James Leggio
Some introductory remarks are in order before addressing this essay’s main subject: the musical setting of The Waste Land composed by Anthony Burgess in the 1970s. Stay with me in Part 1 as I first look at the poem itself, as an auditory experience in its own right, with its own distinctive vocal and even musical features. It is these that Burgess will bring to the fore in his setting, the subject of Part 2.
PART 1: PERFORMING THE WASTE LAND
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), still regarded as one of the masterpieces of modernist literature, and among the most difficult, may not be quite as hard to grasp as many people think. True, the poem is a heady, sometimes bewildering mixture of discrete meditations, narrative vignettes, bits of dialogue, physical descriptions, musical allusions, and literary quotations in multiple languages. To demonstrate its prevailing theme — “I have shored these fragments against my ruins” — Eliot leaps from fragment to fragment, challenging readers to find sense in it all.
Yet the poem offers a rather different experience when we not only read the words on the page but also hear how they sound. We can learn much by listening to it. The poet Roger McGough, host of the BBC Radio 4 program Poetry Please, put the matter succinctly, in a 2011 broadcast. His commonsense remarks are here. (I’ll return later to the composite recording he mentions.)
Moreover, Eliot himself was deeply concerned with how the poem sounded when read aloud. As with all of his major poems, he made studio recordings of it. While not a complete success, his best-known studio effort with it, from 1946, does show, I believe, how the speaking voice tends to ride over the reader’s sense of fragmentation, and allow the poem to emerge as a somewhat more continuous experience.
Let’s explore this aspect of the speaking voice — its role as an agent of continuity.
Eliot’s Recordings of The Waste Land
The recent unearthing of an audiotape of T.S. Eliot’s reading at the 92nd Street Y, New York, in 1950 throws new light on how he felt about delivering his poems out loud. His side remarks to the audience during the reading, which included “The Burial of the Dead” and “What the Thunder Said” parts of The Waste Land, are refreshing, displaying a gentle, self-effacing humor not always associated with him. He wonders, for instance, why people should come out on a rainy night to hear him read in person when they could listen to his recordings of the poems (such as his 1946 studio recording of The Waste Land, mentioned above) in the comfort of their own homes. But then he obliquely answers his own question. The 1950 live performance, with Eliot’s chatty “preamble” to the poems, has an amiable, inviting atmosphere because of what he calls the audience’s opportunity to “size up” the reader in the flesh, and indeed the 92nd Street Y furnished a prime opportunity to see what this monumental figure of modernist poetry, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1948, was like as a living, breathing person.
Revealingly, he also reports what he learned in the course of checking the playbacks at his studio recording sessions. He learned, first of all, the overriding importance of careful enunciation, so that the consonants and vowels register properly through the microphone, and then painstakingly strove to improve his articulation in subsequent sessions. And second, he mentions that in the studio he was very much focused on avoiding slip-of-the-tongue mistakes, which on vinyl could become increasingly annoying to listeners in subsequent playings. These two concerns, enforcing caution and meticulous care, seem to have restrained his freedom of communication — restraint from which he was relatively free in a live, ephemeral reading such as the one at the Y. And certainly, listening to that live event after having known the studio recording for decades, it’s clear that at the Y he’s somewhat more personal and more vocally animated. Not impetuous, to be sure, but a little less stiff, at times rising above the monotone of his studio effort and speaking in a way that falls more naturally on the ear. His insistent rhythm and sorrowful, if bone dry, voicing can be slightly more affecting here, especially in the more continuously connected passages.
The earlier, full-length studio recording of the poem, from 1946 (NBC, for the Library of Congress), has been analyzed in great detail by Stefan Hawlin. It does seem to bear out Eliot’s reservations about the dauntingly controlled conditions of the studio and the special burdens they place on the reader to maintain precise enunciation and avoid error. He was very successful at getting the poem, and especially the pronunciation of foreign-language lines, letter-perfect, to the point where Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, in their meticulously annotated edition of Eliot’s complete poems, note in passage after passage that a given arcane or foreign word is “Pronounced correctly in TSE’s recordings.” But at some cost. The 1946 recording is primmer and more monochromatic than his performance at the 92nd Street Y. He sounds more like a professorial lecturer than a great poet. Also, the full-length recording, being textually complete, must include several key sections in which women speak — the pub scene, the bickering couple, the typist — that he was not well equipped to deliver. The relative success of his live reading benefits from omitting those for him vocally problematic passages.
For the sake of due diligence, note that there’s also a complete 1947 recording, taken down at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, as well as a number of recordings of individual parts of the poem from various public occasions.
Perhaps of greater interest because closer to the date of composition is a complete studio recording dated (by Ricks and McCue, p. 547) to 1933, available online at the website of The Poetry Archive. In 1933, Eliot observes a marginally faster, slightly more urgent tempo. I wonder whether his relative alacrity on this occasion in part results from the technology of the 78 RPM record, in which the sides are very short; he may have had to rush a bit to fit the allotted lines onto each disc in the set, and pause for a side change only at a plausible place for sense, rather than randomly — an imperative that affected singers and conductors as well during the long dominance of this procrustean format, as they adjusted their tempo choices to make the side changes fall at the least damaging points. The changeovers to the next disc are very noticeable in this 1933 iteration, with different degrees of surface noise evident on the different 78 RPM discs. In any case, the 1933 effort confirms Eliot’s well-founded anxiety about making mistakes in a recording: here, in “What the Thunder Said,” he seems to mistakenly say “Revive for a moment the broken Coriolanus,” instead of “Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.” No big deal, but you can imagine how he felt on hearing the finished record played back, his slip enshrined for the ages. When he returned to a studio in 1946, to make his 33⅓ RPM long-playing version, bringing The Waste Land upon its release in 1949 into the new era of the LP, he must have remembered that.
Reluctantly, though, no matter what the recording occasion, in the end we are forced to acknowledge that Eliot’s voice is sometimes simply unsuited to the particulars of the text. It’s true that he’s metrically very precise, but this is in part the result of the imperative for clear enunciation, and he places the accents so scrupulously that he sometimes gives what musicians call a “metronomic” performance, where a player is so fixed on observing the strictly correct meter, as indicated, say, by a metronome, that elastic, poetic phrasing, or rubato, suffers. The tone of voice in Eliot’s 1946 studio recording at its worst, alas, can become a deadly existential drone that mows down whatever quotation or memorable turn of phrase lies in its path. There, and even in the live 1950 reading, he speaks with a kind of desultory despair that can somewhat flatten out the wide range of possible inflections lurking within the printed words.
And yet for most of us, Eliot’s voice, with its emotional reticence, has long been the definitive auditory rendering of the complete text.
“He Do the Police in Different Voices”
There’s another obvious, built-in reason for Eliot’s sometimes limited success as a reciter, whether at a live event or in the studio. He didn’t tentatively give The Waste Land the working title “He Do the Police in Different Voices” for nothing; the interplay of different voices is part of what the poem is about. And yet, he couldn’t really “do” character voices himself. A speaker needs a repertoire of many different vocal personae to bring the text to life before the microphone or the live audience. There are lines to be rendered in Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, and Sanskrit, for example, and few will be equally convincing in enunciating all of them. Eliot himself reveals a tiny bit of uncertainty about his proper Upanishad voice by over time changing his rendition of the words Shantih, shantih, shantih, as Ricks and McCue point out in their annotated edition (p. 708): “In TSE’s 1933 recording he clips and lifts the second syllable of each ‘shantih,’ whereas in those of 1948 and 1950 each trails away.” Moreover, even within the English voices, there are many different “class” accents to handle, from the East End slang in the pub scene to the high-toned allusions to Andrew Marvell and other historical poets held in high academic esteem.
To assess his limitations, listen to Eliot’s 1946 rendition of the famous opening verse-paragraph, which here does not differ substantially from his 1950 appearance. It’s hard to imagine a more doleful reading even of the relatively innocuous lines about drinking coffee and riding on a sled, for example. By way of contrast, compare Alec Guinness’s recording, where the actor, brilliant at “character” voices, adopts a light German accent for the Starnbergersee passage, set in the Bavarian Alps. The change of tone, the touch of arch humor, brings the scene vocally to life in a way that Eliot himself could not.
Truth be told, though, Eliot and even Guinness are put quite in the shade by the semi-staged video reading from Fiona Shaw, who often looks straight into the camera. She is at once disarmingly matter-of-fact and mesmerizing, with the ever-changing variety of inflections and expressions that a dynamic actor can bring to bear. Of course on video — and in her one-person play version of the poem, in 1996, directed by Deborah Warner — she uses her eyebrows, smile, and hand gestures to good effect. But it is her voice that captures the audience. Mel Gussow put it this way in the New York Times: “Ms. Warner steadfastly believes that Eliot’s own recorded reading of the poem undercuts the art: ‘It’s very clear that he wanted to read it absolutely flat. It’s like hearing someone in a foreign language, and that doesn’t help one’s understanding.’ In contrast, Ms. Shaw is virtuosic in her use of different voices.”
