Exactly where Britten may have intended to place the other two discarded songs is unknown, but since he was toying with the idea of composing up to fourteen different Rimbaud settings, and eventually retained only ten, there were presumably several possible sequences in his mind. Britten later redeployed the title “Phrase” to a markedly different song in the established cycle. This is particularly the case in the first re-discovered song, “Phrase,” a virtuosic recitative that explores the same tonal territory as the opening “Fanfare” in the definitive cycle, and which was originally intended to segue into the effervescent number “Marine” in the published set (a link that would have worked well). Finally, and seductive by their very rarity, a few reasonably self-contained fragments from mature compositions that Britten never completed have also been released, and here in particular the technical skills of Matthews-and his innate understanding of Britten’s style and compositional mentality, which dates back to the period during which he was the ailing composer’s assistant (1975–76)-have been indispensable assets when a little fresh composing or rearranging of material has had to be carried out in order to round off the torsos to make them suitable for a satisfying performance.Īs with the songs rejected from other song cycles, the Three Songs for Les Illuminations immediately take us into the distinctive sound world of the relevant cycle, in this case the settings of Rimbaud that Britten composed for Sophie Wyss in 1939. The second, and largest, category is the huge body of juvenilia composed by Britten when he was a precociously gifted schoolboy, which is inevitably of variable quality, though the best of it is truly astonishing in its technical assurance.
Self-evidently, then, Britten sometimes consigned pieces to his bottom drawer not because they were substandard, but simply because he had too many of them for his specific needs. Just how brilliant some of this discarded music could be was first demonstrated in 1983 by the performance of two songs jettisoned from Winter Words (1953), and even more spectacularly in 1987 by the discovery of the haunting Tennyson setting “Now sleeps the crimson petal,” which had been composed for inclusion in the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943). Arguably the most important category, and one in which indisputably impressive compositional standards are virtually assured, is the small but fascinating body of mature songs that Britten wrote for his well-known song cycles, but chose not to include in their definitive formats. Whatever one’s personal view, Britten enthusiasts owe an enormous and ongoing debt of gratitude to Colin Matthews, chair of The Britten Estate, who has for several decades overseen the preparation and publication of projects of this kind in a skillful and sensitive way.īritten’s posthumous publications fall into three broad categories, each well represented by the batch of five new scores reviewed here (all of which appeared in the run-up to, and during, the composer’s centenary year in 2013).
Nevertheless, the level-headed can always find consolation in the equally important realization that he himself, unlike some other prodigiously prolific writers, well knew which of his pieces warranted a place in his official canon, and which didn’t.
While all such publications, no matter how slight, will inevitably be of considerable interest to scholars and die-hard Britten enthusiasts-and it might be argued that this alone is a compelling reason for their public dissemination-it is rather less certain whether every morsel of this rediscovered music deserves a strong foothold in the concert hall and, at times, some listeners have feared that the composer’s reputation might become a shade tarnished by the realization that he did not always attain his customary level of genius. Since Britten’s death in 1976, and in particular since the opening to researchers a few years later of the extraordinarily comprehensive archival collections of the Britten–Pears Library at his home in the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh, keen interest has constantly been aroused by the steady stream of posthumous publications of unknown works which, for various reasons, he had kept firmly under wraps.
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