Benjamin BRITTEN (1913-1976): Serenade (1943)
Prologue – Pastoral – Nocturne – Elegy – Dirge – Hymn – Sonnet – Epilogue
The year after Britten's return to wartime England from America in early 1942 was a troubled time for the composer - he had written nothing more than background music for the BBC, and suffered bouts of ill health which sent him into hospital and depression. Trapped within his own thoughts, serious doubts blossomed about whether to pursue Peter Grimes, alongside the ongoing self-torment over his relationship with Peter Pears.
Pears was at the time reinforcing his remarkable reputation at Sadler’s Wells Opera (today the English National Opera). Audiences were beguiled by the strangely non-operatic, un-Italianate quality of his voice; it lacked the polished Technicolor they were used to from great singers, but it was agreed that vocal sincerity and personality of phrasing were better expressed because of that understated charm.
The twenty-two-year-old principal horn of the RAF Orchestra, Dennis Brain, is the third musical personality present in the Serenade. Britten had greatly admired Brain’s playing since hearing the orchestra broadcast Britten’s incidental music to a radio series the previous year, and he questioned Brain at length about the instrument’s technical capabilities.
It was for these two unique voices which Britten wrote his Serenade within a fortnight of being discharged from hospital, breaking his creative silence. “It is not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think”, Britten wrote in March 1943.
The subject is ‘night the conjurer’, from its brilliant starry sky to its “cloak of evil... the sense of sin in the heart of man”, as Britten himself wrote. The Prologue opens just as the sun is going down, with unaccompanied horn playing entirely on natural harmonics, without use of the three valves, whereby different notes are achieved by varying the pressure of the mouth-shape (embouchure) against the mouthpiece. The resulting 'out-of-tune' sound most closely resembles the natural sound of a hunting horn, a melancholic signifier of a lost, bygone era. Mahler, Britten’s Austrian soulmate, had a word for it: Naturlaut – the sound of nature. It sets the scene for a raw and haunted world with its incipient unease, casting over the work a mood of innocence lost.
The Pastoral which follows is the continuation of this thought: the tenor and horn both sigh their elegiac melodies, characterised by a drooping phrase falling over a whole octave... perhaps a musical depiction of a lengthening shadow as night draws in.
The Nocturne – based on major thirds – brings the final flashes of the sun and a childlike magic: literal impersonations of “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing” in the purple glens of late evening, as the voice trips out an agile line over shimmering accompaniment.
The ‘sense of sin' is introduced in the Elegy as night takes hold, and the first real breath of disturbance is felt in this nocturnal idyll. The ‘dragging’ chords in the strings are based exclusively on the natural harmonic series, but the horn introduces a new chromaticism after the two strictly-diatonic opening songs; roaming mordantly in only a few bars around all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, as though tonality itself were under threat. Innocence is stained in this chilling depiction of the worm in the bud. The voice is no longer lyrical, but sings instead in a tense recitative, and in fact has very little to sing at all; the horn is the real protagonist here. At the end, the hand is required to ‘stop’ the second of each mournful pair of notes, creating a biting rasp and an eerie glissando.
There’s more spooking to come as the night’s darkness deepens. Next comes the Dirge, described by Britten scholar and composer David Matthews as “one of the most terrifying songs ever written” – this cycle’s Dies Irae. More spectres of Mahler here; this time of the death-marches found in each of his symphonies. The voice sings (at the very top of his range) the same melody repeatedly, alone at first, then almost-independently of the strings’ edgy, fugal accompaniment, which Britten spins into a crescendo of terror. The monstrous procession passes, and the voice remains alone again in the final bar. No song in the cycle is more quintessentially conceived for Pears’s particular voice; and as the voice describes what awaits the soul after death (“The fire will burn thee to the bare bane”), no song more uncomfortably reminds us of Britten’s attitude to his homosexuality: ‘the sin he felt he’d committed’, as his friend Ronald Duncan described it.
There is now startling change of mood, as if in an attempt to banish the fear of hell-fire. Ben Johnson’s hunting Hymn to the moon goddess Diana produces florid, baroque-style vocal writing from Britten, but although the panoply of the starry sky is exuberantly evoked, the gaiety seems rather forced. The technical demands placed on both soloists are great, played out above an entirely-pizzicato accompaniment in the strings.
In the Sonnet, sustained strings lull the restless spirit, but chromatic juxtaposition of major triads produce a mood that is simultaneously soothing and disturbed. It is unclear whether the tenor’s final pleas will be answered. The horn is silent now – as if it might tip the balance of the uneasy calm – and won’t be heard again until its offstage epilogue. By reiterating its natural harmonics so far away, that untarnished nature now seems inaccessible, and a distant memory of lost innocence.
The Serenade is one of the most nearly-perfect song cycles in existence: its beauties are immediately apparent, yet familiarity deepens them. While the poetry is great in its own right, the poems do not overshadow the music. The songs are widely contrasted but beautifully balanced and the links are unforced. Despite Britten’s self-assessment, the Serenade is indeed very “important stuff” – a groundbreaking cycle of British verse, embodying so many of Britten’s key characteristics in a single work: his response to text, his extraordinary understanding of the range and colour of instruments, and his love of one unique voice.
