Classical Music Reviews
Return to the Requiem Index
Articles from Sequence II:
MAHLER Kindertotenlieder
GÓRECKI Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
PENDERECKI A Polish Requiem. The Dream of Jacob
Morning Heroes
A Symphony for Orator, Chorus and Orchestra
An Inktroduction
Ever since Beethoven revised the dedication to the "Eroica Symphony", the nature of
heroism has been at best, ambiguous. Heroism cannot be defined without a
political context. And victors always write history. Does one define as hero
the owner of the German hand that struggles to touch a butterfly in "All
Quiet on the Western Front"? What can one say about the freed POWs of the
Indian National Army who fought alongside the Japanese in WWII to liberate
their country from oppression and servitude? The nature of heroism is what
Morning Heroes deals with. While there is no doubt whose side Bliss'
sympathies lay, he managed to produce a work of startling universality - a
testament not only those who leave home to face death, whatever the colour
of their skin, but also to those that are left behind. For example the very
first movement is a tender family scene between Hector and Andromache
reminding us that the presumed "evil ones" were human too with families to
mourn them.
The usual structure of this work allows Bliss great independence in
treatment of these big ideas. Added to it is his unique musical idiom as the unlikely musical child of Stravinsky and Elgar. In the final
reckoning the work is a setting for oration and poetry. Bliss' wonderful
humanism led him to choose passages from as diverse sources as Homer, Walt
Whitman and Li Tai Po.
The first movement is an oration from the Illiad, a scene that starts with the
tender pleas of Andromache to prevent Hector from joining the battle and
ends with masculine bombast of bloodlust and visions of glory.
The second scene is a setting of "The City Arming" by Walt Whitman
describing the spirit of New York at the outbreak of American Civil War in
1861. This scene is intended to recall the spirit of devotion and self
sacrifice of the "lost generation" that volunteered for service in 1914.
However, unintentionally or perhaps intentionally, it also serves to bring
out the mass hysteria and naivete of those who think that war is noble.
The third and the tenderest movement is in two parts. Women's voices start
the first by singing about the young Chinese girl embroidering cushions
of white silk. As she pricks her finger and a drop of blood falls on the
silk, she visualises her husband wounded on icy battlefield and weeps. In
the second part men sing of the soldier on the watch who dreams of home and
his loved ones he has left behind. The poetry of Li Tai Po is startlingly
universal, and treatment of the verses is tender. The second part is derived
from Walt Whitman's "The Bivouac's Flame".
The fourth movement deals with heroism in battle, and what better to
represent that than a choral setting of "Achilles Goes Forth to Battle" after
the death of Petroclus preceded by distinctively Stravinskian martial music.
At the end of this movement, the chorus declaims a roll-call of dead heroes
chosen, significantly, from both sides of the conflict, ending with a
connection to Hector in the first movement.
Hector, who is by now, dead.
The fifth movement contains the most personal writing in this cycle. It deals with
the 1914-18 war and specifically with the Battle of Somme, where Bliss'
brother died. The Orator first recites a poem by Wilfred Owen which talks
about a young soldier as he waits for a signal to advance into "no man's
land", against enemy fire. Finally the chorus sings a poem by Robert Nichols
in which, as the sun rises over the scarred plateau of the Somme, the words
"morning heroes" appear, from which this work takes its name.
Known Recordings:
Below: "Reliefs at Dawn" by C.R.W. Nevinson. (Trustees of the Imperial War Museum).
There is no doubt that the War affected Bliss in a profound and personal
way. His brother Kennard was one of the victims - one of the millions of the
faceless whom Bliss remembered with all too vivid clarity ("poet, painter
and musician, he was the most gifted of us all"). Bliss' own musical career
was cut short as he was drafted into the military and forced to make death
instead of beauty. When the war ended he was closer to thirty than
twenty and a first hand witness to horrors of the trenches. In 1928, ten
years after the war ended, Bliss was struggling with trauma and nightmares.
He returned to the battlefield to seek out the grave of his brother, whom he
was still mourning. Morning Heroes was his catharsis.
"Hector, like man killing Mars
Hector, fierce and grim as any stormy night
Hector, brave Hector"
by Miss Oliver (Trustees of the Imperial War Museum).
562: 30.6.1999