Ritual and parable in Britten’s Curlew River

Abstract

Benjamin Britten defined himself as “a composer for an occasion” and some of his works are composed for commemorations and civic or religious ceremonies which conform to their own rituals. As an opera composer, a genre which stages rites and rituals and obeys to its own forms, Britten was very much aware of the necessity of ritual to which he wished to actively associate audience participation. The composer belonged to the Auden Generation and enjoyed a close relationship with the poet who believed in the concept of parable art. So it is no wonder that his Curlew River, his adaptation of the Noh play, Sumidagawa, should transfer the ritual of Japanese drama in a Fenland community of monks in pre-Conquest times and should be subtitled A parable for church performance. Partly based on the analysis of parable by his former associate, the poet Louis McNeice, this study will focus on Britten’s integration of the genre’s characteristics—its didactic intentions and references to prescriptive texts, the creation of a private world, the encounter with, and acceptance of the Other—to the rituals of operatic conventions and on the composer’s universalist message which barely hides Britten’s anxieties about the place of the artist and the alien in his time.

Keywords

• parable
• ritual
• Noh
• narrative framework
• plainsong
• epilogue