From "In the Winter of Cities" - (2006) YR1540
Tennessee Williams
for baritone and piano
These texts are under copyright and therefore not fully reproduced herein.
i. Old men are fond [ 5 pages, circa 2' 50" ]
Old men are fond
of little certainties.
The mail will arrive
at exactly three-forty-five,
the crossword puzzle....
ii. Which is my little boy? [ 3 pages, circa 1' 15" ]
Which is my little boy, which is he, [ 1 ]
Jean qui pleure ou Jean qui rit?
Jean qui rit is my delicate John,
the one with the Chinese slippers on,
whose hobby horse....
iii. Covenant [ 5 pages, circa 2' 50" ]
If you are happy, I will give you an apple,
if you are anxious, I will twist your arm,
and if you permit me, I will be glad to hold you....
iv. Across the space [ 5 pages, circa 5' 45" ]
Across the space between
a bed and a chair
I watch you fade into
the fading air.
Intimate these moments,
dim and warm.
My finger tips could touch....
v. Death is high [ 3 pages, circa 2' 45" ]
Death is high;
it is where the exalted things are.
I know, for the breathlessness took me
to a five-pointed star.
I was exalted....
[ 21 pages, total duration circa 15' 25" ]
Tennessee Williams
An inscription by Tennessee Williams on a photo of his long time friend and lover, Frank Merlo, read, "When your candle burns low, you've got to believe that the last light shows you something besides the progress of darkness." Frank Merlo died in 1961 of lung cancer. Williams also wrote, "Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a truly awful sense of impermanence." One of the emotional colors which binds these five poems and their musical settings together is that afore-mentioned "belief" in the face of the reality of our own impermanence.
Given the opening lines of this cycle to poems by Tennessee Williams which reads "old men are fond of little certainties," I chose to make among those certainties the constant tonal region of C major, sometimes decorated with other non-harmonic tones and sometimes by a simple flirtatious dalliance with another tonal region, but consistently returning to the tonal center of this work about "certainties."
What are those certainties? "Old men are fond" affirms the certainty us that "Everybody gets to be old now and then." "Which is my little boy" remains unanswered, suggesting that answers are often tough to come by, and "Covenant" is filled with a questioning "if." "Across the space" assures that among the certainties is death, which "Death is high" assures us to be "where the exalted things are." Yet, even some awareness of that causes one to "not be at ease in that space." Dis-ease, then is among the "little certainties," such that one may find dis-ease within the supposedly consonant tonal resources of C major, in reality merely tonal materials much like others and all in service to meaning.
This cycle is wholly in -- or perhaps better said "on" -- C major. In Structural Functions of Harmony (1954), Arnold Schoenberg wrote, "Modulation promotes centrifugal tendencies by loosening the bonds of affirmative elements." By avoiding such "centrifugal tendencies" I chose to avoid "loosening the bonds of affirmative elements," thereby pointing to the opposite of the "centrifugal," this opposite being an inward and self-absorbed tonal regularity used to characterize musically that self-absorbed and singular quality of these poems.
Williams is reported to have said, "Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life." [in Elia Kazan's autobiographical A Life, 1988] Because these texts represent various moments of self-absorption and a perhaps jaded inward reflection, the interpreter of these songs should stress in them that anxiety and unrelieved longing. Certainly this is what Williams intended, and this is therefore apt guidance for the singer/actor. Portray one's self through the flaws of one's own ego.
Schoenberg added in the text cited above that "...the text is frequently so overwhelming in itself as to conceal the absence of value in a melody. These ["Drama and poetry"] extramuscal influences produced the concept of extended tonality." [Chapter 8]
In that, I believe Schoenberg erred at this late stage in his life when finishing the text and perhaps exposed a "flaw" in his ego, for one may also find, as in this cycle, that drama and poetry can produce other concepts as well -- the one for this cycle having been a reductio to one tonal region throughout. This is the antithesis of "extended tonality." The problem with an ideological stance in music is that ideologies change, as do musical tastes and understandings. But oddly, Williams reminds us all, to include Schoenberg, that "old men are fond" of certainties, and Schoenberg's "old man" was one of certainties too, as is the "old man" in me. It is merely the certainties' details themselves which change from old man to the next.
