The Rivered Earth

  VIKRAM SETH

  The Rivered Earth

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Dedication

  General Introduction

  SONGS IN TIME OF WAR

  Introduction

  Libretto

  SHARED GROUND

  Introduction

  Libretto

  THE TRAVELLER

  Introduction

  Libretto

  SEVEN ELEMENTS

  Introduction

  Libretto

  Note on Calligraphy by the Author

  Copyright Page

  By the same author

  FICTION

  The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse

  A Suitable Boy

  An Equal Music

  POETRY

  Mappings

  The Humble Administrator’s Garden

  All You Who Sleep Tonight

  Three Chinese Poets (translations)

  Beastly Tales from Here and There (fables)

  Arion and the Dolphin (libretto)

  MEMOIR

  Two Lives

  NON-FICTION

  From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet

  To Alec Roth and Philippe Honoré

  General Introduction

  Some time ago, when I was ‘between books’, I took part in a project that resulted in several remarkable works of music – involving, from my pen, four very different libretti. Apart from the texts themselves, published here, each with its own brief introduction, I thought it might be of interest to write a more general account of this project, which was unusual in several senses: it was a collaboration between a writer, a composer and a violinist; it developed over four years, with a work produced each year; it took place with the encouragement and within the constraints of three festivals and, indeed, communities; the libretti touched upon three civilizations, Chinese, European and Indian; and much of the work – both literary and musical – was created in a house with rich literary and musical associations, a house on the River Nadder in Wiltshire.

  The project was called ‘Confluences’, but because that name sounds a bit technical, I sought a more vivid title for this book and for the four libretti as a whole. The composer suggested ‘the rivered earth’, a phrase from the last of the libretti, suggestive perhaps of the beauty of our common planet. In fact, the two halves of the phrase encompass the four texts, since the first begins with the image of the moon reflected in a great river, and the last ends with the image of the blue earth spinning through time and space.

  The composer Alec Roth, the violinist Philippe Honoré and I were standing in a red room with a large black piano, anticipating the arrival of the directors of the Salisbury and Chelsea festivals.

  What we needed was a project for the coming year that would enthuse all three of us and would kindle the interest of the directors. But our various suggestions were all over the place – from unaccompanied choirs to the solo violin, from community choruses to chamber orchestras, from violin and piano sonatas to song-cycles, from pieces for instrumental ensembles to grand oratorios. What we were agreed upon was that crucial to the works would be Philippe’s violin and Alec’s composition and my words – and therefore the human voice, which has always been at the heart of Alec’s music, even his instrumental music. But we could settle on none of the various alternatives.

  About five minutes before our guests were due to arrive, I said, ‘Let’s ask for it all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Philippe.

  ‘I mean, let’s suggest some sort of grand plan where each year we would undertake to create a new work and they would undertake to support its creation and performance. It’s now summer 2005. So what about something for each of the four years from 2006 to 2009?’

  ‘Four years?’ said Alec. ‘It’s hard enough getting funding for one. Festival finances have always been in a precarious state. They stagger along from one year to the next: almost all their funding and fund-raising is on an annual basis.’

  ‘Well, don’t festivals ever commission composers or projects for more than a single year?’

  ‘It’s very rare. I can’t think of an example of it, offhand.’

  ‘So how come there’s any continuity in what a festival offers from one year to another?’

  ‘There isn’t much. It’s all a bit ad hoc. The moment the actual festival is over, they start thinking of what to do for the next. I suppose the overall vision of the director gives it some sort of continuity.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever had a commission for more than a single year?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, let’s ask for it. In fact, let’s insist on it. And let’s try to get a guarantee right from the beginning that they’ll follow it through. I can’t imagine anything more killing to any kind of long-term vision than the business of applying for a commission a year at a time and the uncertainty of whether it’ll come through.’

  ‘That’s how it is in the real world.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. And some good ideas come out of ignorance. So let’s give it a try.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be lost,’ said Philippe. ‘It would be fantastic to have a new piece to work on each year for the next four years.’

  ‘They’ll never agree,’ said Alec.

  An hour or so later we were looking at each other in amazement. Not only had Jo Metcalf Shore and Stewart Collins not blanched at the idea, they’d been intrigued. They had asked us to write up a proposal: ideas, forms, forces, venues, costs. But it was clear to them from the start that they’d have to get a third festival to join them to make it possible. Some time later they met Richard Hawley, who had recently been appointed director of the Lichfield Festival. Now that they had a troika, they set about trying to get funding. Eventually both the Arts Council and the PRS Foundation expressed their enthusiasm and guaranteed funding for three years, and the various festival boards signalled their approval – presumably assuming that funding for the fourth year would somehow work out.

  But all this took quite some time – many months, in fact. By now Alec, Philippe and I were champing at the bit and had half given up hope. Indeed, by the time the confirmation of the project did come through, it was so late that I couldn’t create a new work for the first year. I was in Delhi, Alec was in Durham – and there was hardly any time to consult, let alone write. In the event, we had to think of a different solution.

