For the next work in this year’s Lent Series, i’m turning to the uniquely haunting melancholy sound of the brass band. In 2014, i wrote about Gavin Higgins‘ Three Broken Love Songs, and his more recent work Sadly Now the Throstle Sings explores the same subject matter. The title comes from Oscar Wilde’s poignant poem ‘From Spring Days To Winter (For Music)’, which uses the seasons of the year as a metaphor for the beginning, blooming, fading and dying of love. The final stanza laments:
But now with snow the tree is grey,
Ah, sadly now the throstle sings!
My love is dead: ah ! well-a-day,
See at her silent feet I lay
A dove with broken wings!
The piece undergoes a very gradual sense of progression, though at first gives the impression it’s almost reluctant to move. Its opening phrase speaks, and just hangs there, sustained by a lone trumpet that can’t bring itself to stop or move, lending the solemn chords that follow the sense that they’re stuck in one place. Having finally broken free from this, opened out, intensified, broadened and deepened (a process that ends with more fixed trumpet notes), Higgins turns the music first inward, continuing vague and muted, disquieted by strange tremolandi, and then downward, speaking in low registers, each voice moving in close proximity to its neighbours, huddled together.
Out of this dark pain emerges a melancholic flugelhorn solo, slow and somewhat limited in scope but the rest of the brass consolidate around it, all of them occasionally dusted with percussion glitter. Underpinned by a dull thudding drum, they briefly resemble a black, dirge-like procession, before sagging down into shadow. Yet the coda, soft and weak (similar to the opening of the piece), tilts upward, whereupon florid muted trumpet chatter breaks out, like a ghostly echo of the throstle’s song, It transforms the music’s solemnity into something no less sad, but able to rejoice at the memory of something loved and now lost, a memory that, at the last, explodes in sparkles.
This performance of Sadly Now the Throstle Sings was given in August 2021 by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Ryan Bancroft, at the Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff.
Oscar Wilde – From Spring Days to Winter (for Music)
In the glad springtime when leaves were green,
O merrily the throstle sings!
I sought, amid the tangled sheen,
Love whom mine eyes had never seen,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
Between the blossoms red and white,
O merrily the throstle sings!
My love first came into my sight,
O perfect vision of delight,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
The yellow apples glowed like fire.
O merrily the throstle sings!
O Love too great for lip or lyre,
Blown rose of love and of desire,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
But now with snow the tree is grey,
Ah, sadly now the throstle sings!
My love is dead: ah ! well-a-day,
See at her silent feet I lay
A dove with broken wings!
Ah, Love ! ah, Love ! that thou wert slain—
Fond Dove, fond Dove return again!
