In 2004, the Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows had the opportunity to perform all five of Britten’s Canticles in one concert. The repertoire was paired with some of Shostakovich’s music (the Captain Lebdyakin Songs, etc.), juxtaposing two of my favorite twentieth-century composers due to their dates (their birth and death dates are only a few years from each other). I someday hope to perform a cycle of all of the Canticles, even with staging or artwork or pageantry of some kind. Of course, they stand on their own, without theatrics. But they are from the pen of a man who so understood the stage.
Below is pasted from my faculty recital (04/19/15). You can see a link to the video performance (live from Sunday) here.
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The five Canticles of Benjamin Britten occupy a unique position in not only Britten’s compositions, but also within twentieth-century vocal music. Some are almost completely sacred and cantata-like, others fall purely into a category of secular or chamber music. Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain lies as the centerpiece of the quindrivium, and is an intersection of the sacred and secular.
All of Britten’s Canticles pay homage and inspiration to his musical and romantic partner, tenor Peter Pears. They also refer to the operatic compositions which precede them. Still Falls the Rain is no exception. The opening musical motive is drawn directly from his chamber opera The Turn of the Screw. This canticle, with an obligato horn part, serves as a theme-and-variations, with interspersed recitative, upon musical motives which appear in the opera.
This work was written for a memorial concert for Noël Mewton-Wood, a pianist who had committed suicide after the death of a close friend. Britten was a strong pacifist and hated the involvement of England in the Second World War. When he read Edith Sitwell’s poem ‘Still Falls the Rain (The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn),’ he was drawn to it immediately and set forth on obtaining permission from Sitwell to set her text. She agreed. On hearing a live performance of this piece, she and Britten collaborated on a concert program for the 1956 Aldeburgh Festival, which included more of her poetry, and for which Canticle III served as its centerpiece.
Within this poem, Sitwell uses a quotation from the final climactic scene of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Britten sets this quotation in a sprechgesang fashion.
Still falls the Rain---
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss---
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us---
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Still falls the Rain---
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear---
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare.
Still falls the Rain---
Then--- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune---
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,---dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain---
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."
