Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Choral Works Benjamin Britten could occasionally be disparaging about pre-twentieth century orchestral and operatic composition...
Benjamin Britten
(1913-1976)
Choral Works
Benjamin Britten could occasionally be disparaging about pre-twentieth
century orchestral and operatic composition in the British Isles, but he always
made a careful exception where choral music was concerned. In opera he regarded
it as a life's ambition to establish a genre largely missing from his native
country, but in the choral sphere he chose instead to work within a tradition,
one for which he had the deepest knowledge and respect.
Nonetheless, no tradition touched by Britten's towering musical
imagination could fail to be renewed and revitalised, and he left behind a
corpus of work which has already embedded itself deeply into the choral and
liturgical culture of all Anglophone countries. Choral music, he acknowledged,
formed the very bedrock of British musical life in centuries past, from
madrigal groups to cathedral choirs, from small professional groups to large
amateur choral societies. The selection on this disc has been chosen to
represent the breadth and imagination of his musical genius in choral music.
The first work, Rejoice in the Lamb, was commissioned in 1943 by
an indefatigable champion of new music for the Anglican church, the Reverend
Walter Hussey, in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of his church, St
Matthew's, Northampton. Britten chose to set the then recently-published
'Jubilate Agno', written by Christopher Smart in the mid-eighteenth century
from his eyrie in a lunatic asylum. Even by Britten's own standards it was a
daring choice which few could bring off with such dazzling aplomb.
This endearingly eccentric poem explores the wonder of creation from a
variety of unusual perspectives - a pre-echo of contemporary magical realism -
and allow, Britten a virtuoso display of word settings. A lyrical tenor solo
sees the wonder of God in flowers; in a plaintive treble solo the poet
considers his cat Jeoffrey, whose morning worship consists of 'wreathing his body seven times round with
elegant quickness'. In its many-faceted exploration of the wonder of God's
creation, the work celebrates music's power to heal, its restorative innocence
and its capacity to bring unalloyed delight. His contemporaries may have
dismissed Smart as insane, it seems to say, but there is a fundamental truth
and sanity which we can all access through our childlike selves. The music
itself is possessed of radiant wit and childlike simplicity but is never less
than thrilling, especially in the glorious catalogue of musical instruments
which makes up the climax to the work.
The Te Deum in C was written in 1934 for the choir of St Mark's
in London's North Audley Street, and was among the composer's very first to be
accepted for publication - albeit by Oxford University Press rather than
Britten's later publishers Boosey & Hawkes. It is in one sense at least
remarkably daring: in the opening pages it adheres steadfastly to a chord of C
major in the choral parts, and builds its musical interest without traditional
use of harmonic progression, but by use of short motifs which are constantly
reworked. The haunting treble solo
which sets the individual against the chorus is a typically ingenious idea.
The Jubilate Deo, so often viewed as a companion work to the Te
Deum in C, was actually penned 27 years later, in 1961. In fact it was the
first fruit of a proposal from the Duke of Edinburgh that Britten should write
some music for St George's Chapel at Windsor. Nothing more of that idea seems
to have emerged except this joyous, dancing work, with its pert rhythms,
sparkling organ accompaniment and masterly word-setting.
Britten's gift for choosing imaginative and inherently musical texts is
demonstrated in Antiphon, composed in 1956 to a George Herbert poem. The
antiphonal
effects whereby Angels reply to Men throughout the work culminate in a climax
where the two sides appear to move apart in ever more insistent discord before
weaving their way back to final concord.
The earliest choral work in this collection is A Hymn to the Virgin, which
Britten wrote in a matter of hours at the age of seventeen from his sick bed,
during his final term at school. It sets a semi-chorus (or solo quartet)
interposing Latin texts against a fourteenth-century English poem. This
macaronic device is re-used to touching effect in the final section of the Hymn
to St Peter of 1955. Here a treble solo sings the text 'Tu es Petrus, et
super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam' against a quietly insistent,
translating chorus of 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my
Church...'. Britten's life-long affection for his own Peter Pears - so much the
secure rock of his own emotional life - seems to lend this passage its own
heart-felt, deep resonance.