  Yet we were all conscious of how unusual it was that our project existed at all. We dubbed it ‘Confluences’ to indicate the variety of ideas and geographies and forces that merged within it. The other reason for the name was that it implied a voyage downstream, with other tributaries (performers, influences, ideas, and so on) joining en route.

  Our brief each year was to create a work of about twenty minutes for voice, violin and other forces. It would be given three performances over the course of a few weeks in summer – one at each of the three festivals: Salisbury, Chelsea and Lichfield, in that order. The first three years would touch upon China, Europe and India respectively; the theme for the fourth year was to be left open – to the suggestions of (among others) our audiences, to natural development from within the works themselves, and to any extraneous inspiration that might strike. The venues would be large local churches with good acoustics and lines of sight, as well as Lichfield and Salisbury cathedrals. The forces would range, depending on the year, from small ensembles to an orchestra to professional choirs to massed amateur choruses of men, women and children.

  In fact, the works turned out to be between forty minutes and an hour long, and far richer and more complex than we had imagined. The first year produced a song-cycle for tenor,
violin, harp and guitar, Songs in Time of War. The second year saw six pieces for unaccompanied professional chorus – Shared Ground – interleaved with five pieces for unaccompanied violin – Ponticelli – something like a suite dovetailed into a motet, but composed so that they could also be performed separately. The third year produced an oratorio, The Traveller, for violin and tenor soloists, large amateur chorus (including children’s choir) and string orchestra plus harp and percussion. For the final year, Alec created three separate but related works: a cycle of seven songs for tenor and piano called Seven Elements, a seven-movement sonata-like suite for violin and piano called the Seven Elements Suite, plus a short coda, The Hermit on the Ice, for all three performers.

  Being indolent by nature, if there is one thing I hate, it is making an effort for nothing. It would be more than frustrating to write a halfway decent libretto only to find that the composer had made a botch of the music. Alec had set my poems in the past, as well as written an opera, Arion and the Dolphin, to a libretto of mine, so I was confident he would produce something good. But I could not have expected anything as magical as what emerged. The works he produced over these four years are profound, various, moving, imperishable. I am more privileged than I can say that my words provided him with some of the inspiration to create them. Let me leave a hostage to fortune and state that Alec Roth’s works – and not just these but others – are among the finest ever created by an English composer. And part of the reason that they are not better known and more widely enjoyed is because Alec is so hopeless at self-promotion.

  It was others who got hold of the BBC and told them of the reception and reviews the first year’s première had received. Roger Wright of Radio 3 arranged for the final performance (in Lichfield Cathedral) to be recorded and broadcast, and this continued for the remaining three years. Thanks to sponsorship from an anonymous donor, the first of the works, Songs in Time of War, was recorded in 2008; the second, Shared Ground, is due for release in 2011.* (The performers are the same as at the festivals.) One hopes that CDs of the other works will follow. Indeed, because of the way the themes of the works, verbal and (in particular) musical, develop from year to year, echoing and reflecting what has gone before, it would be an enriching experience to hear the works performed one after another over the course of a day, or perhaps two evenings. The works form a family and, for all their differences, a close one.

  The experience for me of creating these four texts, entirely in verse, was full of variety: a mixture of translation and original creation, drawing from a range of personal experience as well as the influence of others – and the consciousness that what I was writing had to be sung. One text was written many years ago – translations from Classical Chinese, a language monosyllabic in nature. One consisted of translations from Indian languages, which are far from monosyllabic, together with six original poems, three iambic, three trochaic, in a variety of line-lengths. For one I used another poet’s forms as a template for my own inspiration. And for one I wrote eight poems in a variety of rhymed and unrhymed forms of my choosing. I talk about these in my brief introductions to the individual libretti.

  Alec and I usually consulted closely at the beginning of this process before I went off to do my thing. But this was sometimes quite frustrating for him. Once he sat in my house in Salisbury, cooling his heels for a week because I couldn’t put myself in the right frame of mind to think about the project. We sat down and talked about it but didn’t get anywhere. We then poured ourselves a glass of wine and went for a walk in the water-meadow past a bare oak tree, which was surrounded, owing to heavy rains, by a pool; we stood there, staring at what looked like the tree’s roots but were actually its leafless branches reflected in the water. Some months later this image would lead to the poems of Shared Ground. The next year he wrote me a series of elaborate memoranda that helped me feel my way to my theme; and it was his strength of feeling for some verses of the Dhammapada that gave them such a prominent role in The Traveller. Even after I handed him the draft of a particular libretto, there were discussions, cullings, rearrangements, suggestions for amendment – and in one case even the request that I go back and produce something entirely different.

