BRITTEN AND DOWLAND
At a time when some composers were trying to sever links with the past, Benjamin Britten was keen to stress his connection to a centuries-old European cultural tradition. In a 1969 interview with Donald Mitchell, he remarked: "I can only work really because of the tradition that I am conscious of behind me."(1) Having previously discussed his newish guitar piece, Nocturnal After John Dowland, Britten went on to mention the Tudor composer once more, saying: “I feel as close to him as I do to my youngest contemporary.”(2) That Britten should feel a special kinship with Dowland is interesting. Despite being the successful composer of many splendid lute songs and solos, Dowland “cultivated a melancholy public persona”(3), and, in the prefaces to his songbooks, often expressed a feeling of isolation from the wider Elizabethan world, casting himself as a lone voice of sanity, pointing out the failures of perceived rivals, and of society in general. This filtered through to his famously downbeat songs, which are filled with grief, tears and death. One of these, Come, Heavy Sleep, forms the basis of Nocturnal.
(This track comes from an excellent selection of Dowland songs on the Hyperion label. The disc also includes Craig Ogden's fine account of Nocturnal)
Full text here.
Britten may well have seen something of himself in Dowland (or at least in Dowland's artistic persona). He too struggled with isolation and self-doubt, and was not above a little professional jealousy. His relationship with the musical establishment was complex, often made more difficult by widespread homophobia (this, of course, was a time when he could not express the true nature of his feelings for his partner Peter Pears). In his music, Britten was frequently drawn to Dowlandesque subject matter; as time went on, he made a habit of exploring the darker side of night, sleep and dreams, another speciality of his Tudor predecessor. In the interview mentioned above, he had this to say about Nocturnal: “And of course the Nocturnal which I wrote for Julian Bream also has some very, to me, disturbing images in it, linked, of course, inspired by this - the Dowland song, which of course itself has very strange undertones in it. Dowland was a person who perhaps consciously realised the importance of dreams.”(4) Britten's comments seem to suggest an interest in dreams, both as a source of inspiration, and as a means of dealing with difficult experiences. It may well be that, in works like Nocturnal, Britten sought to work through some of these issues. Certainly, that's the view of Benjamin Dwyer, who describes a "procedure of encapsulating and exorcising traumatic experiences through music."(5) In another excellent article on the piece, Stephen Goss sees a similar process at work - troubling images are "sublimated in pieces like Nocturnal but never spoken of afterwards."(6)
BRITTEN AND BREAM
Britten liked to compose with specific performers in mind. He was, he said, "hopelessly committed to the people I write for," adding, "I like to have their particular voices, fingers etc. in mind when I write for them."(7) The distinguished list of favoured performers included the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishneskaya, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kathleen Ferrier and Dennis Brain, as well as Peter Pears, for whom he composed more than anyone else. Guitarist Julian Bream joined this select circle in the early 50s. At the time, Britten was wrestling with his opera Gloriana, and was struggling to make room for his second job, as regular accompanist to Pears. The arrival of Bream gave him a much-needed break from the piano stool, and added a new dimension to Pears' recitals, particularly when it came to the performance of early English song. Bream played lute as well as guitar, and, along with Britten and Pears, did a great deal to revive this earlier music, Dowland included. Bream was also keen to expand the 20th century guitar repertoire, and, naturally, soon began to press Britten to make a contribution. Britten's first guitar pieces were duets for Pears and Bream: between 1956 and 1958, he made arrangements of six folk tunes, and also produced the song cycle Songs From The Chinese. Nocturnal was written in 1963, and was premiered at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival. With the sound of the Pears/Bream tenor/lute duo in his ears, it was perhaps no surprise that, in writing his major piece for guitar, he turned to the music of John Dowland (he and Pears actually seem to have viewed Bream as a kind of modern-day Dowland - Pears once commented: “we had to wait 300 years for his successor.”)(8)
A NIGHT PERIOD?
