In the mid-'30s, shortly after the deaths of both his mother and his father in the same short span of time, Benjamin Britten joined the circle of artists clustered around the brilliant poet W.H. Auden. Generally disillusioned with British life, aesthetic tastes, and conventional morality, this group adopted a cynical outlook and a fashionable affinity for left-wing politics. These personal matters are relevant to a discussion of this music because this song cycle (the first of many brilliant collections in Britten's oeuvre) is one of the first Britten works on which they had a direct impact. The five poems of the cycle were written by Auden and are typically complex, with obscure allusions and obvious delight in virtuosity in handling the words. Britten gave them unusually stark settings.

Among them is a song called "Nocturne," probably the first of Britten's evocations of dreaming in a slow-breathed sleep, an image that haunts his music thereafter. The opening "Let the florid music praise" contains figures suggesting trumpet calls, but a subversive and sensual little waltz-figure is also present, a hint at the side of their lives that Auden, Britten, and their friends had to keep hidden—homosexuality was then punishable as a crime in the U.K. The final song is a jazzy number making clear Britten and Auden's disdain for contemporary societal values. The work is highly regarded as Britten's first song cycle and is full of impressive compositional touches, but the disillusionment at its core has denied it the success of the later cycles. Soprano Sophie Wyss gave its first performance, with Britten himself at the piano, on November 19, 1937, a couple of days before the composer's 24th birthday.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.