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SEIBER’S JOYCE CANTATAS
by Alan Gibbs
The Mátyás Seiber Trust is marking the anniversary of the composer’s
tragic death in September 1960 by fostering performances and
recordings of his music, the first of the latter being the Delphian
CD of the three string quartets already reviewed
by MusicWeb International .
Now it is hoped that the first-ever commercial recording of
his choral masterpiece, Ulysses (1946-7) will soon follow,
coupled with the later Joyce cantata, Three Fragments from
‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (1957). A favourite
among Kodály’s famous group of progressive students at Budapest,
Seiber went on to teach in Frankfurt and to play his ’cello
in the Lenzewski Quartet (he had previously played in a ship’s
orchestra).
His enquiring mind enabled him to gain familiarity with a variety
of musical styles including jazz (in which he founded the first
class dedicated to its theory and practice), accordion technique,
choral settings and arrangements of folksongs of Hungary, Yugoslavia
and elsewhere, and wrote a song which won an Ivor Novello award.
But he was especially drawn to the compositional advances of
the 1920s, notably twelve-note technique, which he adopted in
the Second Quartet (1934-5) and many other works, with varying
degrees of freedom. In 1935, having joined the exodus of artists
during the rise of Nazism, he settled in England, as did the
likes of Gerhard and Wellesz. He was not impressed with our
insularity and the conservatism of our academic institutions,
believing that ‘the teaching of composition should be based
on the actual practice of the masters past and present’.1
Fortunately Morley College followed an independent line established
by Holst and developed by Michael Tippett, who invited Seiber
to join the staff in 1942. He became a much sought-after teacher
of composition, and the premičre of Ulysses on 27 May
1949, at a Morley concert in the Central Hall, Westminster (the
rebuilt college was not opened until 1958), conducted by Walter
Goehr with Richard Lewis as soloist, was a landmark in his acceptance
as a British composer.2
The poetry of James Joyce attracted musical settings and the
Joyce Book of 1932 featured thirteen composers, not only
of Irish descent or sympathies like Moeran and Bax, but others
like the American George Antheil, a personal friend. He even
offered to write a libretto for Antheil, who embarked on an
opera, Mr Bloom and the Cyclops, but never finished it,
and Seiber’s Ulysses made history as the first setting
of Joyce prose to attain performance. Seiber’s musical versatility
was matched by his facility in learning languages, and when
I suggested to his daughter Julia that Joycean prose would be
a formidable obstacle to a Hungarian, she replied ‘Language
is no barrier to a multi-linguist!’ Even he admitted that he
found the book ‘rather hard going at first’3, but
he was won over by ‘its symbolism, …its marked capture and expression
of the totality of human experience, …the formal aspect of its
construction, the verbal virtuosity, the relevance of certain
recurring motives which reminded me of musical composition’.
The parodies in the text, which include a drama (Circe) and
newspaper paragraphs (Aeolus), even boast a ‘fuga per canonem’
(Sirens), but it was a passage in Ithaca that Seiber ‘simply
had to set to music –I have not felt such strong compulsion
ever before or after’. Mosco Carner4 joined the chorus
of critics who felt that ‘the text …might almost have stepped
out of a text-book on natural science’ and Michael Graubart
maintains that Seiber failed to detect the satire at its heart.
Certainly the question and answer immediately preceding this
‘mathematical catechism’ hardly prepares us: ‘For what creature
was the door of egress a door of ingress? For a cat.’ Then Bloom,
whose enthusiasm for astronomy was evident when he pointed out
the stars and constellations to Chris Callihan and the jarvey,
suddenly expatiates on the universe to Stephen. Joyce, who observed
classical unities of place and time in the book –Dublin on 16
June 1904- was equally meticulous in quoting astronomical data
and street localities as known at the time. Yet this passage,
sheer poetry jostling with sober facts, was the author’s favourite
in the whole book, satirical or not, as Seiber discovered only
afterwards, pointing to an affinity in their cast of mind.
The composer abridged it to a more manageable length; there
are, in fact, many more omissions than are shown by the dots
in the text printed at the beginning of the vocal score.