In the late 50s/early 60s, Britten was especially engaged with nocturnal themes, producing a string of works exploring the darker side of night-time. The song cycle Nocturne arrived in 1958, while his operatic version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was first performed a couple of years later. In addition to Nocturnal, there are also a couple of delicious, lesser-known miniatures from around this time: the song Um Mitternacht (1959/60, but not performed until 1994), and a short piano Notturno (1963), composed as a test-piece for the inaugural Leeds piano competition.(9)
SERENADE (1943)
The popular Serenade for tenor, horn and strings was written twenty years before Nocturnal, but it feels like an important piece on the path to the "night period". Here is a first extended look at Britten's handling of nocturnal poetry, some of which anticipates the more troubled works of the "night period". For starters, there is Blake's The Sick Rose, a short, enigmatic study of sex, decay and death. Here, over a "bed" of pulsing string chords, Britten casts the horn as Blake's "invisible worm", burrowing into the texture. Britten also sets the Lyke-Wake Dirge, a 14th-century funeral chant, full of grim warnings of the hellish torture awaiting those who do not help their fellow man. Here, the claustrophobic musical setting matches the tight, repetitive structure of this terrifying vision. The tenor simply repeats the same plaintive phrase, while the accompaniment becomes steadily more involved, eventually breaking into a dark, hectoring fugue.(10)
In 1943, Britten was apparently immersed in Keats, whose sonnet To Sleep provides the text for the Serenade's final setting. In this poem, the protagonist yearns for an escape from the pressures of daily life, craving passage into a "calm nowhere, accepting that the pains of 'curious conscience' cannot be deferred indefinitely", as Andrew Motion puts it.(11) This brings us intriguingly close to the world of Come, Heavy Sleep, where, as was common at the time, sleep is used as a stand-in for death: "Come, heavy sleep, the image of true Death, And close up these my weary weeping eyes..." Keats' own plea for "heavy sleep" ends with this lovely couplet: "Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards, And seal the hushèd casket of my soul." Musically, this final moment of transcendence is a gift. After the song's relatively dissonant central section, describing the torments of earthly life, Britten "seals the hushèd casket" with a beautifully placed D major chord.
NOCTURNE (1958)
Britten knew that this later song cycle would never be as well-loved as the Serenade: "it won't be madly popular because it is the strangest and remotest thing - but then dreams are strange and remote."(12) Nocturne is undoubtedly a tougher nut to crack. Darker harmonically, it is also more difficult to pin down formally; where the Serenade can feel restrained and neatly packaged, here there is a wilder quality - the freer vocal lines make it harder to discern the shape of each song. As Britten suggests, the poetry tends towards the "strange and remote" - some of these dreams are better described as nightmares. In Tennyson's The Kraken, a sea monster rises from "below the thunders of the upper deep", while in The Prelude, Wordsworth evokes memories of massacres in the French Revolution. Keats returns in the later work, although, this time, pride of place goes to Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 43 closes the cycle. Each of the previous seven songs has featured a solo instrument, alongside a string orchestra. Here, they come together in an impassioned "finale", infused with the spirit of the later, death-obsessed Mahler.
Earlier in the cycle, Britten sets Coleridge's The Wanderings Of Cain. In this heartbreaking poem, a "lovely boy" is abandoned, with "no friend, no loving mother near." The Shakespeare sonnet is another study in absence and loss, in which the poet can only glimpse his beloved in dreams. As in the Keats sonnet (and Come, Heavy Sleep), night becomes a haven, an escape from daytime torments. Days are dark, and nights are brightened by dreams: "All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me." This final couplet again receives the special "revelation" treatment. After a brief pause, the tenor, unaccompanied at first, makes his way up to the top of his range, punctuated by fragile echoes of the gentle rocking figure that has come and gone throughout the cycle. As the poet gives in to "heavy sleep", we are left with an almost inaudible major chord, floating in the highest register.
A RETURN TO INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
The 50s and 60s were a lean period for non-vocal music by Britten; looking back through the work list, there is a big gap between the Six Metamorphoses After Ovid (for oboe, 1951), and the cello sonata (1961), composed for Mstislav Rostropovich.(13) Speaking in 1964, Britten identified the sonata as a key piece, admitting to a sense of unease when working without words: "Nowadays, I don't seem to lose in confidence in writing vocal music, but I think I was getting a bit nervous about instrumental music. Rostropovich freed one of my inhibitions."(14) Ronald Duncan, librettist of The Rape Of Lucretia, went further, suggesting that Britten "never had a purely musical thought unrelated to a verbal text context."(15) That said, if the cello sonata, with its distinctly nocturnal Elegia movement, certainly appears to be a piece of absolute music (as in, not "about" anything else), the guitar piece is an interesting hybrid. Judging by Britten's comments on the character of the piece, and the fact that the song text appears at the head of the score, we are surely meant to hear Nocturnal as a meditation on the music and the message. Those beautiful settings of Keats and Shakespeare are not so far away.