  Words are all very well, but the success of a musical work lies in its music – and, on the whole, Alec’s main task began after mine had ended – and Philippe’s main task after Alec’s. Before writing this introduction I talked to both of them in order to be able to cast some light on these later stages, and even occasionally on the actual process of composition, which strikes me as being as mysterious as that of writing. The consultation between them, the choice of the other performers, the involvement of the festivals and the local community, the programming for the first half of the concerts, the changes to the music made in the aftermath of actual performances: all these were essential aspects of the project, and because Philippe and Alec talk with great insight about them, I have set their thoughts down largely in their own words.

  As a composer, Alec writes with particular venues in mind – their acoustic and visual and even dramatic possibilities. In the third year, our piece (based on India) was to be performed in Salisbury Cathedral. While we were still discussing possible themes for the libretto and before I had written a single word of it, Alec wrote me a note which he headed ‘Memorandum 1 from AR to VS’:

  I woke up this morning with an interesting sound in my head. Remember how the Advent Procession begins? Everyone stands up and faces West. All the lights are extinguished; it’s pitch dark. Suddenly, quite high up a single candle flame appears. One by one other candles are lit from the first one and move out. In each aisle, North and South, a procession begins and the light spreads down the nave. Imagine this in sonic terms: darkness/silence; the sound of the solo violin; gradually its notes spread to other violins (or voices?); the sound, now a texture of overlapping harmonies, spreads out to envelop the whole building. This would be a powerfully dramatic beginning. Isn’t there a verse in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna says something like, ‘I am the spark that brings life to all living things’? …

  Similarly – and again this gives his music something almost indefinably personal – Alec writes with particular musicians in mind, not for, say, a general tenor or general violinist. He enjoyed this greatly over the course of the four years, because we were lucky to get wonderful performers. Songs in Time of War was sung by the tenor Mark Padmore with Philippe Honoré on the violin, Alison Nicholls on the harp and Morgan Szymanski on the guitar. Shared Ground was sung by the choir Ex Cathedra conducted by Jeffrey Skidmore, while Ponticelli, which interleaved its movements, was played by Philippe. In the third year, The Traveller was sung by Mark Padmore, together with large local choruses, including children’s chorus. The solo violinist was Philippe and the orchestra was the Britten Sinfonia. In the final year, Seven Elements was sung by the tenor James Gilchrist with Rustem Hayroudinoff on the piano, the Seven Elements Suite was performed by Philippe and Rustem, and The Hermit on the Ice by all three.

  Because Philippe was one of the three equal initiating partners in the project, and it was understood from the start that he would play a crucial role in the music, Alec wrote more for the violin over these four years than he could ever have imagined he would. I talked to Philippe about this.

  VS: What was it like to have four years of Alec’s music to play?

  PH: I feel I was really lucky. You know what I think of Alec as a composer. Sometimes, as a musician, one works so hard in an orchestra or at sessions work, where you have no choice in what is being played, that there’s a danger of getting a bit stale, even treating music as a humdrum profession. What can keep one’s pleasure in music fresh is if one is able to play in smaller ensembles or to do solo work. And best of all, of course, is to work on something written specially for you, with your style and tastes and abilities in mind. So it was great to work with Alec’s music – with a new piece every year. And of course frustrating sometimes.

  VS: Frustrating?


  PH: Well, I sometimes thought I didn’t get enough of it! I was particularly frustrated in the first year, when we did Songs in Time of War sung by tenor, with a slightly unusual setting: violin as well as both harp and guitar – two plucked instruments similar in many ways – and no real bass instrument. The texture was very similar – though it actually worked really well. Talking of similar textures: there was pizzicato for the violin as well; in fact there’s one number where I play pizzicato but the harp and guitar don’t come in. Alec had also worked with me on various effects, and he used some of them. I especially remember what I call the pigeon noise – a sort of fluttering of feathers – it’s a particular bowing effect. But anyway, it was an ensemble piece that year and the violin was not used as a main voice or a particularly important voice. It was merely another one.

  VS: You did get that solo in ‘The Old Cypress Tree’ – that dance which Alec says is at the heart of things – a sort of reminder of when life was good and full of ordinary pleasures, before war destroyed it all. Though I admit you received it pretty late and it was sort of iffy whether it would be ready for the première. You got it one day before the performance, if I recall.

  PH: That’s right. So I don’t know how well I played it in Salisbury. Chelsea was better, though, and Lichfield OK. Of course, Alec always made changes between performances; they were never exactly the same. He might change the voicing here or the pitch there – or tweak something else. Which was good in a way: it kept us on our toes.

  VS: In the second year you got Ponticelli – the suite for solo violin whose movements were interleaved with those of Shared Ground. Alec dedicated it to you and – not to embarrass you – the reviewer in The Times said you played it magically.

  PH: Well, the work itself was amazing. Of course when I practised it, I played it as a suite or partita, and it hangs together really well. In fact, it has the same number of movements – five – as Bach’s D Minor Partita, which ends with the Chaconne. Alec’s piece too ends with a very rich and complex movement. There are common features with the Chaconne: not only melody but also chords, two voices, double-stops, etc. And unique features too, of course: that plucking while I’m playing arco, for example; very challenging. It’s a tremendous addition to the solo violin repertoire.