The Festival Te Deum was composed for a church in Swindon in 1944
at a time when Britten was more fully occupied with scoring and
orchestrating his most ambitious project to date, the opera Peter Grimes. Always
keen to seek simplicity in his music, he kept the first half of the piece in
unison. As with the above-mentioned Te Deum, Britten explores the
final, pleadingly personal lines ('Let me never be confounded') by way of a
stark treble solo against a chorus.
The composition of the Missa Brevis in D was inspired by George
Malcolm's work as choirmaster at London's Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral.
The sound world he developed with the boys there had a fresh, natural and
slightly harder-edged vocal timbre, quite distinct from the smooth blend
typically sought at many Anglican cathedral choirs. Britten loved it. 'The
whole choir sang with a brilliance and authority which was staggering,' he
wrote to Malcolm after hearing them in early 1959. Penned within a few weeks in
early 1959, the Missa Brevis is a delightful work for three-part boys'
voices. Its themes show a typically playful iconoclasm (for instance, the Agnus
Dei has an inescapable whiff of the cod horror movie about it), its
harmonies are joyously rich and exotic, while the rhythms pose a delicious
challenge for musically-adept choristers, with seven-in-a-bar syncopations in
the Gloria.
Just as the Festival Te Deum was written even while work
progressed on Peter Grimes, so the Hymn of St Columba of 1962
emerged during the creation of Britten's towering choral masterpiece War
Requiem. Unsurprising, then, that there are more than a few parallels in
word and musical themes between this short work, using judgement day texts by
the sixth-century saint, and the opening pages of the great Dies irae in
War Requiem.
Britten habitually paid homage to other composers by writing variations
on their themes, his Frank Bridge Variations being just one example. It
says much about his field of reference that he turned to the great
sixteenth-century Spanish composer in his Prelude and Fugue on a theme of
Vittoria, at a time when early music rarely ventured pre-Bach.
Surprisingly, this 1946 work was Britten's only solo organ composition.
The Hymn to St Cecilia was begun during Britten's stay in the
United States in the early 1940s and completed during his return on the ship Axel
Johnson in 1942. US customs officials confiscated his half-completed score
of the work just before his departure from America. Spurred on by this
unexpected loss, Britten re-wrote the first section entirely from memory and
used the opportunity of escaping from the drab company on board to complete the
rest.
The words are a setting in three parts by the poet W.H. Auden (who
regarded Britten as his protege), with each part rounded off by an exaltation
to St Cecilia. Auden deliberately conflates his subject - the patron saint of
music - with composers and music in general, as well as with Britten himself,
whose birthday fell on St Cecilia's Day.
In the second section, Auden offers music its own self portrait: 'I
cannot grow, I have no shadow to run away from, I only play' - music is naďve,
incapable of moral growth, simply playing, wanting to be loved. In the third
section Auden widens his field of reference to the innocence of composers as a
species, including Britten himself: 'O dear white children,' he writes 'Playing
among the ruined languages,' alluding to the ongoing wartime degeneracy of
once-great civilisations, and composers' capacity to deploy the musical
building-blocks of those civilisations without political engagement - something
alien to him as a writer and artist. Britten's scintillating setting leaves
little doubt he understood and endorsed Auden's view of music and musicians,
coming to terms with his own pacifism and lack of direct political engagement.
Each section has its own unusual thematic and harmonic developments, and
the work sparkles with typical ingenuity, setting technical hurdles for choral
singers.
Moreover, the quietly passionate unison choruses of 'Blessed Cecilia...'
between each section create a strong unifying effect allowing the work to
function at a simple, hymnic level.
As music, it also functions as a hymn or pćan
to the art's
patron saint: it speaks warmly to musicians who have always delighted in its
themes, revelled in its harmonies and relished its technical challenges without
perhaps grasping the subtleties of Auden' s texts. Perhaps there is a deep
irony in this, or perhaps it is the work's deepest truth. Music is music, pure
and simple - in itself it is deeply hard to politicize. Therein lies its joy
and its universality.
Barry Holden
Rejoice in the Lamb,
Op. 30
Festival Cantata for
treble, alto, tenor and bass soloists, choir and organ Text from Jubilate
Agno) by Christopher Smart