Byzantium, for soprano and orchestra

Byzantium originated as the central part of a three-movement song-cycle for soprano and orchestra which Tippett began to formulate during the mid-1980s. Before long, however, the composer realised that his setting of W. B. Yeats's eponymous poem (dating from 1930) would seem disproportionately large-scale in such a context: so he abandoned the cycle and made the Yeats setting a composition in its own right. Begun in January 1989 and completed in December the same year, Byzantium was commissioned for the centenary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and was first performed on 11 April 1991, with Faye Robinson as soloist and Sir Georg Solti conducting. The work has, in fact, a demanding solo soprano part, more declamatory than lyrical: it amounts to a sort of cantata in which all five stanzas of Yeats's poem are set tomusic and linked with brief orchestral interludes.

It was through his friendship with T. S. Eliot that Tippett came to study the poetry of W. B. Yeats. He developed as a result a deep fascination with Yeats's late verse, written when he had left behind romance, nationalism and politics, and gone to live with his young wife in a ruined Norman tower at Gort in the West of Ireland. While Tippett tended to construct his own texts for setting to music, what he found in the poem Byzantium was a highly compressed text which he could extend in musical terms, substituting a new realm of musical imagery - a creative path signalled by the final lines of the poem:

"Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."

The opening preludial music of the piece, dominated by the gongs, duetting trumpets and angular violin melody, is recapitulated in modified form at this final stage. And thoughout, the listener, is made aware of musical images begetting fresh images, streaming forward in an inevitable organic flow.

Tippett's Byzantium thrives on the Yeatsian polarity between the actual and the visionary. The poem starts with a picture of the historical Byzantium - the holy city known as Constantinople (later to become modern Istanbul), whose intermingling of diverse religions and cultures so appealed to yeats: 'unpurged images of day' recede, horn-calls echoing the voice, leaving us with the star-lit dome of the Santa Sophia mosque, depicted almost pictorially by the voice-line curving upwards and back down one.

The first interlude mirrors the poet's ascent into the tower - the concrete symbol of Yeats's poetic activity - where the soprano evokes the poet's visionary state in long melismas on single vowels, floating beneath a pulsating motif for two harps. After another interlude, we again encounter another dual image - that of the golden nightingale, which does not sing in the poem but obviously has to in Tippett's setting. After song comes a stanza emphasizing both dance and also trance ( a 'rite of purgation') - hence the oscillation between rhythmic movement and arrest in Tippett's treatment of the text. Byzantium ends with a final coalescence of poetic and musical motif and of visionary metaphor.

While the orchestra for Byzantium is large - including synthesizer, two harps, and (amid its sizeable percussion contingent) two octaves of roto-toms, there are very few big orchestral tuttis. The colouring is vivid, but the textures spare, often confined to a solo or line, or small ensemble.

©Meirion Bowen (1997)