Peter Pears: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Nine
Advent Calendar of Song: Day NIne
No, perhaps this entry will prove the most disagreeable.
What’s folk music? It’s a lovely debate: you can tie yourself in knots. When Chaliapin sings “Eh, Van’ka” (that was Day Seven), he sounds like a very specific member of the Russian rural world. When he sings the “Volga Boat Song,” he sings like a large sector of the Russian populace. But what was meant by "Russian music" was already the subject of keen argument in the nineteenth century; Tchaikovsky, who collected and arranged many Russian folk songs, was a great deal more Western than his fellow Russian composers Rimsky-Korskarov, Borodin, Mussorgsky and other composers, was ardent about being an ambassador of Russian music abroad, and was very proud of becoming the first Russian composer to win international recognition. Within a generation of his death, however, his music wasn’t Russian enough for the Parisians, who had come to love the idea - planted by Diaghilev’s imports of the operas of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin - that Russian music was much tougher ("barbaric") and less European than Tchaikovsky's . After the First World War, Stravinsky, now living in the West and still working for Diaghilev, argued that Tchaikovsky was really the most Russian of all composers. Who are we to pontificate here?
To make matters more complex, British folk music has been arranged by Haydn and Beethoven as well as Britten; I love arrangements by all three. What’s folk music? I adore the folk song “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” but its words are by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), not the most folksy of poets in the first place. And someone – surely not “the folk” – composed the melody, probably in the late eighteenth century (though one theory has it that Jonson fitted his words to an existing song).
What’s folk singing? Today we have a whole genre of folk singers, many of them marvelous, but I’m not sure their style is always what the original setters of these songs had in mind. I suspect that today’s “folk” style is itself as artificially romanticized a notion as the intensely classicised versions of it. My Macaulay grandparents, who moved to farm in England over a century ago, both came from long lines of Lanarkshire farmers, most of them renting farms of about a hundred acres from their (usually English) landlords and working on the land themselves. (I once told a fellow theatre critic that my grandfather Macaulay drove a cartload of buttermilk every day for twenty-five years into Glasgow central market. The critic replied “For pleasure?” I was doubled up laughing, but, when I reported that back to my family, they were so shocked they couldn’t laugh.) If I remember my father correctly, his father and others would eagerly drive into Glasgow to hear the great opera singers in (among other things) folk songs: they made no complaints about any inauthenticity of style. To get an idea, you can hear Adelina Patti singing “Kathleen Mavourney” and Nellie Melba singing “Ye banks and braes” on YouTube: farmers were among the original purchasers of their 78s. (I remember the tales of rural people in the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who soon began to realise that musicologists paid them better when they, the rural people, identified various Haydn tunes as part of their old folk culture.)
I don’t know that there’s a right way to sing “Sally in our Alley,” but I do know that Peter Pears is nobody’s idea of a folk singer. His whole vocal tone is intensely cultivated, an exclusively hothouse or greenhouse species; and his genteel diction and pronounced vibrato are among the most famous/notorious mannerisms in classical singing. (They were being parodied even before Dudley Moore did so with imperishable effect in “Beyond the Fringe”: “Little Miss Muffet.”) I loathe some of Pears’s recordings, both of music by his lover Britten and by other composers; but I deeply love others. I also saw him in opera (Britten’s “Death in Venice”, three times, once after Britten’s death); he was a very great actor. Even if you’ve seen and heard Jon Vickers’s Titanically tormented account of the title role of Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” Pears’s performance is vivid and moving on film as well as record.
Anyway, I love him in some folk songs, including the passionately doom-laden and tragic “Bonny Earl o’ Moray” as well as this tender, forlorn/hearty comedy “Sally in our Alley”. And I include this now for his blend of superlative legato and the smiling delicacy. This is not just the most seductively silken delivery of this song I can find, it’s also the only one that always makes me smile at the end; I even laugh out loud. The laughter is due to Pears’s phenomenal lightness of touch, on the final note especially. The seamless way he phrases every line is not just wonderful per se, it adds to the comedy. You can hear other singers with a less genteel manner, but they don’t bring a smile to my face every time. For alternative versions, see below, after the words. (It was fun today to discover what Henry Carey wrote about his words and Sally Salisbury.)
Here’s Pears, with Britten at the ivories:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnBRlJP-GfY
The Ballad of Sally in our Alley
BY HENRY CAREY
The ARGUMENT.