Back in the earthbound realm of the non-actor, Eliot further disadvantages himself by how he performs the women’s speeches, notably the pub scene, and also in the dialogue of the anxious couple. Here are clips of Eliot in the “my nerves are bad” scene and in the pub scene. They can sound a bit stiff and patronizing, with the “rat’s alley” comeback line unnecessarily cutting and the bar-room slang unconvincing. Although, to be fair, not as much so as the same scenes with Robert Speaight. Like some other male readers, Speaight makes the nerve-racked woman sound like what at the time might have been called a nag, while the male companion remains merely glumly annoyed, with his repeated emphasis on “Nothing, again nothing.” And Speaight’s starchy way with the gossipy pub scene can seem classist, even a bit misogynistic, if unintentionally so.
As Lawrence Rainey writes in Revisiting “The Waste Land” (2005), “. . . one of the major sources of the poem’s uncanny power [is] our extreme uncertainty over just who is speaking at any particular moment” (p. 107). True enough. At the same time, though, group readings with two or more speakers taking on specified individual “roles” can give a much livelier and more convincing, if less “uncanny,” account of the scenes we have just considered, as in this excellent joint reading of the couple’s argument. Edward Fox, as ever, here sounds rather posh, feeding a sense of class distinction in his dialogue with Eileen Atkins, as he takes a longsuffering tone with her, while Atkins makes this character, for once, a sympathetic figure tired of being patronized. Atkins brings to the pub scene an appropriate touch of the Queen Vic in EastEnders; however, Eliot’s voice is spliced in abruptly at the end to send the patrons off with a perhaps dismissively authorial “good night, sweet ladies.” Later, in another effective contrast, Michael Gough recounts the aftermath of the typist’s tryst, while Atkins startles us with the young woman’s only line, “Well, now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
Hearing a woman’s voice in the female roles transforms the scenes. Relieved of Eliot’s doing those roles himself, in drag, so to speak, the drama not only works better, but the writer’s sense of sympathy with the women, somewhat submerged in the lines when he reads them himself, surfaces more readily. The three actors just heard in this composite reading — Atkins, Fox, and Gough — realize far more effectively the internal distinctions between the “different voices” within the text, in a way beyond its speaking author. They make for a more continuous drama.
Performing the Musical Lines
Perhaps the greatest challenge Eliot’s poem poses to reciters is how to represent not only “different” voices but singing voices. A great many musical works are quoted in the poem and inform its character. Indeed, as Philip Waldron has observed in an essential article, The Waste Land is “one the most musical of poems we have.” Let me quickly mention some of the musical sources and allusions swirling in the work:
Passages from Richard Wagner’s operas Tristan und Isolde, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal figure conspicuously, the last-named arriving through a line from Paul Verlaine’s poem “Parsifal.” This pervasive use of Wagnerian sources has been closely studied, notably by Waldron.
The quotation of the Rhinemaidens’ song from Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung — “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” — for example, creates some problems for the speaker. Here is what the Rhinemaidens sound like in the latter opera. These nonsense syllables demand resourcefulness from reciters, which they meet in very different, sometimes imaginative ways. Eliot himself is pretty straightforward in 1946, after being a bit more expressive with the song itself in 1933 (the song continuing in the latter clip into the rest of the Thames-daughters scene). The actor known as Tom O’Bedlam is slightly freer and more melodic. Paul Scofield baby-talks the song. Eileen Atkins actually sings the Rhinemaidens’ song, but with made-up notes. Ted Hughes (in a composite recording incorporating clips of Eliot’s voice) turns it into an anxious chant. Michael Gough vocalizes it as the cry of stevedores calling to each other across the docks.
Beyond Wagner, other high-prestige musical sources to deal with include the song “Full Fathom Five” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, containing the lyric “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” as well as the passage “This music crept by me upon the waters” from elsewhere in the play. Also derived from the Elizabethan era is the gentle rippling of the waters themselves, paralleling the singer: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.”
From vernacular sources come the lyrics to a minstrel-show curtain song, dating to 1867, “Goodnight, ladies! Goodnight, ladies! Goodnight, ladies! We’re going to leave you now.” There’s also the nursery song “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, my fair lady.” In addition, there’s a bawdy Army barracks song, “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter and on her daughter,” and, from the dawn of the Jazz Age, the 1912 ragtime tune “That Shakespearean Rag.” Quite a workout for the reciter.
Beyond the sounds made by human musicians, the poem’s reader-out-loud must vocalize numerous birdsongs, from “Twit twit twit / Jug jug” to the climactic cock’s crow of “coco rico coco rico,” the latter delivered here by Scofield and by Gough.
These musical passages, from Romantic opera to jazz, require that speakers in effect recite lyrics — sung language, drawn from diverse sources — that outline a kind of musical scenario, for which some actors may be poorly prepared. It’s a rarity when someone like Mia Williams has the daring to take on sung lyrics directly, here at the close of a reading featuring inserts from Eliot’s own recording and a bit of Ted Hughes.
With so much music in The Waste Land crying out to be heard, it should come as no surprise that Anthony Burgess — who was both a writer and a composer — chose to create a musical setting of the poem.
