Serenade

Suffolk-born composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) produced an amazing amount of music as a youth, roughly 800 pieces prior to his published opus 1! Talent was clear from the beginning and brought him into contact with influential teachers and performers from a young age. He had already mastered the viola and begun writing numerous chamber works for all combinations.
Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings was created upon a commission from noted British horn player Dennis Brain. Brain was the son and grandson of professional horn players, and he was one of the few reasonably famous orchestral musicians of his generation. He made several acclaimed recordings, including a revival of the four concertos by Mozart, before his tragic death in a car accident at age 36. Britten was equally inspired by the vocal gifts of tenor Peter Pears, his romantic partner from 1937 until his death. The Serenade emerged at a dark period during the Second World War, and all of the texts treat the theme of night. Already the principal horn with London’s National Symphony Orchestra, Brain was just 22 years old when he requested a work from Britten. The composer, for his part, had just returned from America where he and Pears—both active pacifists—had resided during the early part of the war. Inspired by a new exposure to British poetry, both men decided to return to England despite the perils of a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1942. Taken ill upon landing, Britten used his months of forced bedrest to work at his opera Peter Grimes and to compose the entirety of this Serenade.
The Serenade is cast in eight movements, with six poems framed by a prologue/epilogue for solo horn. That solo uses both expected and unexpected leaps to strike an invocational tone filled with the aural reminders of medieval gallantry and romantic distance. Fifth intervals predominate in an autumnal sounding F major. Touches of unsettling E flats are thrown in to give a darker, possibly modal or “natural” quality. In fact, this movement—both here and again at the end—is played using entirely natural harmonics on the horn. Natural harmonics describe the set of pitches most readily available to the horn without engaging the valves. It offers a method of playing a modern valved horn as if it were a traditional valveless instrument. Without valves, pitch is controlled by the position of the lips, amount and speed of breath, and the hand being placed in the bell. The natural harmonic series for a horn in F includes the keynotes in F major plus E flat, B natural, then D flat. Perhaps the most aberrant sounding note is the D natural which does not naturally occur in the harmonic series. Thus it is not attainable on the valveless horn without further manipulation—and it may sound “unnatural” in pitch color, surely Britten’s intent.
The ensuing Pastoral strikingly opens in a muted D-flat major, with the common tone F providing a tonal connection. Britten regards Cotton’s text in a measured way. Nocturne takes aural references in the text as an inspiration, including echo effects and the “blowing horns” refrain. The Elegy is based on a chromatic horn part with insistent pleading inner strings. Britten is able to build considerable tension here. The voice unfolds initially as a recitative in E minor, but it moves quickly through G major and C major. The text is incredibly short, framed by instrumental material. An eerie series of harmonically nuanced half steps function as the horn’s final contribution to the movement, as well as being the first vocal notes of the following Dirge.
Brilliantly structured, the Dirge proceeds from unaccompanied voice to voice plus restless low string march. No matter how agitated the strings become as Britten expands from the low strings into a full texture, the vocal material continues insistently with its mournful half-step figures. Finally the horn joins this macabre march at “From Brig.” The Hymn is neither stately nor sacred, but rather vital, vigorous, and even a touch humorous, particularly the glib ending. The ensuing Sonnet actually uses a more traditional hymn texture (homophonic chords) in the strings. Keats’s text is scored for voice and strings alone so that the horn player can slip off stage for its final epilogue. Britten settles at last on high chords with solo pedal tones and harmonics.

(c) Jason Stell