A Vulgar Error having long prevailed among many Persons, who imagine Sally Salisbury the Subject of this Ballad, the Author begs leave to undeceive and assure them it has not the least allusion to her, he being a stranger to her very Name at the time this Song was composed. For as Innocence and Virtue were ever the Boundaries of his Muse, so in this little Poem he had no other view than to set forth the Beauty of a chaste and disinterested Passion, even in the lowest Class of human Life. The real Occasion was this: A Shoemaker’s ’Prentice making Holiday with his Sweet-heart, treated her with a sight of Bedlam, the Puppet-shews, the Flying-chairs, and all the Elegancies of the Moorfields: From whence proceeding to the Farthing Pye-house, he gave her a Collation of Buns, Cheesecakes, Gammon of Bacon, Stuff’d-beef, and Bottled-ale; through all which Scenes the Author dodged them (charm’d with the Simplicity of their Courtship), from whence he drew this little Sketch of Nature; but being then young and obscure, he was very much ridicul’d by some of his Acquaintance for this Performance; which nevertheless made its way into the polite World, and amply recompenced him by the Applause of the divine Addison, who was pleased (more than once) to mention it with Approbation.
Of all the Girls that are so smart
There’s none like pretty SALLY,
She is the Darling of my Heart,
And she lives in our Alley.
There is no Lady in the Land
Is half so sweet as SALLY,
She is the Darling of my Heart,
And she lives in our Alley.
Of all the Days that’s in the Week,
I dearly love but one Day,
And that’s the Day that comes betwixt
A Saturday and Monday;
For then I’m drest, all in my best,
To walk abroad with SALLY;
She is the Darling of my Heart,
And she lives in our Alley.
When she is by I leave my Work,
(I love her so sincerely)
My Master comes like any Turk,
And bangs me most severely;
But, let him bang his Belly full,
I’ll bear it all for SALLY;
She is the Darling of my Heart,
And she lives in our Alley.
My Master carries me to Church,
And often am I blamed,
Because I leave him in the lurch,
As soon as Text is named:
I leave the Church in Sermon time,
And slink away to SALLY;
She is the Darling of my Heart,
And she lives in our Alley.
My Master and the Neighbours all,
Make game of me and SALLY;
And (but for her) I’d better be
A Slave and row a Galley:
But when my seven long Years are out,
O then I’ll marry SALLY!
O then we’ll wed and then we’ll bed,
But not in our Alley.
Scholarly work has been done on “Sally in our Alley”, you may be sure. The Henry Carey who wrote it lived from 1687 to 1741; on 20 May, 1717, one Mrs Willis was advertised as singing it as Drury Lane Theatre. (This piques my interest as I spent months in 1995-1999 researching aspects of the Drury Lane Theatre history between 1706 and 1733.) Carey both sang there and wrote for it. The audience at Drury Lane often included members of the royal family, eminent politicians, the leading figures of the British Enlightenment as well as, I presume, less polished figures. Britten seems to have rearranged two stanzas and made subtly different changes of words; I've printed the stanzas in his order, but have kept the original words, f.y.i..
Beethoven included his arrangement among his “Schottische Ode” (“Scottish Songs!); he published it in London and Edinburgh in 1818 as his op. 109 no 25, and then in Berlin in 1822. (In German, the words starts “Von allen Mädchen glatt und schön” Alas, I can’t find it on YouTube.) In English, it’s sung – very charmingly and happily, and in a live 1989 performance – by the wonderful Philip Langridge, with no less an accompanist than Maurizio Pollini. Beethoven’s arrangement of the vocal line is subtly different (no gruppetti/flourishes, but some lovely appoggiaturas) and he substitutes a harmless alternative version of the final two lines of verse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l868N-4smfg.
Langridge’s diction is at least as good as Pears’s. He also recorded, in a studio in 1995 and in better sound than his Beethoven one, Britten’s arrangement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmtIBFXrGx4 You can say he’s the most sincerely touching singer of the song, the most sweetly enamoured. But he has a thinner voice, and, above all, I just don’t laugh or smile the same way.
I don’t think Pears condescends to his material. I think he loves it – and his audience - to pieces. He’s the one who lodges it inside my head and in my nervous system.
As a very interesting curiosity, here is the marvellous German baritone Christian Gerhaher, singing it in awfully good English in 2016, with what I want to call a greater range of expression than Langridge or Pears except that I neither quite believe him nor smile at his singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQGW7A7zFc8
(As fabulous as any of these singers was Gracie Fields, who made a film “Sally in our Alley” in 1931. But the “Sally” song she sings there – gloriously - is a very different number, and differently endearing.)
Wednesday 9 December
Benjamin Britten at the piano; Peter Pears, tenor, standing.