Listeners who admit to being what Hans Keller called ‘twelve-tone
deaf’ when it comes to serialism may take comfort from the fact
that it is only partly serial: ‘I consider it essentially as
tonally conceived’ with key centres of the five movements E,
A, E, B, E as if conventional tonic, subdominant and dominant.
The first, The Heaventree, opens with a three-note motive
for bass strings (Ex 1). This generates the material of the
whole cantata. It is answered by its inversion in two-part counterpoint
typical of its composer, until a dark, dissonant minor triad
on trombones sets the stage for the tenor soloist’s entry (Ex
2). The word-setting is faithful to the language, unlike Stravinsky’s,
and true to the Purcell tradition rediscovered by Holst, Britten
and Tippett (in his case literally, Holst’s Purcell Society
volumes lying in the wreckage of the Morley bombing). The chorus
answers the question in a phrase rich in its own music: ‘The
heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’. The thirds
(minor/major) of Ex 1 multiply in a rising and falling vocalisation
on ‘ah’, the shape of the phrase suggesting that of a tree and
the harmony surprisingly ‘English’. This impression is reinforced
by the Holstian procession of triads in brass and bassoons.
A semitone glissando shift on horns ushers in a brief interlude
mounting to a high E on a solitary violin.
Meditations of Evolution increasingly vaster suggested
passacaglia form as ‘best suited to express the cumulative weight
of detail’. Trombone and tuba announce the ground, Purcellian
in its three-beat rhythm with the odd syncopation (Purcell was
a favourite with Joyce, as it happens), and there is word-painting
to match, the chorus spreading out ‘vaster’, the sopranos spicily
‘scintillating’, softly-held chordal ‘distant’,, canonic ‘procession
of equinoxes’. An English-born composer might have been wary
of setting ‘new stars such as the Nova of 1901’ which risks
being a ‘stuffed owl’ moment, but it is swept along with ‘ten
lightyears’and ‘a hundred of our solar systems’ and the rest
towards an exciting fugal climax. ‘Our system plunging towards
the constellation of Hercules’ is portrayed with baroque graphicness.
This grows to a thrilling fourfold canon in the orchestra, sinking
to a quieter coda and contemplation of the comparative insignificance
of humanity’s lifespan. Sequential repetitions of the word ‘meditation’
close the movement.
Obverse meditations of Involution, a consideration of
the microcosmos as II had been of the bigger picture, consists
mainly of a fast 3-part fugue in scherzo style making demands
on chorus and orchestra alike. Ex 1 is rearranged and extended
into a twelve-note row of alternate minor thirds and semitones,
half ascending, the rest descending mirrorwise (Ex 3). Keller
noted a similarity in the row to that in Schoenberg’s Ode
to Napoleon (1942) 5: curiously, Seiber became
aware of this only on hearing the Schoenberg, then read Keller’s
article the next day. The significant elements are the three-note
motive a, the jazzy syncopations on one note (b)
and cascading tail (c) starting on a G flat promoted
in the order, strictly ‘incorrect’ but ‘the only thing that
interests me is whether I succeeded in writing some real music’.6
So much in the fugue defies prediction. The second and third
entries begin on different parts of the beat from the original
subject. A second exposition follows in which the parts, now
accompanying the voices, enter in reverse order. A contrary-motion
idea, heard instrumentally in the first episode, is associated
in the second with the words ‘microbes, germs, bacteria’,etc.
A third exposition inverts the subject, punching it out in piano
and xylophone, then trumpet, with the chorus divided into two
groups in octaves and woodwind and strings scurrying around
in semiquavers. In a slower, more lyrical interlude, the tenor
reflects on human elements until the excitement resumes, with
an entry of the subject in retrograde which you may not even
notice. A climax is reached in which martellato detached
chords punctuate a relentless ostinato based on c: the
debt to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936)
is clear. A last exposition of three retrograde entries in the
bass, the first allocated to double bass only, is heard while
the chorus repeats the words ‘nought’, ‘nowhere’, ‘never’ in
whispers, and the bass strings disappear into a low pizzicato
E. Seiber once observed that Kodály’s orchestration, although
it might lack the brilliance of Ravel, always ‘came off’.7
His own in this movement is truly masterly.