LACHRYMAE (1950) - VARIATIONS WITH A TWIST
Thirteen years before Nocturnal, Britten wrote Lachrymae for viola and piano, an earlier exploration of Dowland's music. In this piece, Britten employs an unusual version of a theme and variation form. In a standard theme and variations, an opening theme is used as the basis for subsequent musical adventures. Here, the process is reversed: the earlier variations are based on the theme, but the Dowland original is only fully heard at the end of the piece (another "revelation"). In Lachrymae, we travel towards a version of Dowland's If My Complaints Could Passions Move, although, where the variations are based on the first eight bars of the song, the piece ends with a statement of the second half. In variation six, Britten also makes space for a snatch of the melody of Flow My Tears (or Lachrimae Antiquae in the instrumental version), which was more or less Dowland's theme tune. Britten would go on to produce two further reverse variation cycles: Nocturnal, and the third suite for solo cello, which ends with a presentation of the four Russian themes on which it is based.
Britten may well have seen something of himself in Dowland (or at least in Dowland's artistic persona). He too struggled with isolation and self-doubt, and was not above a little professional jealousy. His relationship with the musical establishment was complex, often made more difficult by widespread homophobia (this, of course, was a time when he could not express the true nature of his feelings for his partner Peter Pears). In his music, Britten was frequently drawn to Dowlandesque subject matter; as time went on, he made a habit of exploring the darker side of night, sleep and dreams, another speciality of his Tudor predecessor. In the interview mentioned above, he had this to say about Nocturnal: “And of course the Nocturnal which I wrote for Julian Bream also has some very, to me, disturbing images in it, linked, of course, inspired by this - the Dowland song, which of course itself has very strange undertones in it. Dowland was a person who perhaps consciously realised the importance of dreams.”(4) Britten's comments seem to suggest an interest in dreams, both as a source of inspiration, and as a means of dealing with difficult experiences. It may well be that, in works like Nocturnal, Britten sought to work through some of these issues. Certainly, that's the view of Benjamin Dwyer, who describes a "procedure of encapsulating and exorcising traumatic experiences through music."(5) In another excellent article on the piece, Stephen Goss sees a similar process at work - troubling images are "sublimated in pieces like Nocturnal but never spoken of afterwards."(6)
BRITTEN AND BREAM
Britten liked to compose with specific performers in mind. He was, he said, "hopelessly committed to the people I write for," adding, "I like to have their particular voices, fingers etc. in mind when I write for them."(7) The distinguished list of favoured performers included the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishneskaya, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kathleen Ferrier and Dennis Brain, as well as Peter Pears, for whom he composed more than anyone else. Guitarist Julian Bream joined this select circle in the early 50s. At the time, Britten was wrestling with his opera Gloriana, and was struggling to make room for his second job, as regular accompanist to Pears. The arrival of Bream gave him a much-needed break from the piano stool, and added a new dimension to Pears' recitals, particularly when it came to the performance of early English song. Bream played lute as well as guitar, and, along with Britten and Pears, did a great deal to revive this earlier music, Dowland included. Bream was also keen to expand the 20th century guitar repertoire, and, naturally, soon began to press Britten to make a contribution. Britten's first guitar pieces were duets for Pears and Bream: between 1956 and 1958, he made arrangements of six folk tunes, and also produced the song cycle Songs From The Chinese. Nocturnal was written in 1963, and was premiered at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival. With the sound of the Pears/Bream tenor/lute duo in his ears, it was perhaps no surprise that, in writing his major piece for guitar, he turned to the music of John Dowland (he and Pears actually seem to have viewed Bream as a kind of modern-day Dowland - Pears once commented: “we had to wait 300 years for his successor.”)(8)
A NIGHT PERIOD?
