The Rivered Earth By Vikram Seth, Hamish Hamilton, Rs 399

“You gave him too many words, Vikram,” the violinist gently chastises the writer in Vikram Seth’s general introduction to The Rivered Earth. ‘Him’ — the receiver of this verbal excess — is the composer who set the words to music, with a special part for the violinist. Vikram Seth (writer), Philippe Honoré (violinist) and Alec Roth (composer) were co-conspirators in getting several British music festivals to fund a series of four works between 2006 and 2009 for voice, violin and other instruments. So, as Seth puts it, relishing the puerility of his own pun, “Seth wrote and Roth set.” And Philippe played. The Rivered Earth collects the four texts or libretti that came out of this collaboration — three men putting their heads together in “a red room with a large black piano”. It is introduced by Seth through a deceptively light-hearted gathering of conversations that he had had with each of his collaborators on the process behind these works.

It is in one of these fragments of talk that the violinist minds a little about being “short-changed” by the writer’s too many words. This keen, yet semi-serious vigilance that each artist maintains over his own turf in this adventure à trois keeps alive a hidden spring of subtle drama — a silent, meta-operatic plot, as in Strauss’s Capriccio, an opera about the delicate, erotic tussle between words and music in opera. It also creates the peculiar melancholy, and human interest, of this fine book.

The Rivered Earth is a book about “confluences”, the original name for the project, at many levels. Not only do a writer, a composer and a violinist come together (and apart) in it, but three civilizations — China, Europe and India — are also brought in relation to one another in the texts. The first, Songs in Time of War, gathers in a cycle — reminiscent of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in opening and closing with the same aria — Seth’s early translations of poems by the Chinese poet, Du Fu. The second, Shared Ground, is a “suite dovetailed into a motet”, that is also a double elegy — to the great Anglican poet, George Herbert, who was the original owner of the house Seth bought and moved into, and to his companionship with Philippe. It came to an end before Seth began to live in Herbert’s Old Rectory in Bemerton and before he could listen to the music composed for Philippe in the gaps between the poems — poems that used some of the forms and shapes perfected by Herbert, Seth’s “tactful host”. The oak tree near a water-meadow outside the Rectory, with its ancient roots, becomes “the still hour-glass” holding the younger poet in its “free cage” while he composes a poem that looks on the page like an hour-glass as well as a winged creature. This “free cage” turns into an image for the paradox of giving new life to an old house, of writing poetry for music, and of love set to loss.

The third work, The Traveller, was first performed in Salisbury Cathedral. It is an oratorio about the stages of life and death culled from Indian sources in various languages, from the Rig Veda to Ramprasad, interspersed with Seth’s own verses: “What can I give the world? What can the world give me?/ How can I render sight? How can I learn to see?” The last, Seven Elements, extends the usual four to a pan-Asian system of seven, including space, wood and metal, set to music for violin, tenor and piano. It confounds “zones of culture” in a wine-fuelled fit of versification as “Fayah”, the fourth element, burns “Hot as a filament wa-yah/ Hot as prawn jamba-la-yah…/Hot as a funeral pa-yaah —/ Leaping up ha-yaah and ha-yaah”.

Rooted in the clear lake by the oak tree in Bemerton, or swelling inside the splendid gloom of an English cathedral, Seth’s poetry engages with a distinctively English tradition of church and festival music that goes back, because of his composer’s pedigree, through Britten and Vaughan Williams to the music of Händel, Purcell, Byrd and Tallis (with Bach as another point of origin). It is a musical tradition profoundly nourished by the achievements of English poetry — Herbert, Milton, Blake, Hardy and Auden, to name a few important, though mostly unwitting, librettists. Seth not only immerses himself in the landscape and architecture of this music and verse, but also opens them up to the diversity and disorderliness of his other worlds, as Mahler had broken up the texture and universe of Viennese music in The Song of the Earth. Seth recalls how the dogs barked late at night in Delhi while he wrote his poems about “the green shades of Bemerton”. It is a detail that folds his displaced memory back into yet another tradition of song — Schubert’s Lieder, especially The Winter Journey, where the barking of dogs at night suggests the darkness of unfulfilled passion.

It is impossible to read Da Ponte’s libretto of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Boito’s of Verdi’s Otello, even Hofmannsthal’s of Strauss’s Elektra, or The Penguin Book of Lieder, without getting bored by the absence of music. Yet, I found myself savouring The Rivered Earth without wanting to reach out for YouTube or get the CDs. And I cannot decide — neither do I want to — whether the poet’s triumph means the librettist’s failure.

What makes the poet’s self-sufficiency poignant is that other, elegantly muted, plot which runs like a hidden river beneath the poems — the story of the musician in whose hands the poems were to gain another kind of life, but in whose absence the poet must learn to create his own music and discover the sadness of its might. Seth describes what it was like listening to Philippe Honoré, “the traveller”, playing his “wordless” solo on the violin in a darkened cathedral: “gathering the thread of things that had gone before and weaving them into a meditation of unutterable loveliness, so that I was almost in a trance, only barely conscious that what I was hearing was being produced by human hands, and hands I knew, moving to and fro with one piece of wood against another, causing gentler elements to touch and vibrate and themselves set in motion the invisible, resonant air around.” To be able to render the wordless so beautifully worded — for such loss, abundant recompense?