Bartók is still in evidence in Nocturne-Intermezzo, although
the movement as a whole pays ‘HOMMAGE A SCHOENBERG’. Seiber
saw that two chords from that composer’s piano piece Op 19/1
could, in alternation, ‘embody that quietness and remoteness’
of solar and lunar eclipses which he wished to express. Perhaps
the two chords of Holst’s Saturn portraying old age were
at the back of his mind. He also noticed that Schoenberg’s could
be supplemented by two of his own, using up the remaining six
notes (Ex 4). Soon the woodwind is decorating two chords by
florid passages derived from the notes of the other two chords.
Then ‘taciturnity of winged creatures’ ushers in pointillistic
Bartókian night music, before the bleakness of the opening returns
for ‘pallor of human beings’.
The Epilogue begins with a wonderfully expressive eight-part
fugato on solo strings, descending slowly in pitch. Ex 1 has
been inverted and extended into a new twelve-note melody. The
chorus reflects with Bloom that ‘it was not a heaventree …it
was a Utopia’. We hear the original tree music, now hummed,
and the three-note motive returns in its inverted form, coming
to rest once again on that low E. One has to agree with Graham
Hair, in an online article,8 that Ulysses
‘ has not found the place in the repertoire of the typical British
choral society that it deserves.’
The year 1914, in which Joyce began Ulysses, saw the
completion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
with himself thinly disguised as the Stephen Dedalus character.
Seiber chose his Three Fragments from, respectively,
a poetic passage in which Stephen finds a harmony within him
matching the floating of clouds across the sky; his nightmarish
imaginings of the Last Judgment conjured up by Father Arnall’s
hellfire sermon; and his rapturous sleep on the beach, after
admiring a young girl bathing her legs in the water. This time
the chorus is wordless, the narration restricted to a spoken
voice (Peter Pears intended). Seiber indicates the relative
pitches of the words in Sprechgesang fashion, and requires the
chorus in general to sustain chords, humming or to a suitable
vowel (eg taking up the ‘oo’ of ‘moon’) or, more dramatically,
projecting the cries of the damned at the blowing of the Last
Trump. In between the two cantatas, Humphrey Searle had demonstrated
even greater courage in setting the last monologue of Anna Livia
Plurabelle (symbolizing the River Liffey) in Finnegan’s Wake,
in a cantata called The Riverrun (1951), which uses a
woman as speaker. (Even Seiber might have baulked at a text
beginning ‘Soft morning, city! Lap! I am leafy speafing, Lpf!’)
Just as Britten turned from the opulent scoring of Peter
Grimes to the more practical chamber group of The Rape
of Lucretia, so Seiber tailored his second Joyce cantata
to an even more modest ensemble in Three Fragments although,
like Britten, including piano and percussion –the latter giving
a choice of timbres. The influence of the younger composer may
perhaps be detected, eg in the association of bass clarinet
and sleep.
