Auden songs op53

…Auden’s closely organised verse forms demand a similarly formal poetry from the composer. He must, at the same time, be able to reflect both the poet’s dry wit and his unsentimental emotional expression – which Sir Lennox Berkeley was obviously well equipped to do. The first of them, with the piano’s cock-crow fanfare periodically repeated and adapted to different meanings, and with the intricate pattern of the repeating lines in the vocal part, is a good example of one aspect of the art involved. O lurcher-loving collier, where the syncopated rhythm in the piano part seem to be inspired by the dog rather than its master, displays the same, teasing sort of affection as the poem itself.

The third and fourth are the most serious poems in the set, oblique in expression though they are. The changing imagery of the passionate love song What’s in your mind is reflected in the developing texture in the piano part, from the light and bare octaves at the beginning to the gradually accumulated weight and colour at the climax of the song. The harsh realities of Eyes - look into the well are expressed in the hard piano harmonies, with vocal melody reserved for the last and most clearly emotional lines of the poem. After which the brilliant wit of Carry her over the water, where singers an pianist have the voices of frogs and horses to contend with, clears the air agreeably.

Lennox Berkely wrote his Five Poems of W.H. Auden not during the period of his close association with the Britten-Auden circle in the late 1930s but two decades later – which must have seemed like at least half a lifetime. Not only had a World Wat intervened but he had been married for 12 years and he was the father of two sons (one of whom, Michael, had acquired none other than Benjamin Britten as a godfather). Although he had been the first composers to set words by Auden, by the time he came to the Five Poems all but one of the texts he chose had already been set by Britten. “O lurcher-loving collier,” for example, had featured in Coal Face, the first of Britten’s collaborations with Auden for the GPO Film Unit, in 1935. It is difficult to imagine, however, a more compassionate setting than Berkeley’s. It might seem at first, from the lurching gait of the piano introduction, that the song is to be more about the dog than the collier. But, although the same rhythm persists in the accompaniment, the intense expression in the vocal part – which is particularly urgent at “Course for her heart and do not miss” – demonstrates where the true sympathies of the poet and composer lie.