them would shed a tear, no matter how good the tune, at the original words of the drinking song that became - The Star-Spangled Banner.


Gordon Kalton Williams
Open University, ©2006

This article first appeared in Music, words and voice: A reader, edited by Martin Clayton and published by Manchester University Press, ISBN: 978-0-7190-7787-6 
Reproduced by kind permission. 
Acknowledgements 
Andrew Schultz
The Strehlow Research Centre
Katherine D. Stewart
Natalie Shea
Siobhan Lenihan
James Koehne





[1]  Strehlow, T.G.H. Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Angus & Robertson, Melbourne, 1969. Quotes by permission of the Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs Australia 
[2] Stein, Jack M Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, Westport, Conn. 1973
[3] See Alenier, K ‘A Poet’s Distraction: Interview with J.D. McClatchy’, Scene4 Magazine, Sep 2005, http://www.archives.scene4.com/sep-2005/html/infocussep05.html
[4] Figures in parentheses after statements refer to page numbers in the novel, which were only removed late in the writing of the cantata.
[5]  In inverted commas because we had still not settled on having a separate character
[6]Aka tjantjurrantjurrai’ (O Sacred Head now Wounded) No.75, p.169, Arrarnta Lyilhintja Lutheran Worlamparinyaka (Arrarnta Lutheran Hymnal), Finke River Mission Board, Alice Springs, 1997
[7] Now with Doug Abbott’s Southern Arrernte corrections
[8]  If Loge had said, ‘They are not heading to their doom,’ you would not have believed him. Any playwright knows that words cannot overpower accumulated action. Or as psychologist Steven Covey would say: ‘You cannot talk yourself out of what you have behaved yourself into.’
[9] Consider also Andrew’s orchestral layout.
[10] To choose an example from popular musical theatre, My Fair Lady. Prof. Higgins convinces himself he couldn’t care less about such an ungrateful wretch as Eliza Doolittle who would run away and ‘marry Freddy. Ha!’ and then the music wells up, and says, ‘Who is he/are you kidding?’ At this moment music brings the emotion (subtext) to the surface. The idea may have been Frederick Loewe the composer’s, but the music is suddenly text, doing the job of the narrative. The welling up is satisfying as music and as an aspect of the story that has developed to that point.
[11] Sometimes music benefits from the nailing specificity of words. The best-received performance I have heard of Schoenberg’s Pelléas et Mélisande was Will Humburg’s with the Sydney Symphony in 2005. He asked for surtitles giving the movement descriptions, eg “He finds Mélisande weeping in the forest”. They cut through what I’ve often felt was a lack of clarifying repose.
[12] T.G.H. Strehlow provides a huge amount of information about his father on pp7-8 and 20 of the Angus & Robertson edition of his novel. 
[13] Schifrin, Lalo: Bullitt, ALEPH Records 018, 2000
[14] And yet, I saw John Williams conduct a workshop on film music at Tanglewood in 1998. He showed the students that when they re-did the scene ‘and this time, with horns in tune’, the whole scene lifted dramatically. The drama and score are truly twinned.
[15] Rosen, Charles ‘From the Troubadors to Frank Sinatra’: review of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, The New York Review of Books, 23 February 2006

If you enjoyed this, I have written elsewhere on the Strehlows in:

Journey to Horseshoe Bend - ten years on, 28 May 2013 

http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2013/05/journey-to-horseshoe-bend-ten-years-on.html

Victory over death and despair in a bygone age, 5 November 2012 and

Ah, Nathanael!, 29 November 2012


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