This seven-minute piece is Britten's only known composition for brass band (barring any future release of another such piece by the Britten Estate form the treasures found in the composer's unpublished archives). It is a product of his interest in left-wing politics in the 1930s; like many another young intellectuals of the time, living through economic depression and noting the rise of Fascism in Western Europe, he was attracted to an idealized vision of the Soviet Union. The work derives from incidental music to a play called The Eagle has Two Heads and was put into its present form for a concert of the London Labour Choral Union on March 8, 1936. It was written in fewer than ten days.

Its intellectual sources are Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and also a reaction to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which ended the promise of a peace to be guaranteed by the League of Nations. It is in a broad ABA form. The opening and closing funeral march is based on a Russian song used at the funeral of the victims of the attack on petitioners at the Tsar's Winter Palace in January, 1905, the first of the revolutionary actions leading to the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar and subesquent Bolshevik coup. The same funeral song was quoted in Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony twenty years later. The central section is a brutal "dance of death."

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide