Parenthood, Pyjamas, and Postpartum Depression at “Music Mondays: The Music of Benjamin Britten”

On Monday, Feb. 6, Core Lecturer of Music in Voice Kate Saik DeLugan and collaborative pianist Lemuel Gurtowsky performed song cycles by composer Benjamin Britten, exploring both the tragic and comedic extremes of his work. 

Saik DeLugan chose to juxtapose “A Charm of Lullabies, Op. 41” (1949) and “Cabaret Songs” (1980) in her performance as “a good snapshot of two different sides of Britten’s composition” and that she “really liked being able to show both sides of his wit and charm.”

Saik DeLugan and Gurtowsky’s performance was the first of the semester in an ongoing concert series titled “Music Mondays.” The music department’s website summarizes the series as “a series of free half-hour chamber concerts on the first Monday of the month starting at 1:00 p.m. in Sweeney Concert Hall.” Around 50 students, faculty and community audience members attended the concert.

“Britten is a new fascination for me,” said Saik DeLugan. “[His music is] melodic and gorgeous but also has an edge to it that’s a little indescribable, and really, really appealing. I just felt really enchanted by it.”

“A Charm of Lullabies” is a significant departure from the typical lullaby. Rather than a collection of serene melodies in hushed tones, each song is narrated by a mother growing increasingly frustrated as her child refuses to go to sleep.

Britten brings an air of tragedy to the lullaby with his unsettling compositional techniques, using sweeping chromatic motifs in the piano accompaniment and rapid shifts in tempo and dynamics — but what truly jars the listener are the lyrics. In the penultimate song, “A Charm,” the narrator explodes, “Quiet! Sleep! Or I will make Erinnys whip thee with a snake / And cruel Rhadamanthus take / Thy body to the boiling lake,” referencing the Ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance.

“When the last song comes in totally a capella,” Saik DeLugan noted, “I just thought that it’s terrifying, and also so beautiful. I think that’s what sold it for me. I like how the exploration of parenthood wasn’t all rosy and sentimental.”

Saik DeLugan opened up about her struggle with postpartum depression after the birth of her son and her identification with Britten’s music. “When you have young kids, you’re not encouraged to be very honest about the internal struggles of parenthood, the desperation you feel or how overwhelming it can be,” Saik DeLugan said. “Particularly in the early 2000s, when my kid was young, people were just starting to talk about how lonely and how difficult it could be to be a parent of young children.”

“I didn’t even know that I had postpartum depression until years later, so I really identified with ‘A Charm of Lullabies’ and how sometimes it’s just too much. You’re just like, ‘QUIET!’ and sometimes you don’t like being a parent and you feel bad, and you’re made to feel very guilty for admitting that you struggle with enjoying that stage of life. But now that my child is almost grown I feel more comfortable exploring and unpacking those feelings, and I find that art is a great way to come to terms with our own internal struggles.”

The second cycle, “Cabaret Songs,” represented an emotional 180-degree turn from “A Charm of Lullabies.” Composed in collaboration with poet W. H. Auden and posthumously published in 1980, “Cabaret Songs” is a playful, comedic counterpart to Britten’s darker work. Saik DeLugan said, “I had come across ‘Cabaret Songs’ a few years ago and just thought they were adorable. So much fun, so silly, and Auden’s poetry is so clever and great and wonderful.”

The cycle begins with the piece “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” as the 35-year-old narrator struggles to understand what love is, playfully asking, “[D]oes it look like a pair of pyjamas / Or the ham in a temperance hotel?”

With this character, Saik DeLugan “envisioned a person who just maybe isn’t the type of person to fall in love, and that’s why she doesn’t get it, but maybe she learns to accept that she doesn’t need anybody.” She posited that, “[M]aybe she ends up taking more of an anthropological framing for love, rather than trying to find it for herself.”

Britten and Auden’s other songs take an equally humorous approach. In the final song “Calypso,” the performer leaps between octaves and ends on the narrator telling her driver to drive “faster faster faster faster faster faster” so she can return to her lover, leaving both the performer and the audience laughing at the end of the concert.

“Britten writes in a whistle in the score,” Saik DeLugan noted. “He has some really funny directions in there, like in ‘Johnny’ one of the stage directions just says ‘suffocate.’”

Saik DeLugan encourages others to “come to Music Mondays. It’s a nice half-hour bite to get some really interesting music, see a bunch of different performers on campus and it’s a casual environment. It’s a really great way to add art to your week.”

Upcoming Music Mondays performances include Music Mondays 5: Joel Pitchon and Friends on Mar. 6 at 1 PM and Music Mondays 6: Contemporary Works for Solo Viola with Ronals Gorevic on Apr. 3 at 1 PM.