In the late 50s/early 60s, Britten was especially engaged with nocturnal themes, producing a string of works exploring the darker side of night-time. The song cycle Nocturne arrived in 1958, while his operatic version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was first performed a couple of years later. In addition to Nocturnal, there are also a couple of delicious, lesser-known miniatures from around this time: the song Um Mitternacht (1959/60, but not performed until 1994), and a short piano Notturno (1963), composed as a test-piece for the inaugural Leeds piano competition.(9)
SERENADE (1943)
The popular Serenade for tenor, horn and strings was written twenty years before Nocturnal, but it feels like an important piece on the path to the "night period". Here is a first extended look at Britten's handling of nocturnal poetry, some of which anticipates the more troubled works of the "night period". For starters, there is Blake's The Sick Rose, a short, enigmatic study of sex, decay and death. Here, over a "bed" of pulsing string chords, Britten casts the horn as Blake's "invisible worm", burrowing into the texture. Britten also sets the Lyke-Wake Dirge, a 14th-century funeral chant, full of grim warnings of the hellish torture awaiting those who do not help their fellow man. Here, the claustrophobic musical setting matches the tight, repetitive structure of this terrifying vision. The tenor simply repeats the same plaintive phrase, while the accompaniment becomes steadily more involved, eventually breaking into a dark, hectoring fugue.(10)
In 1943, Britten was apparently immersed in Keats, whose sonnet To Sleep provides the text for the Serenade's final setting. In this poem, the protagonist yearns for an escape from the pressures of daily life, craving passage into a "calm nowhere, accepting that the pains of 'curious conscience' cannot be deferred indefinitely", as Andrew Motion puts it.(11) This brings us intriguingly close to the world of Come, Heavy Sleep, where, as was common at the time, sleep is used as a stand-in for death: "Come, heavy sleep, the image of true Death, And close up these my weary weeping eyes..." Keats' own plea for "heavy sleep" ends with this lovely couplet: "Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards, And seal the hushèd casket of my soul." Musically, this final moment of transcendence is a gift. After the song's relatively dissonant central section, describing the torments of earthly life, Britten "seals the hushèd casket" with a beautifully placed D major chord.
NOCTURNE (1958)
Britten knew that this later song cycle would never be as well-loved as the Serenade: "it won't be madly popular because it is the strangest and remotest thing - but then dreams are strange and remote."(12) Nocturne is undoubtedly a tougher nut to crack. Darker harmonically, it is also more difficult to pin down formally; where the Serenade can feel restrained and neatly packaged, here there is a wilder quality - the freer vocal lines make it harder to discern the shape of each song. As Britten suggests, the poetry tends towards the "strange and remote" - some of these dreams are better described as nightmares. In Tennyson's The Kraken, a sea monster rises from "below the thunders of the upper deep", while in The Prelude, Wordsworth evokes memories of massacres in the French Revolution. Keats returns in the later work, although, this time, pride of place goes to Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 43 closes the cycle. Each of the previous seven songs has featured a solo instrument, alongside a string orchestra. Here, they come together in an impassioned "finale", infused with the spirit of the later, death-obsessed Mahler.
Earlier in the cycle, Britten sets Coleridge's The Wanderings Of Cain. In this heartbreaking poem, a "lovely boy" is abandoned, with "no friend, no loving mother near." The Shakespeare sonnet is another study in absence and loss, in which the poet can only glimpse his beloved in dreams. As in the Keats sonnet (and Come, Heavy Sleep), night becomes a haven, an escape from daytime torments. Days are dark, and nights are brightened by dreams: "All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me." This final couplet again receives the special "revelation" treatment. After a brief pause, the tenor, unaccompanied at first, makes his way up to the top of his range, punctuated by fragile echoes of the gentle rocking figure that has come and gone throughout the cycle. As the poet gives in to "heavy sleep", we are left with an almost inaudible major chord, floating in the highest register.
A RETURN TO INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
The 50s and 60s were a lean period for non-vocal music by Britten; looking back through the work list, there is a big gap between the Six Metamorphoses After Ovid (for oboe, 1951), and the cello sonata (1961), composed for Mstislav Rostropovich.(13) Speaking in 1964, Britten identified the sonata as a key piece, admitting to a sense of unease when working without words: "Nowadays, I don't seem to lose in confidence in writing vocal music, but I think I was getting a bit nervous about instrumental music. Rostropovich freed one of my inhibitions."(14) Ronald Duncan, librettist of The Rape Of Lucretia, went further, suggesting that Britten "never had a purely musical thought unrelated to a verbal text context."(15) That said, if the cello sonata, with its distinctly nocturnal Elegia movement, certainly appears to be a piece of absolute music (as in, not "about" anything else), the guitar piece is an interesting hybrid. Judging by Britten's comments on the character of the piece, and the fact that the song text appears at the head of the score, we are surely meant to hear Nocturnal as a meditation on the music and the message. Those beautiful settings of Keats and Shakespeare are not so far away.
