Archive item of the month – November 2020

Benjamin Britten (Lowestoft 22 November, 1913 – Aldeburgh 4 December, 1976): composer, conductor and pianist. 

Thanksgiving for music and musicians is traditionally held on the church’s feast day of St Cecilia (22 November), the patron saint of music. The earliest known British celebration of an overtly musical occasion or Cecilian festival was held in 1683 by the “Musical Society”. The Musical Society held services at St Bride’s church in Fleet Street, during which an anthem with orchestral accompaniment and a sermon in praise of music was performed; when these occasions moved to Stationers’ Hall, an ode was especially composed for the occasions with texts by celebrated poets such as John Dryden, William Congreve and Alexander Pope. These festivals took place in several of the provincial cathedral towns, and in Edinburgh the concert hall was to be named after St Cecilia. 

In 1739, George Frideric Handel composed the music to Dryden’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day (‘From harmony, from heav’nly harmony’, HWV76) which was first performed on the feast of St Cecilia in the Theatre Royal. Earlier that year, on Tuesday 20 March, Handel had provided the music for the Society of Musicians’ first concert, given at the King’s Theatre, which included Alexander’s Feast or the Power of Musick, Ode in honour of St Cecilia (HWV75), a setting of John Dryden’s other Cecilian ode. 

One of Britain’s important composers of the twentieth century, Benjamin Britten, was born on St Cecilia’s day. The RSM’s archive holds a programme for an early performance given at St Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, 3 February 1955, as part of the Norwich Philharmonic Society’s season of concerts in which the principal performers of the Serenade were Peter Pears (1910-1986) and Dennis Brain (1921-1957) for whom the work was composed. The composer, according to a pencilled note on this programme, was the conductor for this performance and he, Pears and Brain have all signed the programme. 

The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op.31, composed in 1943, was one of the first works written for Peter Pears. Britten, who was often inspired by specific performers, wrote the horn solo for the young virtuoso Dennis Brain. Pears and Brain gave the first performance on 15 October 1943 at Wigmore Hall with Walther Goehr (1903-1960) conducting. To exploit Brain’s particular gifts, Britten wrote a Prologue and an Epilogue for horn solo to be played on the natural harmonics of the instrument which produce unconventional intonation on some of the notes – sharper intervals at the fourth and sixth. These two horn solos were probably composed last as they do not appear in the composer’s autograph draft. 

Britten’s exquisite writing for the voice and expressive mood-depiction can be heard especially in the gliding line of the ‘Pastoral’ where the tenor has short imitations of the horn, the semitone slide in the ‘Elegy’ and the octave swoop in the ‘Dirge’ at the end of each statement of the ostinato. 

Bronze bust by Samuel Tonkiss (1909-1992), 1981; donated to the RSM by John Turner in 2015.