Heather Harper: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Eight

This will be the one that fewest of you like in this whole month. But I’ve been obsessed by it, and in particular by this singer’s account(s) of it, for thirty-four years; I hope you’ll see why. 

 Our Hunting Fathers is an orchestral song-cycle that, with its premiere in 1936, became Benjamin Britten’s official opus 8. (He was twenty-two.) He later said, however, that he felt it was his true opus 1, his breakthrough. The words are a collage by W.H.Auden: they’re obscure, pacifist, a complex reflection or refraction of the socio-political climate of the 1930s (with some pointed references in a later section about hunting to the Germans’ persecution of Jews). It set the pattern for Britten's later song-cycles, his skill in writing for the high voice (soprano or tenor), his intensely imaginative use of the orchestra, his instinct for stormy modernist drama. 

 This is its second main section, “Rats away!” Auden had found and updated an old anonymous mediaeval Catholic invocation to ward off rats; Britten, with Auden’s approval, turns it into a virtuoso mad scene where the orchestral evocation of rats and then the vocal soloist’s cries of “Rats!” keep interrupting what she’s trying to say. I can neither explain this section nor the rest of the song-cycle - and I don’t care: it’s always been my favourite example of a piece that’s overwhelmingly too hard to handle, grippingly mysterious. Heather Harper (1930-2019) makes it matter to me because of her vocal glory and vehemence. Rats and religion are not the sole issue here; and though I've called it a mad scene, I think really it expresses a cultural breakdown.

 The world premiere was delivered by a soprano, Sophie Wyss. Subsequently, it’s usually been sung by tenors, some of them (Peter Pears and Ian Bostridge) with impeccable diction; but nobody has matched Harper’s amazingly multifaceted musicality, with firm chest tones and gleaming head tones and coloratura that seems to come from the guts. I’ve often found myself unable to sit still while I listen to her singing it: she recorded it with both Edward Downes and (here) Bernard Haitink. She had been a Britten soprano since 1962, famously stepping into sing the world premiere of his War Requiem when the Bolshoi’s Galina Vishnevskaya was unavailable; Britten gave her other premieres too, and often conducted or accompanied her in music that ranged from Purcell to Tchaikovsky. She only began to sing Our Hunting Fathers ten years after his death; she went on singing his music into the 1990s, past age sixty: I remember going to see her sing the War Requiem in 1991, twenty-nine years after its premiere, fabulously. (And in 1995, I reviewed her at the Albert Hall Proms in 1995 in Berg’s Altenberg lieder. She was sixty-five, had come through cancer and chemotherapy, and was as splendid as ever.)

Here you go:-

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi26YwDxkF4

I command that all the rats that are hereabout 

That none dwell in this place, within or without; 

Through the virtue of Jesus that Mary bore, 

Whom all creatures must ever adore; 

And through the virtue of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, 

All four Archangels, that are as one; 

Through the virtue of Saint Gertrude, that maid clean, 

God grant in grace 

That no rats dwell in the place 

That these names were uttered in; 

And through the virtue of Saint Kasi, 

That holy man who prayed to God Almighty 

Of the scathes they did 

His meadows amid 

By day and night. 

God bid them flee and go out of every man's sight. 

Dominus, Deus, Sabbaoth, Emmanuel, great name of God, 

Deliver this place from rats and from all other shame. 

God save this place from all other wicked wights, 

Both by days and by nights, 

Et in nomini Patris et Filii et Sancti Spiriti, Amen.

This is a weird number; I hope it gets to you even a fraction of the way it does to me.

Heather Harper

Heather Harper