LACHRYMAE (1950) - VARIATIONS WITH A TWIST
Thirteen years before Nocturnal, Britten wrote Lachrymae for viola and piano, an earlier exploration of Dowland's music. In this piece, Britten employs an unusual version of a theme and variation form. In a standard theme and variations, an opening theme is used as the basis for subsequent musical adventures. Here, the process is reversed: the earlier variations are based on the theme, but the Dowland original is only fully heard at the end of the piece (another "revelation"). In Lachrymae, we travel towards a version of Dowland's If My Complaints Could Passions Move, although, where the variations are based on the first eight bars of the song, the piece ends with a statement of the second half. In variation six, Britten also makes space for a snatch of the melody of Flow My Tears (or Lachrimae Antiquae in the instrumental version), which was more or less Dowland's theme tune. Britten would go on to produce two further reverse variation cycles: Nocturnal, and the third suite for solo cello, which ends with a presentation of the four Russian themes on which it is based.
(Britten made this arrangement for viola and string orchestra in the final year of his life. He never heard it performed.)
Nocturnal consists of eight variations, leading to a final statement of the Dowland song.
(Bream's 1967 premiere recording of the piece - an essential listen. My favourite modern recording is Sean Shibe's, on the Delphian label. Shibe also includes some Dowland, including the fabulous Forlorn Hope Fancy.)
Variation 1 presents a series of florid, winding melodic ideas, organised into an unpredictable mixture of longer and shorter phrases. This gives the music an almost improvisatory quality, and tends to disguise just how closely this movement follows the Dowland original. Both Dwyer and Goss point out the similarity between the two melodies, which rise and fall in all the same places (Dwyer goes as far as to overlay the text on the Britten version). Viewed this way, Variation I becomes a kind of Brittenized version of the Dowland melody, "translated" into the later composer's musical language.(16)
While Britten's first movement proceeds in a fairly leisurely fashion, several of the subsequent variations zip by at great speed, resulting in a sometimes dizzying turnover of styles (the Dowland is only 14 bars of music, plus a repeat). Repeated listens reveal many subtle thematic links between the various sections, but this kaleidoscopic quality suggests a more restless (dreamlike?) logic is also at play. Britten gives us a kind of frustrated moto perpetuo (Variation II), followed by a thicker-textured movement (III), in which the performer is asked to play both a steady, pulsing accompaniment and a wide-ranging melody, which cuts across the rhythm of the constant crotchets.(17) Much like Variation II, Variation IV is a story of outbursts and aftermaths. Britten leans into Dowland's "image of true death" motif, before the music fades to nothing. The first half of the piece ends with a march (shades of Shostakovich?), generated from the "drumming" figure that opens Dowland's second section (at "come and possess" - Britten's opening variation retains this figure).
From Variation VI onwards, Britten begins to set the stage for the final revelation of Come, Heavy Sleep. In VI, there are echoes of the song's melody (in eerie artificial harmonics), while in VII, the melody is stated more explicitly, albeit through a shimmering curtain of tremolando (quickly repeated single notes). Variation VI also dwells on a figure that will feature prominently in Variation VIII, a descending scalic idea from the lute part of the Dowland song (bar 1). In the eighth movement, this snippet becomes the basis for an elaborate passacaglia, a musical form built on a repeating bass figure (or ground).
Ground bass forms clearly held a special significance for Britten. A probably incomplete list of further works containing passacaglias would include the piano concerto (revised version), the violin concerto, the Serenade (the Lyke-Wake movement mentioned above), the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the 2nd and 3rd string quartets, the 2nd and 3rd cello suites, the cello symphony, the Nocturne (Tennyson's Kraken) and Canticle IV, as well as Noye's Fludde, Peter Grimes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Billy Budd, The Turn Of The Screw, Death In Venice, Albert Herring and the Rape Of Lucretia. Unsurprisingly then, Britten's passacaglias have been the subject of some study. In an excellent article, Darrell Handel suggests Britten's passacaglias fulfil two main functions, serving as either as a "confirming finale", tying together earlier material, or as a means of intensifying a dramatic high point, particularly in the stage works. As Handel notes, in the cases of Grimes, Lucretia and Screw, passacaglias either lead to, or reflect on significant deaths.(18) The Nocturnal passacaglia seems to belong in this category - we are of course minutes away from "heavy sleep".
In the opening section of the Nocturnal passacaglia, the guitar effectively becomes two instruments, as Britten pits the short, scalic ground bass against more exploratory material on the upper strings (the bottom note of the ground rings on each time). This music has the feel of a slightly testy conversation, as the insistent ground constantly interrupts the freer developments above. To begin with, the ground always appears in its original form, but, as the movement progresses, it begins to fracture, and the “non-ground” material becomes more assertive.
The final part of the movement opens with thick chords, steadily growing in power. At the climax of the whole piece, Britten unleashes a volley of frantic fortissimo scales, and briefly, the music seems to come free of its moorings (“ungrounded”). It’s worth noting that this passacaglia is extremely demanding to play. Even in performances by the very finest guitarists, there is an effortful quality to the music - an awareness of the wood, strings and fingers involved. To me, this always feels appropriate, as though we're experiencing a final spike in "nightly cares"(19), before whatever waits beyond.
Even as the passacaglia spirals out of control, Britten continues to point the music towards the Dowland song - each of those wild scales begins with a forceful E major arpeggio, the final key of Britten’s Come, Heavy Sleep. As the tumult subsides, the ground is carefully reinstated; we finally cross over into the Dowland, and the ground becomes an inner voice once more.
THE HIDDEN LIGHT THAT STIRS
Britten was well equipped to pull off the kind of musical transformation we hear towards the end of Nocturnal. Technically gifted, he also had a finely-tuned sense of drama, and knew the power of a well-prepared simple gesture. In particular, when it came to managing the magical effect of tonal harmony emerging from something darker and less secure, he was always a master (Philip Rupprecht has a nice phrase here, describing the emergence of triads in these pieces as "an ancient precursor defamiliarized.")(20) In Lachrymae and Nocturnal, we "rediscover" Dowland and his music, over the course of fifteen minutes or so.
When I started writing this piece, it was the idea of "reverse variation" that particularly grabbed me. This novel approach to form still fascinates(21), as does the fact that the piece can work as a kind of magical guided tour, granting us views across eras, and pointing out musical bonds between close but distant composers (from the safety of our seats).
Getting to know Nocturnal, 35 years ago, I had few "nightly cares", and "heavy sleep" was not a concern. Decades on, with more cares, and a greater proximity to the heaviest sleep of all, I'm perhaps more naturally receptive to the darker dreamworlds of Dowland, Britten, Keats, Shakespeare and the rest. This time round, delving deeper into the nocturnal music of Britten and Dowland, I became fascinated with ideas beyond the notes, dwelling on the more mysterious, transformative powers of music. Truthfully, this is not my home territory. I remain a practical musician at heart, more comfortable with a score than a poetry anthology - there's something about an exquisitely crafted 15/20 minute instrumental piece that will always appeal. Over that kind of timespan, my attention won't wander, and I give the music every chance to work its magic. One day soon, I'll move on, and revisit the big piece missing from this post, the superb operatic version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the time being, though, my "tired, thought-worn soul" is suggesting I linger with Nocturnal, Britten's healing pocket portal.
While Britten's first movement proceeds in a fairly leisurely fashion, several of the subsequent variations zip by at great speed, resulting in a sometimes dizzying turnover of styles (the Dowland is only 14 bars of music, plus a repeat). Repeated listens reveal many subtle thematic links between the various sections, but this kaleidoscopic quality suggests a more restless (dreamlike?) logic is also at play. Britten gives us a kind of frustrated moto perpetuo (Variation II), followed by a thicker-textured movement (III), in which the performer is asked to play both a steady, pulsing accompaniment and a wide-ranging melody, which cuts across the rhythm of the constant crotchets.(17) Much like Variation II, Variation IV is a story of outbursts and aftermaths. Britten leans into Dowland's "image of true death" motif, before the music fades to nothing. The first half of the piece ends with a march (shades of Shostakovich?), generated from the "drumming" figure that opens Dowland's second section (at "come and possess" - Britten's opening variation retains this figure).
