Benjamin Britten's Sacred and Profane, a work for vocal quintet or five-part chorus, is one of the famed British composer's last completed works. A collection of eight short settings of medieval English poems, the cycle conveys Britten's style at its most refined: while never straying too far from familiar tonal realms, the harmonies likewise seldom remain committed to a single harmonic trajectory for long; conventional progressions are rendered opaque by coy chromatic turns or strident dissonances. In this regard, Britten's music complements his chosen texts perfectly, in that the antiquated English of the texts, all dating from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, remains just on the other side of decipherable, but with certain words and grammatical contours bearing enough resemblance to modern English to convey the poignant imagery and character of the poetry. The opening song, "St. Godric's Hymn," balances vivid mood painting—ascending chords arching heavenward, downward, penitent glissandi—with a certain austerity and reverence of delivery created by the lucid voice-leading and subtle modal inflections. This song finds stark contrast in the nimble and mysterious woodland scene, "I mone waxe wood" (I must go mad), the shortest song in the cycle and the most harmonically ambiguous. While this song expresses an uneasiness with nature, the third poem, "Lenten is come," exults in the arrival of spring with syncopated declamation and playful imitative lines. The fourth song, "The long night," begins with a gesture borrowed directly from the third, but quickly alters the mood by turning toward darker harmonies, a change reflecting the passing of summer and the onset of a dreary winter. The subsequent song "Yif of luve can" (If I know of love), transfers this somber mood to the sacred realm in its stirring reflection on the Passion at the cross; the sopranos are the voice of devotion here, with crystalline lines hovering spirit-like above the rest of the ensemble. The strophic, folksy, homophonic "Carol" is followed by another Passion poem, "Ye that pasen by," the latter characterized by sparse but elegant elaborations on stepwise descending and ascending lines. The final song, "A death," is the longest and the most varied in character. Each of its lines describes, in sometimes grotesque physiological detail, the last moments of mortality. Britten conveys each of these images with his characteristically clever pictorial panache.

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