Matthew Rose

Text by Gregorio Moppi

A true rarity for Italy, this programme of songs by Anglo-American composers, curated by Matthew Rose and Alessandro Praticò, opens with Benjamin Britten, the greatest of English composers across all eras. His works are in constant dialogue with earlier authors and musical forms, while remaining unmistakably personal. A self-declared craftsman of music, Britten sought to engage listeners in a frank and direct exchange, using a language firmly rooted in tonality—standing in stark contrast to the experiments of Second Modernism’s leading figures such as Boulez, Stockhausen, and, in another sense, John Cage.

His vast catalogue encompasses all genres, but opera occupies a place of honour, beginning with his 1945 masterpiece Peter Grimes. Among the early composers who most inspired him was Henry Purcell, who lived in the late 17th century and was, prior to Britten, the only English composer to have left a lasting mark on musical history. Rightly, Britten recognised him as the founder of the British musical tradition and considered himself its heir. He frequently revisited Purcell’s works—drawing inspiration from them (as in the educational piece The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, where he uses a Purcell theme to explain instruments to children) and reviving them after centuries of neglect, giving them new life through updated instrumentation so that 20th-century audiences could appreciate them anew.

To this end, Britten prepared new versions of the stage works Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen, along with revisions of various pieces—many vocal—that he often entrusted to his partner, tenor Peter Pears. His encounter with Purcell in the late 1930s and his sensitivity to shaping English through music had a profound effect on his vocal writing. In 1948, he transcribed Job’s Curse (1682–83), based on the Old Testament passage in which Job curses the day of his birth—a deeply moving piece, steeped in affliction. Britten replaces the basso continuo with an emotionally supportive piano, transparent in texture, in empathetic dialogue with the voice.

In 1971, he reworked Let the dreadful Engines of Eternal Will, one of Purcell’s songs composed for The Comical History of Don Quixote by Thomas D’Urfey (1694), a stage adaptation of Cervantes’s novel. The comedy’s script includes several songs; this one is assigned to the character Cardenio (a bass), who has lost his mind for love and rages bitterly after being abandoned by Lucinda, whom he accuses of betrayal. Sudden tempo changes reflect his erratic emotions. Britten preserves the original melodic line while enriching Purcell’s spare accompaniment with a denser piano texture.

From the previous generation comes Ralph Vaughan Williams, who composed Songs of Travel—nine songs for baritone and piano—in 1904, when he was just over thirty. The lyrics are taken from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1896 poetry collection of the same name (Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, travelled widely in his relatively short life). At that time, Vaughan Williams was still early in his career—a scion of a wealthy family with prominent legal and clerical figures and, on his mother’s side, ties to Charles Darwin and the Wedgwood potters. As a boy, he tried every instrument but remained resolute in becoming a composer, despite widespread doubts about his talent. Perhaps because of this, and despite his rigorous studies and a career crowned with honours (he was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey), he continued to lament what he called his “amateur technique”.

By the time he composed Songs of Travel, he had come to believe that the progress of English music depended on a return to native traditions of the 16th and 17th centuries and to authentic folk heritage. These ideals are evident in the cycle. Its protagonist is a wanderer: his long road—life itself—is mostly solitary, and love, which momentarily calms his burning need for meaning, proves only a passing episode. This theme connects Songs of Travel to three iconic Romantic song cycles: Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer).

The opening song, The Vagabond, with its bold marching rhythm, defines the wanderer’s philosophy. The following Let Beauty Awake, and the sixth, The Infinite Shining Heavens, evoke a timbral atmosphere influenced by French impressionism. The Roadside Fire paints a vision of love’s fulfilment—first cheerful, then dreamlike. But in Youth and Love, the protagonist resists all temptation to linger: the road calls, and it is his fate. In Dreams reflects on lost love, while Whither Must I Wander? expresses childhood nostalgia in a melody of folk-like simplicity and strophic repetition. The penultimate Bright Is the Ring of Words also has a folk-inflected vocal line. The final song, I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope, is a terse farewell: “I have loved and lived, and closed the door.”

The journey continues to the United States with Charles Ives, the father of American “art music.” A reclusive modernist and bold experimentalist with a strong technical background—first trained by his bandmaster father, then at Yale—Ives composed in his spare time while working in the insurance business. He was prolific until a heart attack in 1918, but his music only gained recognition in the 1930s. In 1922, he self-published his 114 Songs, written over nearly thirty years, marking his first attempt at public dissemination.

In the postface, Ives humorously explains his motives: “Some have written a book for money; not me. Some for fame; not me. Some for love; not me. Some to stir things up; not me. I didn’t write a book for any of these reasons—or all of them. In fact, I didn’t write a book at all: I just cleaned house. What’s left is strung out on the clothesline—but it’s good for a man’s vanity to be seen by the neighbours, strung out on the clothesline.”

All five songs performed tonight—some with texts by Ives himself—are included in that publication. In the Alley (1896), composed during his Yale years, is a winking parody of a vaudeville tune. The score’s annotation recalls how Ives frequented the Poli’s Theater in New Haven, where the pianist, George Felsburg, “could read a newspaper and play the piano better than some could play the piano without one.” Occasionally, Ives substituted for Felsburg when the latter “stepped out for five minutes—or a dozen beers…”

In Flanders Fields, set to a poem by Canadian John David McCrae written after the Second Battle of Ypres (April–May 1915), reflects the first widespread use of chemical weapons on the Western Front. Ives sets it as a collage of patriotic songs—God Save the King, La Marseillaise—distorted with dissonance. The Children’s Hour (1901) evokes Debussy-like sonorities. At the River (1916) is a personal, warped take on a 19th-century hymn by Rev. Robert Lowry, incorporating motifs from Ives’s own Violin Sonata No. 4. Finally, The Circus Band (1894) is a whimsical mash-up of circus and brass band tunes, an homage to Ives’s father and his own fondness for cacophonous textures.

During the Battle of the Somme, in Pozières, English composer George Butterworth was killed in action. It was 5 August 1916, just after his 31st birthday and days after receiving the Military Cross. His compositional talent had not yet received major recognition—aside from praise by Vaughan Williams—in part because he had destroyed many of his manuscripts before departing for the front, believing them unworthy.

Born into a well-off family and educated at elite institutions, Butterworth had to defy his father’s wishes (he was to become a lawyer) in order to pursue music. In 1911, he composed Songs from “A Shropshire Lad”, six lyrical settings for baritone and piano. The texts are drawn from A. E. Housman’s popular poetry cycle, which was carried into the trenches by countless soldiers during WWI, as young British men strongly identified with the raw emotions of the titular Shropshire lad.

Housman’s poems assert, with some cynicism, that there is no paradise on earth and that youth—and life itself—slips away quickly, often because of war. Butterworth sets two of them with romantic tenderness (Loveliest of Trees, Think No More, Lad), while others have the character of folk ballads, at times cheeky, creating bittersweet contrast with the texts. When I Was One-and-Twenty explicitly claims its folk melodic origin. From 1906, encouraged by Vaughan Williams, Butterworth had been collecting traditional British songs as part of the Folk Song Society.

The final piece in the programme is by Arthur Sullivan, a towering figure in Victorian England’s musical life. With librettist W. S. Gilbert, he created the “Savoy Opera”—a uniquely English brand of operetta. The Lost Chord, composed in January 1877 just as the G&S partnership was forming (their greatest success would come with The Mikado ten years later), is not set to Gilbert’s words but to a poem by Adelaide Anne Procter, a proto-feminist poet and philanthropist admired by literary giants including Dickens.

First published in 1860 in The English Woman’s Journal, which Procter co-founded, the poem describes the spiritual serenity evoked by an organ’s chord, like a great Amen, soothing a fevered soul. Sullivan set it to music on his brother Fred’s deathbed. Fred, an actor and singer, had starred in Sullivan’s earliest operettas. The song’s popularity was such that Enrico Caruso sang it at the Metropolitan Opera in April 1912 during a benefit concert for the families of Titanic victims.