The 1950s came as a time of mixed press and reexamination for Benjamin Britten. Following the unreserved success of his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) and several operas, beginning with the rapturously received Peter Grimes (1945), the ensuing decade brought some muted reactions (Billy Budd) and questioning, if not entirely negative, reviews for Gloriana, presented during the Coronation Year of 1953. With Turn of the Screw, however, Britten was considered to have gotten himself back on track. Later consideration brought revised opinions on both Billy Budd and Gloriana, especially the former.

After traveling to Bali, then composing the gamelan music influenced The Prince of the Pagodas and Noye's Fludde, Britten turned to a work not dissimilar to his Serenade, but fixed upon that imaginative realm partway between waking and dreaming. Some writers have sought to describe this work as a study for the opera, A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was introduced to the public two years later. Surely there is more cause to describe it thus than there is to suggest that the Serenade was a precursor to Peter Grimes. Both the Nocturne and Midsummer Night's Dream impart a dream-like, phantasmagoric aura.

As always, Britten was knowing in his choice of texts. Beginning with Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and including Tennyson's The Kraken, lines were drawn from Coleridge's The Wanderings of Cain; Thomas Middleton's Blurt, Master Constable; lines from Wordsworth's Prelude; The Kind Ghosts by Wilfred Owen (the great war poet to whom Britten returned for his moving War Requiem); Sleep and Poetry by Keats; and, finally, Sonnet 43 by Shakespeare.

Throughout the work, there is a defining tension between D flat and C major which conjures in tonality the floating reverie that parallels the poetry and keeps the music above mundane sensibilities. Both in the presence of seven various obbligato instruments and in the tonal language, Nocturne, despite certain surface similarities with Serenade, occupies rather different territory. The scoring, too, is more diaphanous, calling to mind Gustav Mahler to whose widow, Alma, the work is dedicated.

The premiere took place in Leeds, England, on October 16, 1958, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and featuring Britten's tenor of choice, Peter Pears. Although not as widely performed as Britten's Serenade, the Nocturne represents the composer at his sensitive best, unerringly supporting beautifully wrought words with music at one and the same time firmly rooted and elevated beyond earthly things.

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