Being young you have not known
I've been reminded by a kind email that when I was working on Birtwistle's Crowd, I posted some WH Auden I had much in mind. As artists and as human beings, both Auden and Birtwistle know what it is to want order and wholeness, and equally how the chaos of the universe stands in our way.
It strikes me that perhaps, the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to need and delight in order (good minds naturally sort and interpret), but also to feel how difficult things are. The more you know, the more you know how little you know. Hence Auden's disillusioned, weeping "child with the tremendous brain", and Birtwistle's patterns disordered by chance elements. Crowd's penultimate page is particularly harrowing, where soaring fragments are trapped by sharply cut-off notes, like a door is slamming on all your aspirations.
And so perhaps also extremely intelligent people have a clear, knowing sadness, that is their own - lonely, too. Such is Hamlet's problem: he is much brighter than everyone else, horrified by events the others think OK. Tchja. My father wrote once in a poem: "God must be terribly lonely."
Britten always has this sadness: the fanfare in the War Requiem's 'Sanctus' is so grand, brilliant, soaring, and yet whenever I hear it, despite the huge orchestras, choirs, organ, I always feel there such profound loneliness.
I am listening to the Tavener/Yeats 'To A Child Dancing in the Wind':
- Dance there upon the shore;
- What need have you to care
- For wind or water's roar?
- And tumble out your hair
- That the salt drops have wet;
- Being young you have not known
- The fool's triumph, nor yet
- Love lost as soon as won,
- Nor the best labourer dead
- And all the sheaves to bind.
- What need have you to dread
- The monstrous crying of wind?
