Malcolm MacDonald
Larry Alexander’s letter in Newsletter 55 about Psalm 23 touches on one of the many ‘Brian enigmas’ that we can’t simply resolve in any decisive fashion because we have no hard evidence on which to base a conclusion; in a sense his letter reflects this because his points are couched so much in the form of general assertions (‘how it comes out sounding to this pair of ears’) that they are difficult to discuss in specific terms. In his last paragraph he seems to be claiming Psalm 23 as ‘late Brian’ through and through, in form as well as orchestration, even if founded on material which originally goes back to the early years of the century. I have grave doubts about this; but there’s no way anyone can firmly gainsay him.
It has become clear to me over the past few years - for a number of reasons which would take far too long to elucidate here - that the ‘received dating’ of most of Brian’s early scores (as promulgated by Reginald Nettel in Ordeal by Music, but ultimately relying on information supplied to him by Brian) tends to be three or four years too early, and this affects Psalm 23 as much as other pieces. The 1901 date, which I adhered to in my sleeve-note for the CBS disc, should probably be revised to ‘about 1904’ [1]. A minor point in context, but it serves to highlight the fact that we have no contemporary scrap of paper dealing with the original version of the work that would help to tie it down more precisely: no score, no sketch, no letter (there is a story of Brian’s having shown it to Elgar, which can hardly be earlier than 1905).
All extant manuscript material is of the second, 1945 version. At the end of the full score, Brian notes: ‘Original full score lost at Lewes, 1920. New full score completed at 25 South Way, North Harrow, March 7 1945’. Of the circumstances of the full score’s loss we know nothing whatever. Brian may in fact have destroyed it, and indeed there are several missing works from the Great War period (and immediate pre-War years) which would seem to have faded from view at the same time; maybe it got mislaid in moving house; or what? Equally important, we don’t know what it was that survived 1920 - i.e., what Brian based his 1945 score upon. There is indeed a manuscript vocal score with no date upon it, but the handwriting and paper are identical with the full score, and strikingly unlike the earliest surviving Brian mss. (such as the 1903 Burlesque Variations). However, since Brian’s note only refers to the loss of the original full score, it seems reasonable to surmise that the original vocal score, or at least a short-score sketch, was still available to him in 1945. (The vocal score is in fact in short-score form, which is why the Musica Viva publication is of a specially commissioned piano reduction.) Otherwise Brian would surely have signalled the fact of necessary re-composition from memory, as he did in his prefatory note to the violin Concerto. There could have been many reasons for his then replacing this original source 110/114tr with a fresh vocal score - ranging from actual (but not necessarily major) revisions to the musical substance, to the sheer physical circumstance that the old vocal score could well have been in fragile condition, and not up to his current standards of legibility.
So we have simply no means of comparing the 1945 version with the original in any respect. But we can and should compare it with various pieces of relevant ‘parallel’ evidence: for character and structure with the vocal score of By the Waters of Babylon. an authentic production of a couple of years later; and for orchestral style both with the other extant early works, and with the one available case of a work that Brian restored in the absence of a full score that has subsequently been recovered: namely the first 120 bars of The Tigers, of which he produced a new version in 1969.
Form, etc.
As far as character and structure are concerned, I find myself very much in agreement with Neil Starling’s conclusions: that By the Waters of Babylon duplicates many of the processes found in Psalm 23, but extends them in scale and complexity, while introducing more original features. Of course we could try to stand this argument on its head: to say, for instance, that the 5/2 fugal section in Babylon (‘How shall we sing the Lord’s Song’) is rather diffuse, and on an awkward subject - whereas the ‘But Thy loving kindness’ fugue in Psalm 23, by its relative concision and simplicity, shows the hand of a mature and experienced composer. But that approach doesn’t convince me. The very presence of a comparatively straightforward fugal section limited to ‘real’ answers, compared to the much more involved sequence in Babylon) tends to identify Psalm 23 as an early work: and it seems more commonsensical to assume that the young composer essayed a small-scale fugue on a straightforward subject first, before going on vastly to expand and vary this feature in Babylon. The large amount of fairly literal repetition of thematic elements points to an early date too, though the thematic organization in itself is impressive. Harmonically, also, the musical language identifies itself as ‘early’ Brian, not least through its saturation with triadic sonorities - triads which are commonly heard in full, with their 3rds, in root position. The characteristic ‘later Brian’ bare-5th has little to do in Psalm 23 (and not much more in Babylon) [2].
