Songs and Proverbs of William Blake Op.74 (1965)

Proverb I – London – Proverb II – The Chimney-Sweeper – Proverb III –

A Poison Tree – Proverb IV – The Tyger – Proverb V – The Fly –

Proverb VI – Ah ! Sun-Flower – Proverb VII – Every Night and Every Morn

Although it was Peter Pears who selected the texts of Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, it was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s voice rather than his that Britten had in mind as he set them. This – much though he admired the German baritone, not least for his interpretation of the role conceived for him in the War Requiem – seems to have been a problem. “Frankly,” he told Pears, “I find other singers non-inspiring to write for – I’m too choosy about the performers, I fear.” At the same time, having promised Fischer-Dieskau something “big and serious” – what else? – for a concert at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1965, he was, he confessed, somewhat intimidated by the Blake project: “When I think of the wonderful words I feel rather inadequate.”

In fact, Pears’s brilliantly assembled text – six Songs of Experience each one anticipated by an excerpt from the Proverbs of Hell, the pattern culminating in a seventh Proverb and a last song from the Auguries of Innocence – offered Britten the fundamental security on which he could build a complex and continuous musical structure. Harmonic security he found in a highly ingenious parallel to the layout of the text. The seven Proverbs are based on a twelve-note series which, although it determines the intervals of the oracular piano part in the first six of them, remains undefined until the last, where it is presented by the voice to the words “To see a World in a Grain of Sand…” In the meantime the vocal line, which is restricted to a monotone in most of the Proverbs, introduces more and more melodic characteristics of the series in the settings of the seven songs.

If this seems unduly schematic, the fact is that it is no more than a framework for the unreservedly imaginative settings of the seven songs which, far from avoiding tonal implications in the classic serial manner, depend on diatonic harmony for their expressive effect. It is true that in London whole-tone harmonies and conflicting rhythms in the piano part are vividly symbolic of the agitated mood of the wanderer in the chartered streets. The more telling effect, however, is made by the pure triads on which the piano pauses at the end of each line while never, in spite of trying twelve different roots to the chords, actually coming to rest. After the reference in the second Proverb to brothels being built “with bricks of religion,” the direct link between first clear statement of the B minor tonality of The Chimney Sweeper and the words “They are both gone up to the church to pray” is a profound harmonic irony.

Perhaps the most inspired of the seven songs – and certainly the most powerfully effective in exploiting the dark sonorities of the authoritative baritone voice for which they were written – is based on an extraordinary combination of twelve-note melody and tonal harmony. The first line of A Poison Tree begins with a chord of E flat minor and, the voice having passed through all twelve notes, the second line ends with the same chord. The rest of the song is not about ending wrath but about letting it grow, which means that, as the composer’s material develops with the poet’s wrath, there is no such diatonic closure until the climactic “Glad I see my foe outstretch’d.”

After that expression of human malevolence, the animal majesty of the next song comes as a timely contrast. Music designed to reflect the poet’s awe before a creature of an “immortal hand or eye” can scarcely be described as a scherzo. The Tyger does, however – with its perceptibly B major tonality, quick tempo, muscular piano textures, vigorous rhythms, and the growling dissonances later recoloured under the stars – have something of a scherzo effect in the fairly grim context of the cycle as a whole. Although The Fly is slower than The Tyger in its basic tempo, it seems quicker in its buzzing rhythmic activity, more elusive in its avoidance of tonal definition, and lighter in its higher vocal tessitura and a left-hand piano part that, before thought weighs it down in the fifth stanza, rarely falls more than a few notes below middle C.

In spite of the heroic struggle against march-time adversity in Ah! Sun Flower to achieve the “sweet golden clime” of key areas postulated in earlier songs, the seventh Proverb reveals the reality of the 12-note series that, like Blake’s grain of sand, represents the harmonic world of the cycle as a whole. Quietly resigned though it seems to be, the last song, Every Night and Every Morn – the piano part of which recalls as a distant memory the rhythmic agitation of the first song, London – aspires to a consolatory F major and, in the very last bar, slips into it.