Christopher Webber wrote:

>Robert Peters writes of Queen and Huntress:
>
>>I think the comic nature of the song is obvious, at least in the recordings
>>by Pears and Bostridge.  The unfestive pace, the coloratura in "excellent"
>>(like a deliberate parody), the silly repeat of the word "Goddess" (utterly
>>uncelebratory), the brisk and most funny "bright" at the end of each
>>strophe.  Well, all thinks speaks out for a deliberate comic nature of
>>the piece.  (at least IMHO)
>
>Do you find "Dido and Aeneas" comic? You'll find all the features you
>isolate there, too.

I find Dido and Aeneas not comic. Does it have any silly repeats?

>Perhaps if you realign your hearing of the Britten setting in the light
>of his love and understanding of Purcell, your observations (which seem
>so weirdly skewed against what Britten is actually doing) will fall into
>place.  Perhaps you'll even agree that "festivity" in English music can be
>exhilarating, light as air and fleet-footed as well as solidly bucolic.

So you know exactly what Britten is actually doing.  Listen to Pears
and Bostridge.  I think my interpreting their reading as comic is quite
defendable.  (Most of my friends who listening to the music are of my
opinion.  Maybe we are all weird creatures...) - And festivity in English
music and English plays (and I studied English letters and culture, by the
way) very often has an ironic and comic touch.

>That is precisely how Britten confounds our expectations.  He does so
>brilliantly, and very truly in the spirit of Jonson's text - which is not
>so lightly "occasional" as all that, by the way, but a highly compressed
>moral comment on human desire and bodily activity in his subtlest Ovidian
>mode.

Jonson was a great satirist and most of his works have an ironic edge.  -
That a poem is occasional does not mean it is not a highly compressed moral
comment.  (BTW, I think you overinterpreted the well-crafted, but not too
deep-digging text.) Most of Goethe's greatest poems were occasional poems.

Robert Peters
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