7 Sonnets of Michelangelo Op.22 (1940)

Sonnetto XVI: Si come nella penna

Sonnetto XXXI: A che più debb’io mai

Sonnetto XXX: Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi

Sonnetto LV: Tu sa’ ch’io so

Sonnetto XXXVIII: Rendete agli occhi mieie

Sonnetto XXXII: S’un casto amor

Sonnetto XXIV: Spirto ben nato

A major source of inspiration of Michelangelo’s poetry was his love for Tommaso Cavalieri, who is believed to have beene the model for the “Victory” marble in the Palazzo Vecchio and the “Christ the Judge” fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Cavalieri was 23 and Michelangelo 57 when they first met and their friendship lasted until the artist died in the younger man’s arms 32 years later. So a selection from Michelangelo sonnets addressed to Cavalieri was a not unlikely text for the first song cycle Britten wrote specifically for Peter Pears – even though, as Humphrey Carpenter has pointed out, it does not celebrate a settled relationship so much as “portray a restless and largely unsatisfied desire.”

The setting of the first of the chosen sonnets Si come nella penna – ending with “doubtful hopes and sure and bitter pain” – is not, however, as bleak as it might be. It is true that in these spare textures, which are largely a matter of octaves and unisons built on a stony three-note rhythmic figure, there is little room for harmonic consolation. The song does, however, end in the bright A major with which it begins. An apparent allusion to “Victory,” which is modelled on a dominant Cavalieri standing over a submissive Michelangelo, A che più debb’io mai is set to a passionate, Italian-style, even Rossini-style melody which, though it seems to achieve A major fulfilment, cannot in the end escape its restrictive C minor tonality: “Resto prigion d’un Cavalier amato.”

There is no frustration, unless it is that associated with old-age infirmity, in Sonnetto XXX, Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi. Britten treats it with much the same tenderness and melodic indulgence as he treats Rimbaud’s Being Beauteous in Les Illuminations, retaining here the radiant G major harmonies in spite of the Lydian sharpened fourth which gives such an eloquent lift to the vocal line. While the setting of Tu sa’ ch’io so is not the protest one might have expected from the rejected lover, it is haunted from the beginning by the falling second which identifies itself with “mora” at the end. It occurs twice in every bar of the urgently impulsive piano part except, following an expressive rising scale in the right hand, in two lines of reflection just before the end. Rendete agli occhi mieie is similarly animated by a repetitive piano figure, in this case a muted (una corda) simulation of a serenader’s guitar or mandolin which falls silent just at the point where the vocal line sinks through a despairing seventh in the closing bars.

Anger enters Michelangelo’s S’un casto amor only in the very last line. In Britten’s setting it is there from the start, most vividly in the obsessively dissonant semiquaver figuration of the piano part. But it is present also in a vocal line which, far from dwelling on the romantic aspects of a loving partnership, is anxious to list them and get to the point which however, with anger spent, it expresses in poignant uncertainty. In direct contrast the seventh and last sonnet, Spirto ben nato, is a statement of faith in beauty, the challenging left-hand octaves and the exclamations of the vocal line finally becoming reconciled in a visionary D major.

The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were completed at Amityville, New York, in October 1940 and first performed by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten at the Wigmore Hall on 23 September 1942, a repeat performance following at the National Gallery a month later.