It was another "old man," Sergei Prokofiev, who said, "There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." Hopefully performers and an audience will find this cycle "beautiful" settings of Tennessee Williams' moving poems.
The cycle is intended specifically for baritone, with an easy tessitura, neither to low or high, with an easy cantante style and interpretive instincts.
The opening song is accompanied by a somewhat secco, rocking motion, perhaps indicative of a ticking clock and time passing, but also of regularity.
Setting the internal question to a triple meter emphasizes the "sport" of continually questioning which "little boy" am I, sad or happy. The dichotomy between pessimism and optimism, between the poles of joy and melancholy is common to life for us all. Therefore there is a song form shape to the setting in which another tonal region plays the dissonance to the home key of C.
Continuing the "sport" of indecision, the setting of "Covenant" is meant to note the multiple recurrence of the word, "if." A covenant implies commitment and the four-fold repetition of "if" implies the covenant might need renegotiation or may not last. This poem is a large question, not a statement, as I read it.
"Across the space" images a sick bed, and a terminal patient "fading." Given the restriction to C major as a pre-compositional challenge, I chose to set the opening of this setting as "jeu de clochettes" ringing from afar, or perhaps reminiscent of a clock's quiet ticking as time -- uncomfortable time -- passes for the one who sits and waits. Williams tells us of "intimate moments, dim and warm." These are what is fading, alongside the life on the one lying in the bed. Therefore, as the "heartbeats echo to eternal riot," that riot is small, even tiny, and very real though perhaps unnoticed to one who might be standing outside that sick room and far beyond "the space between a bed and a chair."
The last song begins as a declamando, announcing death. It quickly becomes lyric, as the petitioner pleads with the one dying to "Return." Widely spread chord forms indicate the distance between the one dying and the one who must remain behind, and the plea "Stay!" is accompanied with a quiet legato reminiscence of that "little room."
Also from Williams' In the Winter of Cities one finds the texts for the Blue Mountain Ballads, a far different and less introspective song cycle than this.
This cycle of songs is available as YR1540 for purchase from Yelton Rhodes Music, Los Angeles.
[ 1 ] This poem is marked "for Carson McCullers," an American author and friend to Williams through much of their professional lives. She wrote in Esquire in 1959, "In any communication, a thing says to one person quite a different thing from what it says to another, but writing, in essence, is communication; and communication is the only access to love — to love, to conscience, to nature, to God, and to the dream. For myself, the further I go into my own work and the more I read of those I love, the more aware I am of the dream and the logic of God, which indeed is a Divine collusion."
The French phrase, "Jean qui pleure ou Jean qui rit" refers to the optimistic and pessimistic sides of the self, and comes from a poem (1772) by Voltaire of that name. Subsequently, the phrase has become a part of the patois of several languages, and was used as titles for an operetta by Jacques Offenbach with a libretto by Charles Nuitter and Etienne Tréfeua, Emil Waldteufel's Polka burlesque, Op. 106, a silent film (1897) directed by Georges Hatot and Louis Lumière, a story by Henri Barbusse (1920s) and most recently a novel by François Ayroles, published by L'Association in May 1998 which is a subtle "graphic exercise about the parallel destiny of two twins, one is lucky, the other not...." For Williams both Jeans are him, as they were for Voltaire.
In "The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing" (Esquire, 1959)," McCullers writes the following: "Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about — people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love — their spiritual isolation." This song cycle with a poem which was dedicated to her is about that "spiritual isolation" as well, Williams having been her kindred spirit in many ways.
The line in the text describing "Jean qui pleure" as "with sorrows older than Naishapur" refers to the area of ancient Persia where Omar Khayyam was born. Alternatively spelled Neyshabur, it lies at an elevation of almost 4,000 feet in a wide, fertile plain at the southern end of the Binalud Mountains. It was a regional center founded and named by the Sasanian King Shapur I (d. 272 CE), was seat to several pre-Islamic and Islamic dynasties and suffered in the Mongol Invasion. To have sorrows "older than Naishapur" references age-old human woes while making clever reference to a birthplace of culture and poetry.
