The Traveller was the third in a series of four major works with words by Vikram Seth and music by Alec Roth, commissioned jointly over four years by the Salisbury, Chelsea and Lichfield Festivals (2006-09). Each work featured the violinist Philippe Honoré as soloist, and each took a different geographical/cultural area as its starting point.

The Traveller is scored for solo violin, solo tenor, mixed choir, children’s choir and an orchestra of strings, harp and percussion. India provides the literary/cultural point of departure. In addition to writing six new poems, Seth translated some 20 classic Indian texts from a rich variety of traditions and languages.

Taking as its theme 'the Ages of Man', The Traveller is divided into six main sections: 1. Unborn; 2. Child; 3. Youth; 4. Adult; 5. Old; 6. Dead; followed by a short epilogue for the tenor soloist alone.

Each part is introduced in turn by a speaker reciting one of the seven verses of the great 'Hymn to Creation' from the Rig Veda.

In this universal tale of Man’s journey through life, the role of The Traveller is taken by the solo violin, The Companions by the choir and The Poet by the tenor soloist.

Vikram Seth writes …

2008 was the 750th anniversary year of the consecration of Salisbury Cathedral. Our work was to have its first performance there. We needed a theme at once grand and intimate—suited to the mood of the cathedral as night fell. Why not all human life?

With this modest thought in mind, I sought a structure for the libretto. I found it in the mysterious hymn to creation in the Rig Veda. The hymn has seven verses. Within these seven pillars I nested six arches: the stages of life and death. At Alec’s suggestion, I called the piece The Traveller, to reflect our earthly journey.

To the four traditional stages of life in the Hindu scheme of things—childhood, youth, adulthood and old age—I added two more: unborn and dead. I searched for texts in various Indian languages—passages both sacred and secular, that moved me and that suited these stages.

For example, the first Tamil text in the Youth section [No 10] comes from an epic poem in which the husband of the heroine Kannagi is wrongly accused of stealing the Queen’s ankle bracelet and is put to death. Kannagi’s angry lament—the fury and courage of a young woman confronting the power of the state—is followed by the the Queen’s eerie vision of the fall of the kingdom as a result of this injustice.

I offered a choice of about twenty such passages to Alec in existing English versions and asked him to tell me which he wanted before I set about making my own translations. ‘Oh, I want them all,’ he said, ‘I find them all inspiring.’ So, pondering my tactical unwisdom, I got down to more work than I had bargained for.

The Hindi passages of my selection presented no serious linguistic problem, as Hindi was my first language. The medieval Hindi of Kabir and the Brajbhasha of Surdas were familiar from literature studies at school as well as from songs. When I began translating the Sanskrit texts, my long-forgotten schoolboy lessons kicked in. There were problems, though, and choices to be made: in Pali, the word deep is ambiguous, so in the Old section [No 21], the Buddha could have been saying to his followers ‘be to yourselves a lamp’ or ‘be to yourselves an island’.

I had studied Urdu in order to understand the cultural world of the Muslim characters in A Suitable Boy. When working on the Bengali poem, I was able to draw on the little Bengali that I had gained by osmosis from my mother. For the texts from Tamil—a Dravidian language utterly different from north Indian languages—I was forced to resort to a crib.

Apart from these translations, for each of the six stages of life I wrote a short poem of my own.

My main reward for writing these libretti has always been the music. From the moment in the darkened cathedral that a small bell led into the first verse of the hymn to creation, I was held by the power of it. ‘They say love is the reason why / This soul of ours is bound by bone’ could not have been more tenderly set. Nor could Kannagi’s demand ‘Is there a god?’ have resonated with more indignation to the ancient roof and spire.

(Abridged from 'The Rivered Earth', Penguin, 2011, Vikram Seth’s collected libretti for the 4-year Salisbury commissions project, including an account of ‘the pleasures and pains of working with a composer’.)

from notes by Signum Classics © 2023