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Notes to pages 51–57
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Austin would term an “explicit performative” formulation (“I pray that God have mercy upon me!” for example). In its avoidance of such markers of illocutionary precision, Grimes’s prayer maintains a relative ambiguity of force; on this point, see esp. Austin’s lecture 6 (67–82). A phrase appearing for instance in a courtroom scene by the Victorian author Charlotte M. Yonge, in her novel The Trial, ch. xiv (181). Britten’s opera is set “towards 1830.” In one sketch, Ellen’s “we’ve failed” is conflated with the choral “Amen,” while Peter’s “God have mercy” theme is still a wordless cry (transcribed in Brett 1983: 77). In the composition sketch (p. 61r: reproduced in Brett 1983: ii), the choral “Amen” assumes its familiar position, after Peter strikes Ellen, and before he utters the prayer, worded “To Hell then, And God have mercy upon me!” For more detailed comment on these sketches, see Brett 1983: 75–78. The link between these two prayer cadences is also timbral: the crucial pedal point, in both scenes, is heard in the orchestral horns. Peter Evans (111) notes that each V pedal serves as leading-tone to more local tonicizations (of Gb Lydian, at “Peter, tell me one thing” in Act 2, and of a less triadically secure G tonic, at “In the black moment,” in Act 3). For Butler’s arguments about hate speech and subject formation, see, respectively, Butler 1997a and 1997b. The tonally arranged release that comes later in this scene, by successively falling transpositions of a single melodic phrase – as the posse march off to Peter’s hut – is a schematic reversing of this earlier ascent. Compare the graphic “falling” motion in The Turn of the Screw, Act 2, at the Governess’s decision to leave Bly. The Borough, Letter XXII, lines 73–78 (Crabbe 566). The libretto’s only other direct Crabbe quotations are in the framing Worksong chorus (Act 1, Scene 1 and Act 3, Epilogue). Boles’s words in Act 2 are in fact a return to his charge in the Act 1 pub scene: “his exercise is not with men but killing boys.” Butler 1997a: 31–33. Althusser, famously, compares ideology to a policeman hailing a passerby, who then turns around in response. I return to these questions below, considering the Act 3 mad scene. Britten, remarking on a 1950 performance, catches the terms of the debate surrounding Peter’s “character”: This young singer has a voice of just the right timbre. It was not too heavy, which makes the character simply a sadist, nor was it too lyric, which makes it a boring opera about a sentimental poet manqué ; but it had, as it should, the elements of both. (Cited in Blyth 14–15)
40 1960 interview with Lord Harewood, cited Mitchell–Reed 1991: 1043; Britten’s interest in tying specific musical forms to a given social situation is evident too in the sing-song children’s rhymes with which Albert is mocked in Albert Herring.