Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31, is a song cycle written in 1943 by Benjamin Britten for tenor, solo horn and a string orchestra. Composed during the Second World War at the request of the horn player Dennis Brain, it is a setting of a selection of six poems by English poets on the subject of night, including both its calm and its sinister aspects. The poets Britten chose to set for the Serenade range from an anonymous 15th-century writer to poets from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Britten's domestic partner – the tenor Peter Pears – and Brain were the soloists at the first performance. They later recorded the work, which has received subsequent recordings by tenors, horn players, orchestras and conductors from Britain, continental Europe, America and Australia. Background and first performanceBritten and his partner, Peter Pears, returned to Britain in April 1942 after three years in the United States.[1] A few weeks later Britten was commissioned by the BBC to write incidental music for a documentary series on life in England to be broadcast to the US. The score was played by the RAF Orchestra, in which Dennis Brain was first horn. Britten was struck by Brain's skill and needed little persuasion to write a concert piece for him.[2] Brain may have been expecting a concerto,[3] but instead Britten chose to compose a song-cycle with the horn and the singer as equal partners. Early in 1943 he caught measles so severely that he was in hospital for several weeks, and then convalesced at his country house in Suffolk.[4] There, while also working on his opera Peter Grimes, he composed most of the Serenade. In April 1943 he wrote to a friend, "I've practically completed a new work (6 Nocturnes) for Peter and a lovely young horn player Dennis Brain, & Strings ... It is not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think".[5] The Serenade contains Britten's first settings of English poems since On This Island in 1937.[6] In selecting them Britten had advice from Edward Sackville-West, to whom he dedicated the work. Sackville-West wrote of the Serenade: The subject is Night and its prestigia [conjuring tricks]: the lengthening shadow, the distant bugle at sunset, the Baroque panoply of the starry sky, the heavy angels of sleep; but also the cloak of evil—the worm in the heart of the rose, the sense of sin in the heart of man. The whole sequence forms an Elegy or Nocturnal (as Donne would have called it), resuming the thoughts and images suitable to evening.[7]
Britten acknowledged the help Brain had given him with the horn part: His help was invaluable in writing the work; but he was always most cautious in advising any alterations. Passages which seemed impossible even for his prodigious gifts were practised over and over again before any modifications were suggested, such was his respect for a composer's ideas.[2]
The first performance was given at the Wigmore Hall in London on 15 October 1943 with Pears and Brain as soloists, and Walter Goehr conducting his eponymous string orchestra.[8] It was well received: The Times called it "one of the most remarkable, and on any estimation most successful, of modern English compositions. … Britten's imagination seems to be most readily kindled by words, which strike an equivalent musical image out of him with the utmost spontaneity".[9] The Musical Times thought it a "very likeable and uncommon piece", but was inclined to Britten's own view of the importance of the work, and thought the solo horn prologue and epilogue "unnecessary".[10] Britten was pleased by the reception of the piece: he wrote to an American friend, "We had a lovely show, with wonderful enthusiasm and lovely notices".[3] ContentThe settings are framed by a horn prologue and epilogue; Britten had employed a framing device in his 1942 A Ceremony of Carols, and did so again in the prologue and epilogue to Billy Budd.[6] In the Serenade both prologue and epilogue are performed by the horn alone, and in these movements Britten instructs the player to use only the horn's natural harmonics; this lends these short movements a distinctive character, as some harmonics sound sharp or flat to an audience accustomed to the western chromatic scale. The epilogue is to sound from afar, and to this end the final song does not include a part for the horn to allow the player to move off-stage.[11] MovementsThe Serenade has eight movements:
LyricsThe words or lyrics to each movement are: 1. Prologue
2. Pastoral The day's grown old; the fainting sun
3. Nocturne The splendour falls on castle walls
4. Elegy O Rose, thou art sick;
5. Dirge This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
6. Hymn Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
7. Sonnet O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
8. Epilogue
RecordingsIn 2020 Gramophone published a survey of recordings of the Serenade. These are the recordings mentioned:[3] A 2022 recording featured Andrew Staples (tenor), Christopher Parkes (horn) and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Harding.[12] References and sourcesReferences
SourcesBooks
Web
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