Work of the Week 11: The Holy Sonnets of John Donne)

The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Benjamin Britten wrote this set of songs in 1945. In August of that year, which had been a particularly busy year for him, he and Yehudi Menuhin embarked on a tour of concentration camps, particularly Bergen-Belsen, where they played to the survivors of the Holocaust. Now, as one can imagine, what Britten saw there was something that was truly horrific. And he couldn't actually put his thoughts into words. He found that, quite understandably, it was almost indescribable. So he did what, I suppose, a composer does naturally. He turned to music to describe and to articulate actually what he thought he felt and certainly what he saw. The medium that he actually chose was the poetry of John Donne. And at the Foundation, we actually have the book of poems that Britten worked from. It's a 1941 non-such edition of the Complete Poetry and Selective Prose of John Donne. And Britten annotated this book. He selected the poems very carefully. John Donne wrote a series of 19 sonnets in total, and Britten selected nine of them. One of them is sonnet number 14. It's called Better My Heart. And this, in terms of its content, is the story of a man who was actually questioning his faith. It's a poem in which the imagery is awful of contradiction. Better My Heart talks about someone who was desperate to find faith in God and would use any means possible to do that. And certainly in terms of describing that pain, it comes across very nicely because Donne actually uses a series of contradictions. If I can quote the last three lines, I think that gets across the idea quite well. And you've got to bear in mind that the speaker is talking directly to God. Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. Very strong emotions, very strong ideas. And Britten's accompaniment to that is quite frenetic. It's quite fast and it's quite furious. What he's actually getting across is not only the power of what the speaker is feeling, but also the drama of the words. Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. If you're unfamiliar with these sonnets, it's well worth actually looking at the text and following the thoughts that John Donne expresses, and Britten puts so beautifully into music.