As some may know, I sing with Measure for Measure, a men’s chorus of 85 voices that performs music in the style of collegiate glee clubs (and is a post-graduate spin-off of the U-M Men’s Glee Club). Although the tradition of men’s choruses has waned in the US, the tradition is still strong in Europe, and its very enjoyable and rewarding to sing with a group of fine, expressive singers who are (usually!) passionate about the music we’re singing together.

Measure for Measure doesn’t perform many large works, although we are increasingly collaborating with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and other ensembles in performances such as Orff’s Carmina Burana and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. Some of this is due to the needs of our audience and our performance opportunites, which requires a variety of styles and selections to appeal to a broad audience, and also due to the lack of a large body of good music for men’s chorus.

We’re doing a great piece this season by Benjamin Britten, a 20th-century English composer, which is a setting of an anonymous tale from the Oxford Book of Ballads, which is sort of an ill-fated medieval Lady Chatterly’s Lover: Boy meets married woman at church where they declare their love (or at least infaturation) for one another and they make a plan to get together at her love nest outside of town. Lady’s servant-boy overhears and runs off to tattle on her to her husband, who speeds off to find them, and discovers them in flagrante delicto. The husband, being magnanimous, orders the young lover to don some clothes “for it shall ne’er be said in my country that I’ve killed a naked man!”. They fight a duel, the young lover dies, and in his wrath the husband kills his wife, blames everyone else in the room, and orders the lovers to be buried together.

Interestingly, Britten edits the text somewhat (perhaps to protect the sensibilities of his audience, as well as for time), as in the story the husband kills his wife by cutting off her breasts (”He cut her paps from off her breast”), and he edits out some of the more comic bits. In exchange, he sets the text with dramatic flourishes that move from passionate tenderness to alarm to anxious rage.

One friend referred to this as “Britten’s indictment of heterosexual jealousy”. Britten was most definitely not heterosexual (although he was a simple and private man who did not enjoy intrusions into his personal life), and I’m curious what the inspiration was that moved him to set this particular ballad.

You can find the complete text at http://www.bartleby.com/243/50.html.