This is not to deny that the Psalm, even if written around 1904, is in many respects a highly individual piece; that it sounds unmistakeably like Havergal Brian (it has become clear that there was no stage of his career at which he didn’t sound like himself); that it constitutes a considerable advance on the 1903 Burlesque Variations; and that it contains things that are strikingly prophetic of his later work [3]. (The most ‘prophetic’ section, to my mind, is the Tranquillo, bars 280-300, on ‘for ever’, with its aerated textures, disembodied treatment of tonality, and rapt, mystic, vein of meditation. If Larry wants to maintain that this was actually composed in 1945, I can’t disprove it; but I don’t hear anything inconsistent with circa 1904 in the chromaticism of the immediately following bars, nor in the climactic cadence at bars 306-7.)
But in general the personal voice is not yet particularly highly developed: it’s music ‘of its time’, displaying certain turns of phrase that seem to echo Elgar and other contemporaries (‘But thy loving kindness’, a wonderful tune, is positively Parryesque); and the influence of Wagner, Das Rheingold especially, is obtrusive and not wholly assimilated - though capitalized upon with skill and expressive point. An inchoate late-Romanticism is especially noticeable in the orchestral accompaniment of (for me) the least successful section, the big tenor solo (‘Thou hast prepared a table before me’). And the vocal line here - though it starts (bars 212-3) with that most characteristic Brian shape which I traced throughout the symphonies on pp.170-1 of my Volume III - basically displays the asymmetrical, ‘negative’ type of word-setting which Mike Smith (Newsletter 50) has identified as a trademark of the early songs. (The word-setting in Wine of Summer and Prometheus is often cantankerous, but not in this way.) I have no difficulty, therefore, in accepting that Brian in 1945 may have revised Psalm 23 in many of its details: but I feel strongly that the work he has transmitted to us is essentially the one he wrote in or around 1904.
Orchestration
It is illuminating to compare the orchestra of Psalm 23 as listed in the 1945 score with that of the first version of Babylon. This latter valuable piece of information appeared in the pre-premiere report in the Staffordshire Sentinel, and it seems not to have been known to Neil Starling: I give it here in the form of a direct quote, and have put the Psalm’s instrumentation in the same order for purposes of easy comparison:
Babylon: ‘strings...3 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 1 cor anglais, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 1 double bassoon, 4 horns (6 horns ad lib), 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and bass tuba, harp, 3 tympani, bass drum, side drum, cymbals, tambourine and large gong’
Psalm 23: ‘strings, 2 flutes (2nd takes piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd takes cor anglais), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, harp, timpani, bass drum, side drum, cymbals, glockenspiel and organ’.
On the face of it the Babylon list appears to contradict the statement that this work was originally scored for double woodwind - but since it is reporting a total instrumentation only it gives no indication of doublings, and the basic wood-wind line-up could still have been 3.2.2.2, only one player more than the Psalm. If we accept that, the two orchestral constitutions are very closely matched: Babylon has slightly greater range of colour and flexibility in the wind, plus two notionally ‘Oriental’ instruments in gong and tambourine; the Psalm being slightly more austere, with the ‘ecclesiastical’ element of the organ, and one pitched percussion instrument, the glockenspiel (but this occurs in several of Brian’s pre-1914 scores, whereas post-1914 he invariably complements it with a xylophone). The 1945 version of the Psalm, therefore, uses an orchestra that is quite consistent with his practice circa 1904.
