My Violin Sonata was commissioned by Alun Hoddinott for the Cardiff Festival of Music with funds provided by the Welsh Arts Council and first performed by Yfrah Neaman and Martin Jones on 4 December 1979.
The work is in three movements - the first is fast and aggressive and is based on a sequence that appeats throughtout the rest of the piece. The second movement is, by contrast, slow and would see to have been bruised by the first. The final movement renews the aggressive vehemence of the opening and grimly combines it with material from the slow movement. The work has, therefore, an A B A pattern.
Wessex Graves
Song cycle for tenor (or mezzo-soprano) and harp to words by Thomas Hardy.
She at his funeral - Drummer Hodge - In the moonlight - Ah, are you digging on my grave? - Her secret
The composer writes:
These songs are among my earliest compositions, written in the mid-1970s at the suggestion and encouragement of Peter Pears. They are deliberately written in a folk-song idiom, partly because the harp is essentially a diatonic instrument, and partly because the nature of the words of the poems suggested this style. The poems, by Thomas Hardy, were chosen for various treatments of one theme - death, and the grave. Some are wistful, some tragic, some humorous. There are no better programme notes than the words themselves.
(c) Michael Berkeley,
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
Wessex Graves
1. She at his funeral
They bear him to his resting place -
In slow procession sweeping by;
I follow at a stranger's space;
His kindred they, his sweetheart I,
Unchanged my gown of garish dye,
Though sable-sad is their attire;
But they stand round with griefless eye,
Whilst my regret consumes like fire!
2. Drummer Hodge
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined - just as found;
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
3. In Moonlight
'O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave there were?
If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,
Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!'
'Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!
'Ah she was one you loved, no doubt
Through good and evil, through rain and drought.
And when she passed, all your sun when out?'
'Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
But during her life I thought nothing of.'
4. Ah, are you digging on my grave?
'Ah, are you digging on my grave,
My loved one? Planting rue?'
- 'No: yesterday he went to wed
One of the brightest wealth has bred.
"It cannot hurt her now", he said,
"That I should not be true!"'
'Then who is digging on my grave?
My nearest dearest kin?'
'Ah, no: they sit and think, "what use!
What good will planting flowers produce?
No tendance of her mound can loose
Her spirit from Death's gin."'
'But some-one digs upon my grave?
My enemy? Prodding sly?'
'Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate
That shuts on all flesh soon or late,
She thought you no more worth her hate,
And cares not where you lie.'
'Then, who is digging on my grave?
Say - since I have not guessed!'
- 'O it is I, my mistress dear,
Your little dog, who still lives near,
And much I hope my movements here
Have not disturbed your rest?'
'Ah, yes! You dig upon my grave...
Why flashed it not on me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!'
'Mistress, I dug upon your grave
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I'm sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting place.'
5. Her secret
Her love's dull smart distressed my heart
He shrewdly learnt to see,
But that I was in love with a dead man
Never suspected he.
He searched for the trace of a pictured face,
He watched each missive come,
And a sheet that seemed like a love-line
Wrought his look lurid and numb.
He dogged my feet to the city street,
He followed me to the sea,
But not to the nigh, still churchyards
Did he dream of following me!
Winter Fragments
This song cycle was commissioned by the Nash Ensemble, who gave the first performance at The Purcell Room in London on the 5th of March 1996 with Jean Rigby the soloist, conducted by Thomas Ades.
The double meaning title of these pieces came naturally, partly because I was at that time considering an opera project based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, partly because the music was largely written in a frozen Welsh landscape, and partly because I wanted to write short, spare pieces that combine to create an overall aspect of winter. Since composers often tend to destroy words before recreating them, I have gone further still and both used lines and ideas from various poets as well as concocting miniatures of my own.
The first is a case in point with the music waking-up, as it were, with difficulty from a frozen slumber. Next comes two lines from Romeo and Juliet to begin the first of several metaphysical references to winter.
After these two very spartan pieces, the third is a quick and more extended movement evoking the sheer exhilaration and power of high wind and rough weather. Incidentally these lines about reeling clouds are by the 18th-century poet James Thomson - not to be confused with his 19th-century namesake. Following the swirling storm there's a brief return to frozen stillness and the blinding light refracted from snow in bright sun.
The fifth song has a feel of folk music with a simple melodic line for Shelley's words and a repeated mechanical pattern for the bass clarinet which, only in the final line of the poem, is revealed as being the sound of the mill-wheel. In addition to the clarinet, Winter Fragments is scored for flute and oboe plus harp and string trio.
The penultimate piece consists of lines from Longfellow's Snowflakes and ascribes a certain melancholy to nature itself. Finally there is a passage from David Malouf's libretto based on The Winter's Tale in which that touching character, Paulina reminds us of the inexorable passage of Time and its ability to heal; we must have faith for season on season the changes are wrought.
(c) Michael Berkeley,
Text reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press:
No.1
Winter, winter fragments the earth and
stills sheer space.
MB
No.2
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
No.3
The reeling clouds
stagger with dizzy aim, as doubting yet
which master to obey: while rising, slow,
sad, in the laden-colour'd east, the moon
wears a bleak circle round her sully'd orb.
Then issues forth the storm, with loud control,
and the thin fabrick of the pillar'd air
o'erturns, at once.
Thick clouds ascend, in whose capacious womb,
a vapoury deluge lies, to snow congeal'd:
Heavy, they roll their fleecy world along;
and the sky saddens with th'impending storm.
Thro' the hush'd air, the whitening shower descends.
See! Earth's universal face
is all one, dazzling, waste.
James Thomson (1700 - 1748), from Winter
No.4
Frozen still; a loud silence
speaking, speaking so white, so bright -
light eye cannot see.
IATALIC(MB)
No.5
A widow bird sate mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.
Shelley, A Song
No.6
Silent and soft and slow descends the snow.
The troubled sky reveals the grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air.
This is the secret of despair,
Now whispered and revealed to wood and field.
Longfellow, from Snowflakes
No.7
Time that knows more
than we do has its own
story to tell.
In good time we say,
in good time all
that time has locked away
in the realm of what is
and will be will be
revealed. We must not force it
but in good faith abide
the telling, it is
out of our hands,
but not out of hearts.
Season on season
the changes are wrought. Awake
your faith now, and listen.
David Malouf, from libretto for The Winter's Tale
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