The Heart’s Assurance (1950–51)

Song

The Heart’s Asurance

Compassion

The Dancer

Remember your lovers

If the First World War produced more and better poetry and music than the Second – as is generally agreed to be the case –    Michael Tippett contributed disproportionately much, for one composer, to the volume of high-quality work arising from the later conflict. First there was the prophetic oratorio A Child of our Time, which was completed in 1941. Then, ten years later, he wrote the retrospective song cycle The Heart’s Assurance to words by two young British poets, Alun Lewis who had died in Burma at the age of 28 and Sidney Keyes who was killed in Tunisia at the age of 20.

The Heart’s Assurance is more, however, than a memorial to those poets and their soldier contemporaries. There is a more important, intensely personal side to Tippett’s inpiration here, which was the profound sadness occasioned by the death of his closest woman friend, Francesca Allinson, who had taken her own life just as the war was ending. It wasn’t until five years later – when, as he said, “the personal wound began to heal and, more importantly, as the very real wounds of the war healed” – that he was able to distance himself from events enough to create this passionate reflection on “love under the shadow of death.”

Like Britten in many of his songs, though in a different way, Tippett bases each setting on a significant musical image. The turbulent arpeggios of the opening Song swirl through the piano part with the “cruel revolutions” of “this endless belt,” varying in colour and textural density according to the person addressed – journeyman, soldier lad, or lonely wife – and briefly making way for another image as “Death taps down every street.” In the second song the image is more emotive, the elated rhythms associated with “the heart’s assurance,” “pride of movement” and “careless heart” being repeatedly negated. In much the same way the rumbling figurations corresponding to “the hurling night” in Compassion are consistenly soothed away. The balletic imagery of the piano part of The Dancer is allied with a vocal line skipping through Purcellian elaborations which, though characteristic of the whole cycle, are most appropriately applied here. Remember your lovers – the words of which were written in an Oxford examination room when Keyes had finished his paper early – echoes with the Last Post, which is sounded in the unaccompannied lines beginning “Young men.” Tippett imagined here, he said, “a young woman singing out over the Elysian fields to the young men in the fields beyond.”

Commissioned by Peter Pears and dedicated to the memory of Francesca Allinson, The Heart’s Assurance was first performed by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten in the Wigmore Hall in 1951.