When we turn to the use of that orchestra, however, we find that Larry Alexander is undoubtedly correct in his contention that the ‘sound’ which Brian obtains is, in general, strikingly different from that of the early works for orchestra alone. Though it would be an extremely lengthy process to enumerate the differences in detail, I think they may be summed up broadly and simply: the orchestral works are much more concerned with instrumental colour ‘for its own sake’. They are full of attention-demanding and -holding devices of timbre, texture, and execution, and they show Brian exploring and extending the full gamut of sonority made available to him by the various examples of Strauss, Debussy, and Rimsky-Korsakov. We see this in his taxing use of woodwind and brass ensembles, his experimentation with percussion effects, his frequent complex, multi-divided textures for strings. Orchestral virtuosity as such is one of his prime expressive aims during the early period. We do well to note, also, that he approached it through the forms to which it was most appropriate - character-suite, bravura variation-sets, and more or less programmatic tone poems. This brand of virtuosity is immensely developed, but with special structural significances, in the early symphonies between the Wars.
The 1945 score of Psalm 23 approaches the orchestra from an entirely different viewpoint. Though extremely sensitive in its use of the instruments, colour as such is rarely employed even for illustrative purposes, and even then is used in a straightforward and traditional way: the pastoral oboe for pastures green, the insistent drumbeat in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. From first bar to last, the orchestra’s role is conceived as functional, in that it exists to reinforce the music’s thematic and polyphonic essence.
Now this is indeed the standpoint from which Brian views the orchestra in the first works which he wrote after 1945 (Symphonies 6 and 7 and The Tinker’s Wedding): and Larry is right, it is a ‘symphonic’ standpoint. But we cannot assume that it wasn’t his standpoint for choral works from the be-ginning. First, Psalm 23 and Babylon are vastly different in their musical character from the more extrovert orchestral works, and would seem to demand a more restrained use of the orchestral resources’. Second, it’s obvious that the orchestra’s overriding raison d’être in these psalm-settings is to accompany the chorus, and thereby to reinforce the chorus’s thematic and polyphonic essence. (A relevant comparison here - so long as we remember that the use of the orchestra is more extreme in every way - would be that between Symphonies 2, 3, 4 (second movement), and 5 on the one hand and the choral movements of 4 on the other. Again, in the choral music, the orchestration, though massive, is much less keyed to colouristic and virtuosic effect.)
The orchestral style of Psalm 23, therefore, seems to me no more inconsistent with ‘early Brian’ than the constitution of the orchestra itself. Not that I suppose it was Brian’s intention to attempt a detailed historical reconstruction of the lost full score. He would naturally have brought to bear all the garnered experience of the intervening 40 years. If that lost score were to turn up we’d undoubtedly find a myriad divergence in detail, representing a gain in professionalism, and in most, probably all, of those details we’d con-sider the 1945 score preferable. But his approach may well have been to provide a generalized ‘early Brian’ orchestration in accord with the work’s ‘early Brian’ material, while avoiding anything that his current standards of orchestral technique could no longer accept.
The Prometheus connection?
Larry Alexander has nevertheless raised a very interesting point in getting us to think about how Psalm 23 (1945 version) might relate to Prometheus Unbound (completed 1944) and the series of symphonic works that resumed in the winter of 1947-8.
Prometheus, the most crucial work in Brian’s oeuvre after The Gothic and The Tigers, remains a yawning gap in our knowledge; and even in the absence of the full score, the vocal score deserves a whole series of articles to make a preliminary assessment of its place and significance. I hope to attempt that before we are all very much older; but at the moment I will confine myself to a couple of observations.
The two-act form of Prometheus divides it neatly into two halves, each dominated by a principal protagonist - Prometheus in Act I, Asia in Act It - and on the musical level, too, the two acts constitute a kind of ‘masculine/feminine’ dualism. The dramatic Act I, in its extended solos and choruses, demonstrably inherits and develops aspects of the 4th and 5th Symphonies. These are further developed in Act U. but in the direction of greater lyricism; and this tendency leads to an increased simplicity and directness in the material itself. That can to some extent lend the material resemblances to some of Brian’s early music. It certainly, in my opinion, has some bearing on the relative directness of expression in the succeeding symphonic works. Also, for many reasons (better laid out in an article on Prometheus than here), Brian seems, during its composition, to have been glancing back over his life and reviving old memories -which would include the works of his earliest period. But - independently of that - the score gives off something else, very strongly: in some ways Prometheus is Brian’s most ‘Wagnerian’ creation.
