The early '40s were a difficult time for Benjamin Britten, whose pacifist ideals led to an uneasy relationship with a British public fired with passion and fighting spirit in the face of World War II. Partly to provide comfort for his fellow Britons and partly to salve his own troubled conscience, Britten produced a variety of striking religious choral works that take a place among his best-known and most beloved music. Surely no choral society or harpist is unfamiliar with the Ceremony of Carols (1942), and Rejoice in the Lamb (1943) is similarly a staple of the modern choral repertoire.

While perhaps less familiar than those works, the Hymn to St. Cecilia, Op. 27 (1942), is an imaginative, important example of Britten's singular gift for melding words and music. In relation to Britten's career, the work provides a distinctive bridge between the accomplishments of a young if immensely talented prentice and those of the more sophisticated composer who was to soon burst onto the international scene with the opera Peter Grimes (1944-1945).

Britten had focused almost exclusively on instrumental music during the 1930s, and it comes as no surprise that his earliest choral works, such as Te Deum (1936) and Ballad of Heroes (1939), are filled with vocal imitation of instrumental effects. In Hymn to St. Cecilia, however, Britten begins to incorporate superficial gestures of this sort into a more truly choral style in which the vocal forces are frequently deployed in rich parallel triads.

The text of the Hymn consists of three poems of W.H. Auden, each followed by a four-line invocation to Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Britten's setting is not really a hymn in the traditional sense of the word, but rather a three-movement structure, like a cantata in miniature, that sets the sonorous triads of the first poem against the rapid-fire vocal scherzo of the second and the ground-bass design of the third. The somber cycling of the last poem is interrupted in the middle to make way for a soaring solo for boy soprano. The invocation is set in delicate unisons and octaves after the first poem, blossoming into a fuller texture at the end of the scherzo movement. Beyond this use of a text refrain, Britten achieves further formal unity by fitting to the final statement of the invocation to "Blessed Cecilia" the music that opened the Hymn.

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