Benjamin Britten: Hymn to St Cecilia

Benjamin Britten, described by Sir Thomas Beecham as “the only composer of any worth to come out of our music colleges,” was born in Suffolk in 1913. The son of a local singer, he entered the RCM in 1930 and studied with Frank Bridge and John Ireland. Whilst writing music for a series of documentary films about the GPO made by the BBC, Britten met the poet W.H. Auden, and there started between them a friendship and collaboration that was to colour much of Britten’s life. Britten often found Auden demanding, and there is no doubt that he did exert a considerable, some might say unhealthy, influence on the composer. During the mid to late Thirties Auden was undoubtedly in love with Britten, and some of his best verse from those years is laced with coded messages of affection. This love was not reciprocated, at least not to Auden’s satisfaction, and the arrival of Peter Pears on the scene ensured that he was thereafter kept at a safe distance. Pears became Britten’s long-term partner, his lover and the inspiration for many of his great operatic roles, including Peter Grimes.

There is little doubt that Auden planted in Britten's mind the issues that stalked the composer's work ever after. Issues of innocence and corruption, the individual and society, and the acceptance or denial of desires. The first reference to the Hymn to St Cecilia is from 1935, when Britten wrote in his diary "I’m having great difficulty in finding Latin words for a proposed Hymn to St Cecilia - spend morning hunting." Britten had already worked with Auden on a number of large-scale works, including the operetta Paul Bunyan. Britten asked that Auden provide him a text for his ode to St Cecilia, and Auden complied, sending the poem in sections throughout 1940. Britten began setting the Hymn to St Cecilia in late 1940 in the United States. Britten, Pears and Auden had exiled themselves there as conscientious objectors during the second world war.

The Hymn to St Cecilia was finished on Britten's voyage home from America to England, in 1942. New York Customs had confiscated the first section, thinking the work might be some type of code, and so Britten re-wrote the manuscript from memory while aboard the MS Axel Johnson, and finished it on April 2^nd, 1942. The piece was first performed in 1942 on St. Cecilia's Day (November 22^nd), Britten's twenty-ninth birthday, by the BBC Singers.

In the Hymn to St Cecilia, Auden not only dedicates the poem to Britten, but finishes it with two stanzas that both acknowledge the composer's struggle with his loss of innocence and urge him to celebrate it, ending with the lines: "O bless the freedom that you never chose, O wear your tribulation like a rose."

Britten's music to the Hymn convincingly embraces this idea of celebration. Auden's relentless attempts to liberate Britten from his inhibitions, and the poet's discomforting psychological power over him, led Britten to distance himself permanently from Auden in the years during and after World War II.

Britten was, as Leonard Bernstein once said, "a man at odds with the world." He despised critics, he tended to use and discard associates, colleagues, and friends, he declined interviews, and he avoided television appearances. It's not that he felt he was a bad composer or that he had nothing important to say, but he viewed most critics as musically illiterate, and feared the intrusive and potentially destructive effect of subjecting music to analysis, which he regarded as a kind of prying.

Auden’s work is in three stanzas, each ending with the same ode to St Cecilia. Brittem replicated this structure in the music. The first section is very similar to the refrain, based around the E Phrygian scale and with the same melody. The second section is a scherzo with a modified fugue form. The third section is more lyrical, with solos in each voice (SATB) describing a different instrument, traditional in odes to St Cecilia.

Notes by Peter Parfitt
©2011 Aberdeen Bach Choir

Page last updated 5 May 2011 by Ian Downie