I don’t want that statement to be misunderstood. The work isn’t derivative from or cannibalistic upon Wagner. But it is Brian’s own great confrontation with an absolutely crucial Wagnerian theme - Redemption through the Love of Woman (Asia representing in Brian’s scheme what Goethe calls ‘das Ewigweibliche’) - and Brian was most certainly aware of the Wagnerian resonances of what he was doing. (Indeed, at some points he appears to challenge Wagner directly and deliberately on his own ground: the superb ‘Dawn’ Prelude to Act II looks like a conscious re-thinking, wholly in Brian’s own terms, of the opening of Das Rheingold.) I think it’s possible, therefore that this personal assimilation of Wagnerian concepts recalled to Brian’s mind the work in which, as far as we know, he had first tried to make a creative, though far more simplistic, use of Wagner - Psalm 23, whose march-like main idea evokes the Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla, and thus draws an ambiguous parallel between the House of the Gods and the House of the Lord. Perhaps, if he was unsure what direction to take after Prometheus (and the exalted super-lyricism of its final sections remains unparalleled in his entire output), this may well have struck him as the first reasonable moment to revivify the Psalm: marking time on a not wholly unrelated creation while his artistic impulses adjusted to the significance of what he had actually achieved.
The complete gap in composition from 1945 to the end of 1947, however, suggests that the Psalm’s re-scoring stands as an appendix to Brian’s ‘Middle Period’ (of which Prometheus is the final climax as well as ‘final transition’ - Larry is right here, though I don’t think in quite the way he expects) rather than ‘at the head of the penultimate period’. The most I can say is that its clear-cut structure and thematic economy may have helped to turn Brian back towards those features, which are certainly on display in the works of 1948.
'The Tigers’ re-scoring
Finally, the joker in the pack. Once again, a detailed article is really needed to compare the 1969 re-scoring of the first 120 bars of The Tigers with its 1929 original, but the result of such a comparison can be very simply stated; the two versions are entirely different. The 1969 score is definitely in Brian’s latest style, and there is no sign of any attempt to recall the original, apart from a couple of places where the material practically specifies its own instrumentation. One should be cautious of generalizing from this one instance, of course: The Tigers is a very different kind of work from Psalm 23, and Brian’s attitude to re-scoring (to say nothing of his aural memory) may have been very different in 1969 from what it was in 1945. On the other hand - Larry Alexander could reasonably claim that The Tigers fragment is the only piece of hard evidence on how Brian re-orchestrated that we have, and as far as it goes it supports his case. But I can’t take that as conclusive proof on the matter. Which is where I came in...
Footnotes: [1] A detailed chronological ordering is now impossible to establish, but if we confine ourselves to still-extant major works, it probably goes something like this: Burlesque Variations (1903) (date on score); For Valour (1904) (first performance programme-note: date on score is actually 1906, but the work was described in the Press in 1905.); English Suite No.1 (1903-4? but incorporating earlier material); Psalm 23 (1904?); By the Waters of Babylon (1905) (Press report); Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme (1907) (date on score); The Vision of Cleopatra (1907) (on vocal score); Festal Dance (1908) (date on score).
[2] "MR. HAVERGAL BRIAN'S 'BABYLON' / Sir Edward Elgar's Opinion of the Work" - unsigned preview article in The Staffordshire Sentinel. 16 April 1907. "3 tympani" of course means 3 drums, not 3 sets; and though Brian late in life demanded side-drums for the Psalm, the score itself indicates one only.
[3] If any of the purely orchestral pieces shares something of the expressive character of the Psalms, it is (intermittently) In Memoriam: the handling of the orchestra in this work is not impossibly different from Psalm 23, and in some features - the use of the organ, for instance, (very different from its employment in the symphonies) - the resemblance seems very close.
© 1985 Malcolm MacDonald
Newsletter, NL 57, 1985