PART 2: ANTHONY BURGESS SETS THE WASTE LAND
In a prefatory reminiscence to his setting of The Waste Land, Burgess recalls his first great rush of enthusiasm for the poem when he discovered it at the age of fifteen. Later, when he entered the University of Manchester, he recalls that in 1937, “In my first year I organized a sort of arty reading of it with the lines split up among various characters called the Hyacinth Girl, the Drowned Phoenician Sailor, Tiresias, Belladonna, and so on. The music was a mixture of ragtime, Wagner, plainchant, and I myself composed a setting of the Thames-daughters’ song made out of Wagner’s own ‘Weialala leia’ from Das Rheingold.” Burgess’s composition as completed in 1978 had substantially begun taking shape in his mind four decades before (although at the 1937 event, his colleagues rejected his idea, realized in the final work, of beginning with a quotation from the first notes of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring).
Burgess’s musical setting of The Waste Land lives in a hybrid space occupied by relatively few major compositions. That is, it’s an “accompanied recitation,” meaning a musical score synchronized to a spoken text.
This form was common in the nineteenth century and gave rise to the term melodrama, meaning not exaggerated emotions but rather words spoken over melodic accompaniment: melo-drama. Notable examples from the twentieth century make up an oddly sorted group, though still often inspired by Romantic and Victorian poetry, such as Richard Strauss’s setting of Alfred Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (recorded here by Claude Raines and Glenn Gould), and Arnold Schoenberg’s setting of Lord Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte. More diverse texts range from Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, taken mostly from Abraham Lincoln’s writings; to Marc Blitzstein’s homage to powered flight, The Airborne Symphony, here with Orson Welles as narrator. Possibly the most powerful work in the genre remains Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, here with Simon Callow. (Note however that Schoenberg, in this and in his Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, indicates pitches in the score for the narrator to approximate, a practice that Burgess does not follow.)
Burgess’s “accompanied recitation” of The Waste Land (available complete here) largely grows out of the musical examples already embedded in the text, now scored by him for flute, oboe, cello, piano, and soprano, with narrator. In light of the foregoing discussion, let’s now compare passages from various spoken-word recordings of The Waste Land, and contrast them with the same episodes in Burgess’s score.
With such a complex text and score, it may be useful to follow along with this “annotated libretto” to the musical setting. The left column of the libretto reprints Eliot’s poem in its entirety; the right column contains a running musicological commentary by Paul Phillips on the unfolding score. (I’m most grateful to Professor Phillips, the author of the definitive book on Burgess as writer/composer, for permitting his published commentary to be included here.)
Distressed Lovers
Among the most renowned episodes in the poem is this capsule summary of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859):
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
— Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
The first four lines come from Act I of the opera, as Isolde is taken by ship against her will from her home in Ireland to marry King Mark of Cornwall. The lines are sung by a young sailor about his distant beloved back in Ireland, but Isolde takes them as an insulting reference to her forced marriage.
The last line — meaning “Waste and empty the sea” — comes from Act III, as Tristan lies wounded and unconscious, while his retainers wait for the arrival, again by ship, of Isolde, who is the only one, with her magic potions, thought able to cure him.
In between, the “hyacinth girl” and a troubled erotic encounter — “I was neither / Living nor dead” — take the place of Wagner’s Act II, the love duet, wherein Tristan and Isolde’s imminent consummation is interrupted at the last minute by the intrusion of King Mark and his knights, one of whom grievously wounds Tristan.
The words can seem a pale imitation of what the cited music actually sounds like. First, here’s the Prelude to Act I of Tristan, which Burgess will add into the mix. Then, here are clips of the Sailor’s Song from Act I and the empty sea in Act III.
In recitations, one can easily be distracted by what may be an English-speaking actor’s stilted pronunciation of German words like oed or unidiomatic phrasing of the German lines overall, especially the last one, with its internal rhyme. Eliot reads the German Tristan lines accurately, but in a tone that owes little to musicality, and he cannot find a different voice for the female character.
Fiona Shaw, in the earlier of her two video recordings, makes a show of breathing in the salt air after reading the initial Tristan line, about the “fresh wind” at sea, then sings the second line. She delivers the final Tristan line, “Waste and empty the sea,” in a way that suggests a melody without actually quoting the notes from Act III.
A dual reading with Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins shows the effectiveness of the multi-reader approach in this Tristan episode, with Irons doing the young sailor’s lines and Atkins the rest. It may seem odd, dramaturgically, that Atkins, after playing the “character” part in this drama, also takes the framing Act III quotation, rather than it going back to Irons. Yet this surprise choice of voice does help us to see that “Waste and empty the sea” continues the experience of being “neither living / Nor dead” in “the silence.” And she sings it in an approximation of Wagner’s melody.
In Burgess’s musical setting, while still allowing for an excellently acted recital of the poem, the underlying music is finally heard, and leitmotifs from Tristan play across the hyacinth episode, uniting the whole sequence, transforming it into the mini-Tristan that Eliot apparently intended it to be. The soprano sings both of the quotations, while other themes from the opera, especially the Act I Prelude, hold the episode together. Here is the Tristan und Isolde episode from Burgess’s score.
Note also how abruptly Burgess cuts off the Tristan music, to make way for Madame Sosostris, thereby cleverly alluding to the coitus interruptus that cuts off the Act II love duet before it can reach its sexual and musical climax. He thereby brings out a narrative point that can be lost in the printed text alone.
An Eruption of Ragtime
Another remarkable episode concerns another unhappy couple. And their scene of quiet desperation forces the reciter to make a difficult hairpin turn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to cheeky ragtime.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag —
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
Fiona Shaw half-sings the three lines of the rag, her light inflection of the rhyme of “elegant” and “intelligent” marking a brief, if manic, pause in her reproachful despair.
With Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins, Irons takes the music — the Tempest song as well as the ragtime — while Atkins does all the lines printed within quotation marks. Irons, in a tone of habitual melancholy familiar since his days narrating Brideshead Revisited, makes a good foil to Atkins’s evident anxiety.
With Edward Fox, and, again, Eileen Atkins, the breakdown of lines between the two is pretty much the same, but the dynamic is different. Fox brings a snobbish tone to his opening line, noticeable in the way he enunciates the word “pearls,” while his sarcastic singing of the rag furthers the sense that he considers such material socially beneath him. He brings out the patronizing tone that Eliot’s recording somewhat downplays, and which Robert Speaight’s reading betrays.
The Burgess setting of this scene brings in a touch of Tristan to introduce the Tempest lyric, and then plays on the piano the actual rhythm of “That Shakespearean Rag” as published in 1912. He makes the eruption of ragtime more strictly a reaction to another piece — and species — of music, which is not always clear to a reader looking at the text alone, and gives them a causal relationship.
Again, he thereby brings out the continuities within the poem.
From the Bawdy to the Beatific
After the ragtime episode, Eliot makes calculated use of the archaic “O” again, and in an even more loaded context. This later passage is another trouble spot for reciters, partly because it involves another lightning transformation in vocal delivery, this time from the bawdy to the beatific — from Mrs. Porter to Parsifal.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Eliot links Mrs. Porter and the line from Verlaine’s poem “Parsifal” in part by two more uses of the exclamatory “O,” giving both lines a sense of antique rhetoric. A writer as fastidious as Eliot would be well aware of the difference between the interjections “O” and “oh.” The first is now considered simply an archaic, poetic spelling, but it also has a somewhat different meaning and tone, derived from its special use to introduce words directly addressed to an absent deity, person, or other being, as in Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!,” addressed to Lincoln after the assassination.
As Gabe Rivin writes in “What Happened to ‘O’? The Death of an Exclamation” (The Paris Review, August 27, 2015): “Poets like T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings used O, as have more recent poets. . . . But twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets also used O satirically, draining its emotional gravity and treating it as a cutesy anachronism.” Eliot here has it both ways, as the “O” with Mrs. Porter is indeed “satirically” in the vernacular, while Verlaine’s awed “O” retains the “emotional gravity” of Wagner’s Parsifal and reminds us that when used in the vocative case, “O” can also introduce an address to an absent deity.
The difference between the Parsifal and Mrs. Porter uses of “O” is rather like the difference between the Roman Catholic act of contrition, which begins “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” and the text message acronym “OMG.”
In a spoken performance, much will depend on how the reader differentiates between the two “O”s.
•
The larger context for Mrs. Porter is the biblical washing of feet as an act of spiritual ablution, performed by Jesus on the apostles (“If I then, your lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet”). Also lurking in the background is Mary Magdalene anointing Jesus’s feet with expensive oils. But what stands out in the song is the “soda water,” which alludes to the discredited folk-remedy of carbonated water as a form of postcoital contraception via douche (as a coarse variant of the lyrics makes clear).
How does a reciter manage the segue from that to the final line, referring to Wagner’s Parsifal and the unsullied faith of the prepubescent choirboys in that opera who, with their unchanged voices, are still essentially nonsexual?
The Verlaine poem need not be explicated here, except to note that in it, “Parsifal has overcome the gently babbling daughters / Who’d distract him to desire.” His chastity is essential to his “harrowing Hell” and retrieving the Centurion’s “trophy” sword, to rejoin the Grail, thereby enabling redemption:
Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil
Babil et la luxure amusante — et sa pente
Vers la Chair de garçon vierge que cela tente
D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil ;
Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au cœur subtil,
Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante ;
Il a vaincu l’Enfer et rentre sous sa tente
Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril,
Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc suprême !
Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même,
Et prêtre du très saint Trésor essentiel.
En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,
Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.
— Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole !
···
Parsifal has overcome the gently babbling daughters
Who’d distract him to desire; despite fleshly delight
That might lure the virgin youth, the temptation
To love their swelling breasts and gentle babble;
He has vanquished fair Womankind, of subtle heart,
Her tender arms outstretched and her throat pale;
From harrowing Hell, he now returns triumphant,
Bearing a heavy trophy in his boyish hands,
With the spear that pierced the Saviour’s side!
He who healed the King shall be himself enthroned,
As priest-king and guardian of the sacred treasure.
In golden robe he worships that sign of grace,
The pure vessel in which shines the Holy Blood.
— And, O those children’s voices singing in the dome!
The unchanged, soaring voices of the boys’ choir, heard in Acts I and III of Wagner’s Parsifal singing in the dome, become emblematic of the Grail Knight’s chastity, wholly alien to the modern Sweeney’s “horns and motors.” The beatific auditory experience of the children’s chorus is essential to the sound world that Eliot might expect you to hear in the mind’s ear, so to speak.
Shaw, after a prolonged “O,” excitedly sings (and dances) the Mrs. Porter song until stopping short before the Verlaine line with a kind of “eek” sound replacing the French conjunction “et.” Her delivery of the song is so raucous that the sudden shift to the aestheticized spirituality of a softly rendered “O ces voix d’enfants” becomes all the more clinically bipolar.
Irons, after sneering the names “Sweeney” and “Mrs. Porter,” goes on to perform “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter” as a singsong little ditty. He then manages to continue some vestige of the same notes, in a more parlando style, as he turns lyrically to the voices of the Parsifal children. Where Shaw highlights frantic disjunction, Irons finds an underlying continuity.
Speaight intones Mrs. Porter’s song like an antiphonal church service on one long, sustained note for each line, finally dropping to a lower note at the last syllable of each. Yet his reading of the Verlaine line is not at all musical. Instead, he makes it sound like an appreciative, even wonderstruck critic’s comment on the bawdy song he’s just sung, thereby producing one of the most adroit readings of these hard-to-manage lines.
Burgess goes one better, letting you hear the larger musical context. He moves from the bawdy to the spiritual by means of the compositional device known as the “Dresden Amen,” which can form the ending of a sacred piece performed in a church, as in this clip. Its reappearance at the end of the opera Parsifal offers a benediction, after Parsifal’s return from his quest makes possible the healing of Amfortas the Fisher King, as Eliot’s notes suggest.
Here’s how the passage turns out in Burgess’s setting. A jaunty tune on the piano fleshes out the Mrs. Porter song. The soprano interrupts these earthly erotics to intone the “Dresden Amen,” calling the speaker to order in time for the Verlaine line about children’s voices. The fact that Burgess does not stop the action there but continues immediately on to “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d. / Tereu” makes for a double shock, as we are wrenched back to the earthly again.
The disjunctive shifts in the narrative line are thereby made more readily comprehensible. The shifts already exist in the text as written, but the music brings them to the fore and relates them to each other in a newly illuminating, audible way.
•
Here are the initial words sung by the young boys high up in the dome in Act I of Parsifal.
Boys
(from the summit of the dome)
The faith endures,
the dove, the Saviour’s
loving messenger, hovers.
What Verlaine’s voix d’enfants in the coupole are singing about is the Holy Spirit hovering in the form of a dove. When the enfants are heard again in the summit of the dome in Act III, that is indeed what is actually happening onstage, as the dove hovers over Parsifal’s head upon the completion of his quest.
The important link between choral voices and the dove was not lost on Igor Stravinsky when he wrote the piece Anthem: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air (1962), setting Part IV of Eliot’s Little Gidding (1941‒42):
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
This SATB choral setting is likely Stravinsky’s response to Eliot’s own reference in The Waste Land to the choruses from Parsifal — as well as to Eliot’s later bringing into the range of Little Gidding’s inference the Holy Spirit that descends on the apostles in tongues of fire at Pentecost. (Not to mention that the “flame of incandescent terror” alludes as well to the aerial bombardment of London taking place at the time of composition. Talk about overdetermined.)
What Burgess (and Stravinsky) helps us to see is just how much meaning Eliot’s poetry can extrapolate from a crucial musical moment — a few choral minutes within a four-hour Wagnerian music drama. Though Eliot restricts himself to quoting a single line from Verlaine, a larger universe of implication opens up and affects the progress of The Waste Land, and his poetic career, as a whole.
