Thus In Babylon ...

The last time I was able to spend quality time with my Walton score was during the lock-out.  At the time, I wasn't in the mood to do much more than mark my new pristine copy of Belshazzar's Feast.  With a highlighter, I followed the slim and often-disappearing thread of the alto line ... through a thicket of split choruses, semi-choruses and soli ... sketching in skulls, crossbones and startled eyeballs because this is a scary piece ... and there are meter changes, polyrhythmic pitfalls, bad page turns ... no end of opportunities for the unwary singer to honk in early and often.

(I think the secret to singing confidently is to just go for it, holding nothing back during rehearsals.  I once heard Keith Hernandez -- retired NY Mets first baseman -- say something similar:  You go to extra batting practice, especially if you're not hitting well, to get all the bad juju out of your bat.  Choral singing isn't much different.)

Last week, we had a terrific chorus rehearsal with plenty of honking in and cleaning up ... before delivering enough honk-free passages to satisfy the director. As of today, we are weaned from count-singing -- a milestone in our preparation -- and are able to delve more deeply into the work.  

Oscar Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying reverses the Aristotelian mimetic premise that "Art is an imitation of Life."  More often, says Wilde, Life imitates Art. His essay is an exhausting conversation between two Edwardian toffs, Cyril and Vivian, who say things like:  the 'self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.' Vivian wraps up the discussion with a classic Wildean quip:  'At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.' 

I get what Vivian is saying.  If the aim of life is to find meaning through poetic expression, then the 'sounds of nature' we hear in Beethoven's highly-programmatic 6th 'Pastorale' Symphony, for example, are not simply the products of his compositional aesthetic, which invented them ... they are the means through which he expressed his love for the natural world, and a means through which we divine our own.  

The human condition continues to find poetic resonance in the choral masterworks in which text and the composer's musical language are perfectly aligned.  The choir becomes the anguished voice of the people, singing "Help, Lord!" in Elijah ... "Libera me!" in the Verdi Requiem.  Generations after these works were composed, performances of them can have a disquieting timeliness: events occur in which the transcendent power of text and music are fully realized, as in the circumstances surrounding the origin of The Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin:  We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them. 

Belshazzar's Feast does not create the same powerful emotional connection ... but, Lord, it is exciting to sing, with its rich tapestry of interweaving melodic lines, complex often jazzy rhythms.  Taking into account its orchestral riches and demanding vocal athleticism -- both of which it has in abundance -- Belshazzar dazzles.  Relentlessly. 

I think the work's weakness lies in the central narrative.  Walton's librettist, Osbert Sitwell, chose the Book of Daniel:   King Belshazzar, while feasting with his guests and concubines, commits a sacrilege by pointedly using the Jews' sacred vessels to take wine shots and toast the gods of iron, stone, gold, etc.   The king's death and Babylon's destruction mark the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. 

The problem is that Belshazzar is no archetype of wickedness like Ahab, or a 'destroyer of nations' like his father, Nebuchadnezzar.  Rather, he comes across as a showy, minor despot and a sensualist.  Lacking an arch-villain, Walton had to write a whole lot of music to make the Babylonian excesses sound convincingly wicked, although his handling of Belshazzar's lavish banquet puts me more in mind of those old Bible movie scores.  Everybody is having a great time, right up to the moment the writing appears on the wall.  "Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting."  Eh?  When the disembodied fingers emerge from the ether to write on the wall, I can easily picture Belshazzar frowning, slightly drunk, scratching an itchy place under his turban while Daniel is summoned to explain what it means.  The doom is pronounced and fulfilled in less than two pages.  Faster than the chorus can bellow "Slain!", through divine judgment (weighing, numbering), power is taken from the wicked and restored to the righteous. 

Then sing aloud to God our strength:
Make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob,
For Babylon has fallen!

However ... 2,400 years later, 'Babylon' is still the default symbol for every institutional evil, specifically, spiritual corruption yoked to immense power and wealth.  Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, 'American Civilization' in an 1862 issue of Atlantic Magazine, discourages any idea that physical and economic slavery belong to a distant past:  "... Well, now here comes this conspiracy of slavery,—they call it an institution, I call it a destitution,—this stealing of men and setting them to work,—stealing their labor, and the thief sitting idle himself; and for two or three ages it has lasted, and has yielded a certain quantity of rice, cotton, and sugar. And standing on this doleful experience, these people have endeavored to reverse the natural sentiments of mankind, and to pronounce labor disgraceful, and the well-being of a man to consist in eating the fruit of other men's labor."

The truth is that the showy, minor despots of modern civilization -- Emerson's 'thieves of labor'  -- continue to rebuild the 'great city' over and over:  the 'great harlot', referring to Rome in Revelations ... Hollywood in the 20's.  The 99 Percenters occupy Wall Street.  And instead of saying, 'The Jamaican government must stop the oppression of its people!" a Rasta sings, 'Babylon must fall'.

Isaiah's prophecy wasn't a one-off ... and it's difficult to overlook the irony these days.  Sitwell most likely understood this.  At the conclusion of Belshazzar's Feast, two separate passages of scripture are elided:  the chorus is the jubilant voice of the Jewish people singing Alleluia's, as well as the merchants rending their garments, lamenting the fall of a great city.  

While the Kings of the Earth lament
And the merchants of the Earth
Weep, wail and rend their raiment.
They cry, Alas, Alas, that great city,
In one hour is her judgement come.

Babylon's continued resurrection, however much we abhor it, doesn't surprise us, and there are always plenty of people sorry to see her go.

The emotional core within Belshazzar's Feast can be found in the second movement ... the opening lines are from Psalm 137, some of the saddest lines ever written, in which the chorus expresses the yearning of Jerusalem's exiled people during the last of three deportations into Babylon.

By the waters of Babylon

There we sat down: yea, we wept

And hanged our harps upon the willows.

Setting these lines to music must have flowed easily from Walton's pen ... the choral passages are truly beautiful, filled with longing and bitterness, punctuated by forte-piano stabs of pain from the upper voices.


For they that wasted us
Required of us mirth;
They that carried us away captive
Required of us a song

'Sing us one of the songs of Zion':  in other words, sing us one of those songs about being God's chosen people, under Jehovah's special protection. Considering that the captives only knew holy songs, sacred to their worship -- which they were forbidden to sing under other circumstances -- this request amounted to a demand that the Israelites profane their religion for the amusement of their oppressors.  

Disquieting timeliness, indeed ...