The Instant Moment (1986)

The five poems which constitute the text of this cycle are all taken from the collection Look! We Have Come Through!, published by D.H. Lawrence in 1917. They are mainly concerned with the development of his deepening relationship with Frieda, the wife of Professor Ernest Weekley of Nottingham University. Lawrence and Frieda had eloped in 1912 and for a time were to live a nomadic life together, mainly on the Continent, until their marriage in 1914. Look! We Have Come Through! was written during this period.

I have selected the poems in order to express in musical terms five highly contrasted reactions to the experience of love. The title of the work is a quotation from Lawrence’s introduction to an American edition of his poems in which he characterises the kind of verse he was writing as “the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment”.

In the declamatory nature of the vocal line and the descriptiveness of the instrumental writing I have attempted to capture in musical terms some of the immediacy of emotion contained in Lawrence’s poetry, while at the same time preserving its very real sense of organic structure. The work was commissioned by the English String Orchestra (with funds provided by West Midlands Arts) and first performed by them with Henry Herford on 21 March 1987, at the Adrian Boult Hall, Birmingham at a concert to mark my sixtieth birthday. It is dedicated to the late Sir Laurens van der Post.

I. Bei Hennef

Hennef, on the River Sieg in the Rhineland, provides the twilit backdrop to this intimate soliloquy on the bliss of newly realised love. The music attempts to convey the “twittering” of the little river culminating in the avowal “you are the call and I am the answer” to more impassioned phrases in the orchestra. The song ends on a note of uncertainty, however—“Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!”

II. Loggerheads

The faster tempo, minor tonality and histrionic vocal part together convey a defiant assertion of identity separate from, and independent of that of the beloved. The poem seems to prefigure some of Lawrence’s and Frieda’s notorious rows.

III. “And oh—That the man I am might cease to be—”

The title of this poem is a quotation from Tennyson’s monodrama Maud, whose male protagonist Lawrence seems to have identified with to some degree. It describes a mood of black despair and a longing for a state of unconsciousness which is neither sleep nor death, “but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable”. The music reflecting this employs opaque divisi string chords, and ends with a cry of pain from the soloist which inverts the “avowal” motif from the first song.

IV. December Night

An invitation to love with more than a passing nod to Tristan in the rising chromatic phrases of the opening. As the mood becomes more impassioned the “avowal” motif reappears to conclude the song ecstatically. The strings are muted throughout, however, to suggest the enclosed warmth of a firelit room in winter.

V. Moonrise

A visionary poem which sees true love as everlasting, as “a thing beyond the grave”, and the moon itself as something that will “dim sooner than our full consummation here will tarnish or pass away”. The music, ascending from the depths, suggests the rising of the moon whose “lambent beauty shakes towards us”. After a climax and a pause the ascent begins again, this time in a rich D flat major tonality which, rising to a second climax, affirms the immanence of love before subsiding to a serene conclusion.

Programme note by John Joubert, 1996