This is a thoroughly serial work, ‘about the strictest among
all my works to date’9: there is not a single note
which does not arise from the basic series (Ex 5). It is used
in all the regular permutations (ie including inversion, retrograde
and retrograde inversion) and sixteen transpositions (9 of the
basic row and 7 of its inversions). To those who claimed that
serialism was ‘abracadabra’, he replied that it was no more
obsessed with ‘the rules of the game’ than tonal composition,
and evolved organically from the actual creative process in
the same way10. In Three Fragments there is
a musical or literary reason for everything. Seiber held the
work in special affection, I think for two reasons: it is both
emotionally and intellectually satisfying; and it hides a personal
grief, the tragic death of his great friend Erich Itor Kahn
in New York, shortly before he began the work (now there
is an irony). The row contains his name ‘as an anagram’11:
as a Dorian Singer under Seiber I sang two of Kahn’s highly
individual Three Madrigals in a BBC recording of 24 April 1959,
not transmitted until 19 May 1960; the first began ‘Fare thee
well’. The row contains three semitones or major sevenths, with
all their expressive potential, and the ambiguous tritone, which
colours the harmony. The row is regularly divided into groups
of three and four, melodically and harmonically. It may already
have been noticed that the row of Ulysses, like those
of Webern’s string trio and quartet (and Searle’s The Riverrun)
contains six semitones. So would Seiber’s Concert Piece (1953-4),
and his rows often begin with a semitone, as here, dwelt on
lovingly by the flute in its opening phrase, to end in a complementary
seventh (Ex 6). The chorus takes it up in the tenors, then altos
and bass clarinet follow: we do not need to know that their
semitones come from different parts of the row, the music speaks
for itself. Seiber exploits the sustained notes of the vibraphone
as soon as the third bar, and they join high string chords,
with broken chords spread over the piano, to evoke Joyce’s ‘veiled
sunlight’. The choral harmonies give way to three-note imitative
phrases in different voices. And then comes pure magic: a beautiful
progression at the words ‘They [the clouds] were voyaging across
the deserts of the sky’ which proves, on analysis, to have a
subtlety of construction which is noteworthy, and is nothing
less than a modern application of the medieval technique of
isorhythm. A 3-chord phrase (color) is sung four times without
a break, but to a simultaneous rhythmic pattern (talea) which
occurs three times, not four, over the same period. The vibraphone
is providing a counterpoint using the same values but backwards,
and the piano is holding the whole together with flourishes
on the second and fourth beats of each bar. And, just by the
way, three different versions of the row are being employed
at the same time! I am quite sure that we (the Dorian Singers)
were totally unaware of all this as we sang and enjoyed these
five bars.. This is surely the art which conceals art. Seiber
would have been well aware of the historical precedent: Leonard
Isaacs observed ‘His own musical interests were so wide that
there was virtually no subject of music upon which one didn’t
find Seiber a mine of information’12. Antheil wrote
something similar of Joyce.13 The next passage, ‘He
heard a confused music’, prompts the composer to replay the
slow, mysterious trills of the nocturnal animals in Ulysses,
expanded here to six-note chords embracing all twelve notes,
and the voices enter and proceed at bewilderingly close intervals.
Successive phrases imitate each other, but in progressively
shorter values, then the process is inverted. But all this text-led
complexity gives way to the more tranquil texture of the opening,
and Joyce’s ‘one longdrawn calling note’, E (of course) is passed
from a group of six sopranos, reducing until a solitary unaccompanied
voice disappears into niente.
The hellfire second movement bursts upon us feroce, using
extreme intervals. Rooted in the tritone of E, B flat, among
its secrets are the first use of the tritone transposition (the
diabolus in musica –can this be a coincidence?) and serialism
of the rhythm. The latter is most obvious, perhaps, at ‘The
stars of heaven were falling’, where the repeated chords heard
in the previous two bars undergo a frenzied diminution, followed
by imitation at a mere semiquaver’s distance, to return later
in retrograde form. The timpani enter, repeating a 5-note rhythm
on a tritone, quietly at first, but louder with the appearance
of the Archangel Michael ‘glorious and terrible against the
sky’. (The diminutive James Blades, fresh from The Turn of
the Screw, is again brilliant here in my memory.) With no
brass available, the Last Trump is manufactured by the tutti
martellato with maracas and cymbal, culminating in bass
drum ff tutta forza. The frenzied opening
returns, to subside for the narrator to proclaim, with a note
of finality, ‘Time is, time was, but time shall be no more’.
Cymbal, small and large gongs take it in turns to break the
eerie silence.
Peaceful chords and a hauntingly persistent semitone E-F on
the vibraphone conjure up the ‘languor of sleep’ at the beginning
of the last movement.. In a 14-bar interlude major sevenths,
rising and falling, colour the choir’s contribution, but these
are no longer the extreme intervals of the previous movement,
of which nervous string tremolos are the only echo. At ‘His
eyelids trembled’ the vibraphone ostinato returns, now as a
descending semitone. Seiber still has surprises for us, though.
