Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings

1. 0:00
   Introduction before the voice

   The Elegy opens with a long introduction for strings and horn. Richard Cooke hears the string accompaniment as the worm of the poem moving underground, and notes a weighty double-bass pizzicato throughout the movement.

2. 1:22
   Sustained top C, then B

   The horn rises to a sustained top C and slips a semitone to B. Cooke places this exposed entry in the fifteenth slow bar. Colin Clarke counts two sustained high Cs in the movement, each resolving to a held B natural; the second comes near the end.

3. 1:42
   Tenor enters with Blake’s poem

   The tenor enters after a quiet moment and declaims Blake’s eight lines as a recitative, against shifting chords in the strings. They run from “O Rose, thou art sick” to “Does thy life destroy”.

4. 2:20
   Sackville-⁠West on the Serenade

   Edward Sackville-⁠West, who advised Britten on the poems and received the dedication, wrote that the cycle’s subject was night, including “the worm in the heart of the rose, the sense of sin in the heart of man”.

5. 2:30
   Orchestral conclusion

   After the tenor’s last line the strings and horn play an extended conclusion. Cooke hears in it the same worm music as in the introduction.

6. 3:50
   Second top C, again resolving to B

   Near the end the horn reaches a second sustained top C and again falls a semitone to a held B, the pair of notes it sounded in the introduction.

1. 0:00
   Tenor alone, first stanza

   The Dirge opens with the tenor unaccompanied. His part carries a single marking, come un lamento, and singers have followed Pears in keeping to a steady mezza voce. The anonymous fifteenth-century text has nine stanzas, each ending “And Christe receive thy saule”.

2. 0:31
   Strings enter beneath the voice

   The strings join from the second stanza, under the same six-bar tune in the tenor. Christopher Palmer wrote of “a fugally impelled funeral procession” in the orchestra, with a voice “impassively independent” of it.

3. 1:12
   First performance, Wigmore Hall, 1943

   Pears and Brain gave the first performance of the Serenade at the Wigmore Hall on 15 October 1943, with a string orchestra conducted by Walter Goehr. This Decca recording was made in 1944, with Britten conducting the Boyd Neel String Orchestra.

4. 1:46
   Britten on Dennis Brain

   Britten met Brain in 1942, when Brain was first horn in the RAF Orchestra and Britten was writing radio scores for it. After Brain’s death in 1957 Britten wrote that “His help was invaluable in writing the work”.

5. 2:20
   Horn enters at “From Brig o’ Dread”

   The horn enters in the sixth stanza, at “From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass”, with the music the cellos and basses had at their own first entry. Palmer wrote that the procession comes “close enough to strike mortal terror”, with “horn hysteria”, and then “makes off”.

6. 3:44
   Ninth stanza, repeat of the first

   The ninth stanza repeats the first: “This ae nighte, this ae nighte, / Every nighte and alle”. The tenor ends alone, as he began. Palmer wrote that the procession leaves the last word to “the disembodied wail and whine of the singer”.

Joins

1. 2:20
   Horn takes up the cellos’ music

   The tenor repeats one six-bar tune through every stanza. Over stanzas two to five the strings accompany it and the volume rises. At “From Brig o’ Dread” the horn enters with the music the cellos and basses played at their first entry. After this stanza the music subsides.