From Variation VI onwards, Britten begins to set the stage for the final revelation of Come, Heavy Sleep. In VI, there are echoes of the song's melody (in eerie artificial harmonics), while in VII, the melody is stated more explicitly, albeit through a shimmering curtain of tremolando (quickly repeated single notes). Variation VI also dwells on a figure that will feature prominently in Variation VIII, a descending scalic idea from the lute part of the Dowland song (bar 1). In the eighth movement, this snippet becomes the basis for an elaborate passacaglia, a musical form built on a repeating bass figure (or ground).
Ground bass forms clearly held a special significance for Britten. A probably incomplete list of further works containing passacaglias would include the piano concerto (revised version), the violin concerto, the Serenade (the Lyke-Wake movement mentioned above), the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the 2nd and 3rd string quartets, the 2nd and 3rd cello suites, the cello symphony, the Nocturne (Tennyson's Kraken) and Canticle IV, as well as Noye's Fludde, Peter Grimes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Billy Budd, The Turn Of The Screw, Death In Venice, Albert Herring and the Rape Of Lucretia. Unsurprisingly then, Britten's passacaglias have been the subject of some study. In an excellent article, Darrell Handel suggests Britten's passacaglias fulfil two main functions, serving as either as a "confirming finale", tying together earlier material, or as a means of intensifying a dramatic high point, particularly in the stage works. As Handel notes, in the cases of Grimes, Lucretia and Screw, passacaglias either lead to, or reflect on significant deaths.(18) The Nocturnal passacaglia seems to belong in this category - we are of course minutes away from "heavy sleep".
In the opening section of the Nocturnal passacaglia, the guitar effectively becomes two instruments, as Britten pits the short, scalic ground bass against more exploratory material on the upper strings (the bottom note of the ground rings on each time). This music has the feel of a slightly testy conversation, as the insistent ground constantly interrupts the freer developments above. To begin with, the ground always appears in its original form, but, as the movement progresses, it begins to fracture, and the “non-ground” material becomes more assertive.
The final part of the movement opens with thick chords, steadily growing in power. At the climax of the whole piece, Britten unleashes a volley of frantic fortissimo scales, and briefly, the music seems to come free of its moorings (“ungrounded”). It’s worth noting that this passacaglia is extremely demanding to play. Even in performances by the very finest guitarists, there is an effortful quality to the music - an awareness of the wood, strings and fingers involved. To me, this always feels appropriate, as though we're experiencing a final spike in "nightly cares"(19), before whatever waits beyond.
Even as the passacaglia spirals out of control, Britten continues to point the music towards the Dowland song - each of those wild scales begins with a forceful E major arpeggio, the final key of Britten’s Come, Heavy Sleep. As the tumult subsides, the ground is carefully reinstated; we finally cross over into the Dowland, and the ground becomes an inner voice once more.
THE HIDDEN LIGHT THAT STIRS
Britten was well equipped to pull off the kind of musical transformation we hear towards the end of Nocturnal. Technically gifted, he also had a finely-tuned sense of drama, and knew the power of a well-prepared simple gesture. In particular, when it came to managing the magical effect of tonal harmony emerging from something darker and less secure, he was always a master (Philip Rupprecht has a nice phrase here, describing the emergence of triads in these pieces as "an ancient precursor defamiliarized.")(20) In Lachrymae and Nocturnal, we "rediscover" Dowland and his music, over the course of fifteen minutes or so.
When I started writing this piece, it was the idea of "reverse variation" that particularly grabbed me. This novel approach to form still fascinates(21), as does the fact that the piece can work as a kind of magical guided tour, granting us views across eras, and pointing out musical bonds between close but distant composers (from the safety of our seats).
Getting to know Nocturnal, 35 years ago, I had few "nightly cares", and "heavy sleep" was not a concern. Decades on, with more cares, and a greater proximity to the heaviest sleep of all, I'm perhaps more naturally receptive to the darker dreamworlds of Dowland, Britten, Keats, Shakespeare and the rest. This time round, delving deeper into the nocturnal music of Britten and Dowland, I became fascinated with ideas beyond the notes, dwelling on the more mysterious, transformative powers of music. Truthfully, this is not my home territory. I remain a practical musician at heart, more comfortable with a score than a poetry anthology - there's something about an exquisitely crafted 15/20 minute instrumental piece that will always appeal. Over that kind of timespan, my attention won't wander, and I give the music every chance to work its magic. One day soon, I'll move on, and revisit the big piece missing from this post, the superb operatic version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the time being, though, my "tired, thought-worn soul" is suggesting I linger with Nocturnal, Britten's healing pocket portal.