At ‘His soul was swooning into some new world’ the chorus hums
a melody, doubled now at the octave, now at the double octave,
now at the unison, until the row is complete. The nearest parallel
I can think of, if it be one, is the wonderful moment in Bach’s
Trauerode where the counterpoint gives way to an uncharacteristic
choral unison. Just before ‘Evening had fallen’ Ex 6 creeps
in on the ‘cello, with its semitone disguised as a seventh to
match the preceding texture. Before long the original version
returns in the choral tenors, to share in the discussion until
the semitone, repeated over and over, has the last word.
Ulysses has never been recorded, in spite of its success
all over Europe, including at the ISCM in June 1951. It was
performed at the Royal Festival Hall under Rudolf Schwarz in
1957 (BBCSO, Chorus and Choral Society, soloist Pears), and
again under him on 4 February 1961 in a live broadcast (BBCSO,
LP Choir, Morley College Choir, Dorian Singers, soloist Gerald
English). It is hoped to issue the first CD using the BBC recording
of a broadcast performance of 21 May 1972 under David Atherton
(LSO, BBC Chorus, soloist Alexander Young). Morley College featured
again with a performance on 19 March 2005 to mark the composer’s
centenary, by the Anton Bruckner Choir and the College Chamber
Choir and Chamber Orchestra under Christopher Dawe (soloist
Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts).
On 6 October 2010 an American SO concert under Leo Botstein
in Carnegie Hall will feature the cantata; Seiber’s daughter
Julia hopes to attend.
Three Fragments was performed at Basle in November 1958,
at Aldeburgh on 25 June 1959 (Richard Standen replacing an indisposed
Pears), and at the RBA Galleries on 11 December 1959. The first
broadcast was on 18 June 1959 (recorded on 28 May) and the only
commercial recording so far was issued by Decca in 1960, with
the Dorian Singers, Pears and the Melos Ensemble conducted by
the composer. It is hoped to reissue this very soon on a CD along
with Ulysses and the 1953 Elegy for viola and strings; it can
also be heard, but without Ulysses or theElegy, on a Decca
Eloquence CD with quintets by Shostakovich and Prokofiev (to
be reviewed).
Footnotes
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Tempo No 11 (June 1945), p 5
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The Scotsman critic (John Amis) commented the
next day on ‘the discriminating nature of their programmes’
contrasting with ‘the smallness of their audiences’, the performance
of Ulysses being ‘in the best traditions’…’Although
it is too long, this composition contains some outstandingly
fine passages’. The Morley College choir was, on this occasion,
accompanied by the Kalmar Orchestra.
-
‘A note on Ulysses’ (Music Survey, iii (1951)
p 263
-
Music Review, xii (February 1951) p 105
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Music Survey iv/2 (February 1952)
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Appendix to J Rufer: Composition with Twelve Notes related
only to one another ) tr Searle, p 198
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Music Magazine (radio programme, 31 March 1957)
-
www.n-ism.org/Papers/graham_Seiber4.pdf
-
Aldeburgh Festival Programme Book (June 1959). However,
his assertion that ‘the first movement contains only series
beginning or ending with E’ is incorrect, eg the string chords
in bars 23-28 use rows from C to D (inversion) and G to A
(retrograde).
-
‘F.H.’ (probably Frank Howes) thought Seiber’s Fantasia Concertante
at the ISCM, unlike the usual fare, ‘indicated a musical mind
at work behind the abracadabra.’ (The Musical Times
(June 1949, p 203)). For Seiber’s view, cf his Composing
with Twelve Notes (Music Survey iv/3 (June 1952)
p 472.
-
I think he meant the first five notes in German or Italian
nomenclature: E – r(e diesis)- (G)i(s)- C – H(=B).
-
Radio Times (4 February 1961)
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‘He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of music , this of all
times and climes’ (Bad Boy of Music).
Music examples reproduced by kind permission of Schott Music Ltd
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