If you want an intellectual challenge, then power your way through the sonnets of John Donne, the leading exemplar of the school of Metaphysical Poets, as I and many other students of English Literature have had to do. In these poems Donne wrestles with God (he was an ordained priest), himself and the world around him, using the three thematic triggers of sin, death and love. But because there is so much depth and indeed universality to Donne’s writing, it is understandable that Benjamin Britten found himself drawn to setting these words to music, which he accomplished in less than three weeks during August 1945. He and Yehudi Menuhin had just come back from giving a concert for Holocaust survivors in Bergen-Belsen. This experience was so profound that, as his life-partner Peter Pears later recalled, he went to bed for a week and “none of his music after that was ever the same”. Britten’s collection of songs, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, using nine of the nineteen Petrarchan sonnets or “divine meditations”, is bleak, stark and unsettling.
Delivering this message at Wigmore Hall was the 45-year-old tenor from Somerset, David Butt Philip. As a recitalist he is very self-contained: he moves very little, the two arms rarely used for emphasis, at best a closed fist or open palm together with a pointed finger or two, the countenance mostly untroubled. Everything therefore depends for effect on the voice itself. It is without doubt a powerful instrument, at home in the wide open spaces of an opera-house, less so in the intimate surroundings of this hall. Here, some lines can be almost whispered but will still carry within this acoustic. Butt Philip’s voice was at its most charming whenever the markings in the score suggested dolce or dulce. In his career path he followed the advice of many, including Vladimir Jurowski, in transitioning from a baritone to a tenor. This accounts for the impressive security in upper and lower registers, supported by excellent breath control, but the two departments are not quite evenly matched. There was a welcome warmth and depth to the baritonal reaches, whereas the tenor range often took on a cobalt-blue steeliness, slightly aggressive and uncomfortable in extended dynamics. His diction, however, both in English and in German, was commendable.
At his side as accompanist was the sterling James Baillieu, encompassing the heavy and arresting E flat minor chords at the start of Britten’s cycle, the agitations repeatedly present in harmonic lines, the strong underpinning of the left hand for the start of the final sonnet, Death be not proud but, above all, in the earlier stages of the evening, the controlled poise of the many soft endings.
There is often a feverish and restless quality to this cycle, relaxing only for the sixth sonnet, mirroring Donne’s conflict between thought and duty, belief and devotion. It requires considerable emotional intensity but this has to be tempered with a prayerful inwardness in order to avoid any one-dimensionality. Butt Philip had a full and powerful chill for the opening Oh my black Soule!, the following lines often declamatory in character, yet without those moments of whining and pleading which suggest the child within. At its close, where the imagery becomes startingly visual, there were some exquisite head tones for “it dyes red soules to white”.
I found the delivery of the next sonnet, Batter my heart, a little on the brisk side, its pace robbing the words of their percussive and persecutory force. Speed, too, was used to underline the urgency of Oh, to vex me, and the full impact of Britten’s melismatic close, “when I shake with feare”, was a touch compromised. Butt Philip displayed a fine legato line for much of Since she whom I loved, the sixth of these sonnets in sequence, which is flushed with an almost Schubertian-like lyricism, and he properly savoured the three syllables in “ravished”. The following sonnet, At the round earth’s imagined corners, takes on a celestial quality, enhanced by the rippling piano accompaniment. At the volta in this sonnet, following the eighth line, I found myself hearing pre-echoes of the composer’s later War Requiem; at this point I craved a greater degree of hushed stillness for the memorable line, “But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space”.
There is an obvious linkage in the two works that framed Butt Philip’s recital. The closing work by Britten was premiered by the composer and Peter Pears at the Wigmore Hall in November 1945; Vaughan Williams’s The House of Life, a cycle which drew on six sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was first heard in what was then still the Bechstein Hall in 1904. During his long life Vaughan Williams amassed over 800 songs, carols and country dance tunes; this early work already shows his mastery in matching music to words. He would have been instinctively drawn to the pastoral elements in the second sonnet, Silent Noon, with its reference to “golden kingcup fields with silver edge where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn edge”, and the atmospheric mention of the dragonfly which “hangs like a blue thread loosen’d from the sky”. Butt Philip took due note of the composer’s Largo sostenuto marking, with a gentle stretching of words like “loosen’d”, and deployed a magical range of dulcet tones often missing elsewhere.
Baillieu’s opening for the third song, Love’s minstrels, with its gentle strumming chords brought an ideal representation of the minstrel and his lute, and the concluding eight bars for piano alone made the final line “This harp still makes my name its voluntary” resonate with quiet intensity. Earlier he had matched the swell and forcefulness of Butt Philip’s delivery of the balladic narrative.
Framed by these settings of sonnets by Vaughan Williams and Britten were two exemplars of German Romantic spirit: three songs by Alma Mahler-Schindler and Wagner’s only mature song cycle, the Wesendonck Lieder. Most of the compositions by Gustav’s wife have been sadly lost, and the three chosen by Butt Philip were part of the final published set in 1924. The third of these, a setting of the Expressionist poet Franz Werfel’s Der Erkennende, showed off the richness of Butt Philip’s baritonal range in its low-lying tessitura; meanwhile, the intensity of expression contained in the lines of the final stanza with the rhythmic potency of “Allein” and “mein” together with “brennen” and “erkennen” was fully realised. This song carries the influence of Alma’s teacher and lover Zemlinsky but already points to the fracturing qualities of musical development during this period.
Turbulence of spirit was nothing new to Wagner when he set five poems to music which Mathilde Wesendonck had sent him as a token of their forbidden love. The most obviously operatic in treatment is the second, Stehe still!, and here I sensed a greater identification with the words by Butt Philip, the heroic characteristics in his voice suggesting at the start a kinship with Siegfried, though he was appropriately sensitive in his dynamic shadings to the import of “Seele ganz in Seele versinken”. In Schmerzen he delivered the line “Wie ein Stolzer Siegesheld“ with the ringing authority of an operatic tenor and was alive to the anguish which Wesendonck’s imagery reveals – a weeping sun, the glory of the dark world, agony that brings bliss. Both Im Treibhaus and Träume can be seen as explicit studies for the composer’s later Tristan und Isolde. If there was one aspect of Butt Philip’s interpretation which left me somewhat unsatisfied, it was the undercharged yearning desire, typified in a phrase like “in sehnendem Verlangen”, and the repetition of the word “Träume”. It’s the kind of moment when the singer needs to tear open a buttoned-up shirt-collar, metaphorically speaking, in order to release all the emotional undercurrents.
Alexander Hall
Vaughan Williams, The House of Life – Alma Mahler, Three Songs: Hymne, Ekstase, Der Erkennde – Wagner, Wesendonck Lieder – Britten, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne
David Butt Philip (tenor) – James Baillieu (piano)
Wigmore Hall, London, 15 June 2025
Top image: David Butt Philip. Photo © Andrew Staples.