“a record on the gramophone”
In portraying modern life, Eliot was keenly aware of living in the Machine Age, as he wrote in a “London Letter” published in The Dial magazine in October 1921. The era manifested itself, he said, in “the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life” — like Sweeney’s “horns and motors.”
In this milieu, people too can become mechanical, as office workers rise from their desks to go home at the violet hour, “when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting.”
Music also can become mechanical, notably in the aftermath of the scene between the typist and the “young man carbuncular”:
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
In the post-folly indifference of the nameless typist, her relief mixed with demoralization, she becomes mechanized, like “the human taxi.” When she “smooths her hair with automatic hand,” her arm is as much a piece of lifeless machinery as is the turntable tonearm she puts down on the gramophone record.
Lia Williams, in a version with Ted Hughes that also includes moments spliced in from Eliot’s own recording, does the typist’s scene in a quiet, wounded voice. And in a striking sound-editing effect, the moment she puts the record on the gramophone we hear Eliot himself reciting “This music crept by me upon the waters.” Apparently, the disc she puts on the machine is Eliot’s 1946 recording.
In an unusual approach, Craig Swanson literalizes the gramophone to the extent of miming the act of placing the record on the turntable — and then crackles the ensuing music to sound like a scratchy old 78 RPM disc.
Burgess seizes upon the modern record machine in a quite different way in setting the passage. Most of the typist’s scene is accompanied by a pensive, sympathetic solo for the cello. But as we reach the mention of the gramophone, the cello line completely changes, with the starting up of the disc captured by the ascending glissando, which imitates the rising pitch of the record as the turntable revs up to full speed. In imitating this mechanical effect, the cello turns in a flash from compassionate companion to disc-driven automaton.
With Burgess, the music heard on the gramophone is largely that of the Rhinemaidens — at first in a complacent tea-room arrangement — giving another thread of ironic continuity to the scene that can remain somewhat hidden in the printed text alone.
Framing “What the Thunder Said”
Since Burgess was a renowned novelist as well as a composer, it would not be surprising to find him capitalizing, through music, on opportunities to bring a sense of narrative, or at least a somewhat plot-like progression of discrete moments, to the fragmented contents of The Waste Land, as Tristan und Isolde leitmotifs help shape the encounter underlying a major section of “The Burial of the Dead.”
In addition, Burgess also frames events via music having no obvious historical reference. This can be seen with special clarity in his approach to Part V, “What the Thunder Said,” where the poem’s previous reliance on overt allusions to historical compositions, such as Tristan, nearly vanishes, and where, as a result, the score is made up mostly of original music, with an overt quotation only at the very end. At the same time, there is less textual narrative here than in most of the rest of the poem, nothing like the vernacular storytelling of the pub scene, the typist, the Bavarian episode, and so on. Here, after the fatal event of “Death by Water,” Eliot abandons social satire and class parody, while the composer seeks to enhance the narrator’s lines of increasing despair, and the sheer unsettling strangeness of the remaining phantasmagorical episodes, by giving them elements of musical continuity. He makes them into a journey through a landscape or, more accurately, a soundscape.
Recall that in his preface, Burgess, in his vivid way, characterizes the entire poem as a kind of journey: “The Waste Land was, and still is, quite apart from its poetic merit, a kind of big railway terminus from which you could take a train to various literatures and theologies.” Hugh Kenner, too, in his essay “The Urban Apocalypse” (1973), thinks in terms of travel, mentioning on his first page “the desert traveler” and later summarizing the poem’s core: “Its center had become the urban apocalypse, the great City dissolved into a desert where voices sang from exhausted wells, and the Journey that had been implicit from the moment he opened the poem in Cambridge and made its course swing via Munich to London had become a journey through the Waste Land” (Eliot in His Time, p. 46).
In Part V especially, Burgess’s setting manages to frame the subsistent strands of quasi-narrative continuity within the poem as a kind of musical journey, conducted through the accompanying instruments. In the nine verse-paragraphs (or strophes) of Part V, episodes scored to suggest travel alternate with passages that are more meditative, more stoically philosophical, as the traveler pauses to reflect on what has transpired, then moves on again. The alternate reflecting and journeying are clearly demarcated in Burgess’s score from paragraph to paragraph.
Here’s a brief summary of how the composer manages this, with the paragraphs (crudely, I admit) labeled “Reflection” or “Journey” to highlight the ongoing, alternating structure brought out by the music. You might want to read this summary and then watch “What the Thunder Said” in the performance of Burgess’s score.
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Reflection: The first paragraph (“After the torchlight red on sweaty faces . . .”) sits at a dead stop, alluding to the wake of the Passion narrative in stunned, abstracted terms devoid of consolation. Burgess underscores the sense of dramatically charged stasis, leading to “He who was living is now dead,” through the stark opening piano chords and portentous tremolos for the cello.
Journey: In the second paragraph (“Here is no water but only rock . . .”), the speaker starts to “walk” through a barren landscape of rock without water, the walking indicated by the kind of “striding” musical figuration musicologists sometimes point out in the standard repertoire. For example, the pilgrimage depicted in the “walking” bass line for cellos and double basses in the second movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, features a steady forward rhythm accompanying the pilgrims’ hymn heard in the woodwinds and violins. Or in the last of Gustav Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfayer, the left/right and one/two of “footsteps” are heard, in alternating pitches, as the wayfarer moves on. In Burgess’s setting, the speaker too is accompanied by “walking” piano figures and cello pizzicatos as he begins a journey, joined in this paragraph by the oboe. Along “the sandy road” he looks for a spot where “we should stop and drink,” but there is none: “Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit,” which presumably leaves walking as the only physical option left.
Reflection: In the third paragraph (“If there were water / And no rock . . .”), the speaker stops, reduced to a kind of desperate, babbling cry for water, the text cut down to short lines and disconnected repetitions, contrasting with the lively accompanying song of the hermit-thrush. The speaker thinks about the sound of water, the “drip drop” of the flutes, as reduced as the text.
Journey: With the fourth paragraph (“Who is the third who walks always beside you . . .”), walking figures begin again, but slower, in repeated piano chords with oboe and cello accompaniment, as the speaker recounts the dejected trek of two of the apostles on “the white road” to Emmaus, when they are puzzled by the apparition of a third figure.
Reflection: The fifth paragraph (“What is that sound high in the air . . .”) halts while a phantasmagorical scene unfolds, as the soprano ascends to near the top of her range to vocalize “maternal lamentation.” This episode continues into paragraph six (“A woman drew her long black hair out tight . . .”) as the speaker reflects on the Bram Stoker‒inspired bats with baby faces who “crawled head downward” and a woman who “fiddled whisper music” on her hair. The eerie sound of the “whisper music,” scored here as sliding harmonics for the cello, has been a familiar part of modern music at least since the magical string harmonics early in Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet score.
Journey: In paragraph seven (“In this decayed hole among the mountains . . .”), the traveler draws near “the empty chapel,” which Eliot in his notes compares to “the approach to the Chapel Perilous,” familiar from the Grail myth. Pulsing piano chords, longer note values, and quieter dynamics create a calming effect, and a somewhat soothing nostalgia for the deserted site, now “only the wind’s home.”
Reflection: Burgess continues the walking figures of the piano’s pulse, with oboe melody and single flute notes, well into paragraph eight (“Ganga was sunken . . .”). Then the main pause for reflection arrives: the thunder speaks.
Journey: Travel resumes with “sail and oar” near the end of paragraph eight, progress making itself felt through the rocking rhythm of flute and oboe, together suggesting a bobbing boat that is easily controlled, sailing through a calm sea.
Reflection: Here again, at the end of the eighth paragraph, Burgess makes no sharp break, and continues the travel figures on into paragraph nine (“I sat upon the shore . . .”). The final moment of reflection, after a barrage of quotations, comes with a vocalise on the “Dresden Amen” and the reappearance of Parsifal music for “Shantih shantih shantih.”
Musically, this finale ties many thematic threads of the poem together, by reminding us of Parsifal’s return from his journey, and of the mysterious benediction conferred by the Grail — but cruelly withheld in Eliot’s vision of a desolate modern world. The journeying speaker in the poem has meticulously surveyed what that sense of spiritual void feels like, from scene to scene.
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As the alternating pattern shows, Burgess uses music as a means to shore these fragments against his ruins or, in other words, to salvage some sense of continuity and progression. By highlighting the counterpoint between journey and reflection pervading this last part of The Waste Land, he helps elucidate how the speaker’s mind works, how it strives to make tentative connections between fragments — by reflecting, moving onward to new experiences, and then reflecting again, more deeply — thus revealing in a different way the continuities within this restless elegy.
At the end of the journey, the music of the culminating ninth paragraph achieves an incantatory power that remains true to Eliot. It simply reveals the poem’s meanings in a way that the “different voices” — of a composer/novelist — can “do” them.
(June 2019)
Online recordings of The Waste Land cited in the text:
Jonathan Best (narrating Anthony Burgess’s musical setting)
T.S. Eliot (Complete, 1933)
T.S. Eliot (Complete, 1946)
T.S. Eliot (Parts I and V, 1950)
Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins, and Michael Gough (with spliced-in clips of Eliot’s voice)
Ted Hughes and Lia Williams (with spliced-in clips of Eliot’s voice)
Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins
Fiona Shaw (Complete)
Fiona Shaw (Part I)