(The ending of Nocturnal. Britten's Come, Heavy Sleep is one bar longer than his first variation, although this bar is barely audible, and practically impossible to play.)
(1) "Mapreading" in Kildea (ed.), 2003. Britten On Music. Oxford University Press, pp. 321-329
(2) "Mapreading", pg. 238
(3) Goss, Stephen. “Come, Heavy Sleep: Motive and Metaphor in Britten’s Nocturnal, Opus 70.” Guitar Forum 1 (2001): 53–74. Reprinted in Soundboard Scholar 10 (2025).
(4) "Mapreading", pg. 326
(5) Dwyer, Benjamin, 2020. Britten and the Guitar: Critical Perspectives for Performers. Peter Lang, pg. 25
(6) Goss, pg. 54
(7) "An Interview With Benjamin Britten" in Kildea (ed.), 2003. Britten On Music. Oxford University Press, pg. 305
(8) see Dwyer, pg. 20
(9) In truth, a fascination with nocturnal themes was there from the beginning of Britten's career. For a taste of his developing "night music style", try the Ravelian, wide-spaced piano writing in the Night movement of Holiday Diary (1934), or the earlier Phantasy Quartet (1932), filled with nervous rustlings - more reminiscent of Bartók's many night movements. On This Island (1937) includes a lovely, soothing Nocturne movement, a setting of an Auden poem offering a fleeting glimpse an alternative night-time world ("Now through night’s caressing grip / Earth and all her oceans slip"). A survey of early Britten night music would also include the song cycle A Charm Of Lullabies (1942), and, of course, the 3rd act of Peter Grimes (1945), which opens with the beautiful Moonlight interlude.
(10)This anonymous poem has inspired many musicians and composers. Bax (1908) and Stravinsky (1953) both made settings. Several folk groups also recorded versions (see here for details).
(11) Motion, Andrew, 1997. Keats. Faber, pg. 379
(12) Kildea, Paul, 2013. Benjamin Britten - A Life In The 20th Century. Allen Lane, pg. 428
(13) Britten also produced the massive War Requiem in 1961, which slightly complicates my "night period" theory.
(14) "Musician Of The Year" in Kildea (ed.), 2003. Britten On Music. Oxford University Press, pg. 267
(15) Dwyer, pg. 176
(16) Since Variation I and Come, Heavy Sleep are so closely related melodically, this opening section retains some distinctively Dowlandesque features, for use in later movements. Most importantly, these include the descending 4th at "heavy", as well as a falling and rising figure ("the image of true death"), which also outlines the interval of a 4th. As Britten would have known, the 4th (particularly descending) was a significant interval in Dowland's lexicon of musical melancholy. Anthony Rooley calls it one of Dowland's "distinctive musical emblems", explaining that, at the time, the interval was "widely felt to express man's earthly condition as weak, vacillating and uncertain." ("New Light On Dowland's Songs Of Darkness, Early Music, January 1983) Nocturnal is crammed with 4ths.
(17) Britten was meticulous in his exploration of the guitar's technical possibilities. When asked about Nocturnal, he once said: "I wrote this piece for Julian, I worked out every single chord, although I've never played the guitar in my life, but I had a little diagram of all the fingerings and all that, and I found it absolutely fascinating. And I find it so often gives one sort of ideas for colour and for harmonies and the technical thing is very, very useful."
(18) see Handel, Darrell. “Britten's Use Of The Passacaglia” Tempo, Autumn, No. 94 (Autumn 10970), pp. 2-6
(19) Go Nightly Cares is another Dowland favourite.
(20) Introduction to Rupprecht (ed.) 2013. Rethinking Britten. Oxford University Press, pg. xviii
(21) In his magnificent Britten biography, Paul Kildea mentions a couple of earlier pieces which employ this form, D'Indy's Istar, and the finale of Honegger's 2nd symphony.
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