Fifty years after his death on December 4, 1976, Benjamin Britten remains one of the great composers for the human voice. Born in Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast, he wrote much of his vocal music for one singer, the tenor Peter Pears, who was his partner in life and in music from 1937 until the end. This evening’s program follows three threads that run through that partnership: devotion, longing, and remembrance. Its title echoes the New Testament language of steadfast love, and each thread asks where that love abides: in another person, in God, in a song, or in the memory of someone lost. In Britten's songs the answer is often all of these at once.
Faith was a constant but complicated presence in the lives of Britten and Pears. Britten was raised in the Church of England and wrote sacred music throughout his career, from A Ceremony of Carols and Saint Nicolas to the War Requiem. Yet he was never a conventional believer. By his own account he was not a regular churchgoer, though he believed a serious artist needed some kind of religion. Pears, by most accounts, held a more openly Christian faith. In the end, what they shared was a habit of listening for something larger than themselves, a theme that surfaces even in their secular songs.
Britten revered Henry Purcell, and the recital opens with two realizations he made for his own recitals with Pears, in which Purcell's spare melodies are given a piano part of Britten's own. If music be the food of love treats music itself as an act of devotion, and the Alleluia is simple praise. Morning, from Ronald Duncan's 1945 masque This Way to the Tomb, greets the day with quiet gratitude. Britten's setting of Blake's A Poison Tree then shows love's absence: anger left unspoken until it grows into something fatal.
Britten met W. H. Auden in 1935, when both worked on the documentary Night Mail for the General Post Office in Britain. The poet became a friend, mentor and collaborator, and their work together—from song cycles to the operetta Paul Bunyan—shaped Britten's early voice. Fish in the unruffled lakes and Night covers up the rigid land come from those years: the first watches the untroubled ease of nature against the unease of human love, the second is a hushed nocturne. Their friendship cooled after both men left for America, but Auden's influence on Britten's ear for poetry never left him.
Not even summer yet is one of the more personal songs of the first half. Its text is by Peter Burra, a friend of Britten's who also introduced him to Pears. When Burra died young, Britten wrote the song for Pears to sing at his funeral. It is a farewell with the stillness of a prayer, and an early sign of what Pears's voice would become for Britten: the instrument through which his most private feelings—grief and faith included—were made public.
Canticle I: My beloved is mine (1947), written for Pears, sets Francis Quarles's "A Divine Rapture," a seventeenth-century poem drawn from the Song of Songs. Its "best beloved" is Christ, and the soul's union with him is described in the language of earthly lovers: two brooks running into one sea. This tender music can be heard as a love song between two people, and Britten surely realized that. It is the program's clearest answer to where love abides—and as it was composed and first performed for a memorial concert, remembrance is a part of it as well.
Where the Canticle rests in faith, Winter Words (1953) tests it. Thomas Hardy was a doubter, but one who never lost his pity, and his poems look at a world where the divine seems distant and compassion falls to people. The six songs in the center of the cycle observe life in its innocence—pure and uncorrupted: a child on a night train, a mother's worn table, a choirmaster remembered by the tenor who sang at his grave, a boy with a violin playing for a convicted man. The cycle’s first song is spoken by an older, experienced man who regards this innocence as a wonderful gift (perhaps he sees himself as the child throughout the poems) and in the last song (Before Life and After) asks whether suffering was always part of creation—a question he leaves unanswered.
Britten arranged folksongs from the early 1940s onward, many of them for Pears, and they carry the same questions in plain speech. The swagger of The Lincolnshire Poacher gives way to the regret of The Salley Gardens, the young bride of The trees they grow so high, the murder of a child in Little Sir William told with the solemnity of a martyr's tale, and the grief of O Waly, Waly, where earthly love fails and nothing is left to hold.
These songs, written across four decades, return again and again to the same few questions. Where does love live when it is given, when it is withheld, and when it is lost? Britten's answers are never simple. In the Canticle, love abides in devotion, in a union that is at once human and divine. In the Hardy poems and folksongs it abides in longing, and in the songs written at a graveside or in the shadow of one, it abides in memory. Fifty years on, these songs remain alive and continue to be sung. That may be the truest answer the evening can offer: love abides wherever it is remembered, and when it is remembered in song, it abides in company.