Alan Bush: Prison Cycle : Chant et Piano

This collaborative work has a curious origin. In 1938 a group of refugees from Nazi Germany living in London established the Free German League of Culture. This organisation presented work by progressive German artists, painters and writers as well as musicians. In the following year the League invited Alan Bush and Alan Rawsthorne to collaborate on the composition of song-cycle to poems by the German Socialist poet Ernst Toller. Toller had taken a leading role in the short-lived Bavarian Workers' Republic, and the poems set in this work (some but not all being from the collection first published under the title 'The Swallow Book') were written during his subsequent term of imprisonment. The first and last songs (by Bush), and the third song (by Rawsthorne) act as a sort of ritornello depicting the poet pacing up and down in his cell. In the second song (Bush) the poet considers the apparent increasing friendliness, induced by familiarity, of various everyday objects about the cell, the table, the bars, even the midges. In the fourth song (Rawsthorne) the poet contemplates a pair of swallows that nested on the window-sill until they were shot by the prison guards. Toller himself committed suicide in May 1939. The work was first performed by the mezzo-soprano Anne Wood with Alan Bush at the piano on the 15th December 1939 at the Conway Hall, London, and was given several performances in 1939-41, but the manuscript was then mislaid for over 35 years until it was revived by the baritone Graham Titus with Erik Levi at the Purcell Room, London, on the 24th October 1977. The manuscript, in the hands of the respective composers, is housed in the Library of the Royal Academy of Music, and there is a further copy of the two Rawsthorne songs, in the composer's hand, in the Rawsthorne Archive at the Royal Northern College of Music. The work is Bush's opus 19; Rawsthorne, of course, did not use opus numbers.