In a Dark Time

This work is a setting of Byron’s poem Darkness, the apocalyptic vision which has been likened by many writers to the description of a world following a nuclear holocaust. In fact, the title In a Dark Time is not only taken from a poem by Theodore Roethke, but also a book by Nicholas Humphrey and Robert Jay Lifton which deals with the psychology of the nuclear age. This work thus returns to the concerns of my 1983 piece The Kingdom of Bones. However, the personal tragedy of that work is replaced here with a vision of the whole world disintegrating.

This setting divides Byron’s poem into five sections, each of which is prefaced with a repetition of the poem’s opening lines. These sections are framed by a prelude and coda and separated by interludes.  The form of the work thus attempts to reflect a sleepless night, during which the protagonist continually wakes from the same terrifying nightmare. To begin with there are four basic musical ideas; two allotted to the instrumental prelude and interludes and two to the vocal sections. Throughout the piece these gradually lose their individual identity and transform into the unison line which constitutes the fifth vocal section. This sense of the material being drawn to one common goal is continued in the coda, where the unison line itself is levelled by being absorbed into the final sustained E.

In a Dark Time was commissioned by the Bath Festival with funds from the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was premiered on 28 May 1989 at the Bath Festival by Lontano conducted by Odaline de la Martinez with Henry Herford baritone. 

Philip Grange

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moon-less air;
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passion in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch;
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire – but hour by hour
They fell and faded – and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash – and all was black.
The brows of me by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands and smil’d;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shreik’d
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twin’d themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless – they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sat sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought – and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails – men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corpse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer’d not with a caress – he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak’d up
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspect – saw, and shreik’d, and died:
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless,
A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay,
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge –
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them – She was the Universe.

Lord Byron