I have been listening now for four days to Benjamin Britten's Serenade for
Tenor, Horn and Orchestra and I have come to the seemingly paradox result
that I like and admire the work but do not think it is really good.  My
main criticism is that the work is totally heterogenous, that the texts
used do not match and that there is no clear thread running through it.
But it nevertheless impresses me much.

This is more a nocturnal work than a serenade.  The texts deal more with
night than with evening.  The first two poems deal with sunset, the other
four with night.  The mood of the poems and pieces differs a lot: one
piece (Hymn) is comic, two chilling and horrible (Elegy and Dirge), the
other more or less meditative (Pastoral, Nocturne, Sonnet).  As is the
obvious course the whole work deals more or less distinctly with death
(but the piece Hymn is an - to me unexplained - exception).  The quality
of the poems Britten used varies a lot: there are undisputed masterpieces
(Elegy by Blake and Sonnet by Keats), artful baroque occasional poetry
(Hymn by Jonson), sentimental (Nocturne by Tennyson) and kitschy (Pastoral
by Cotton) lines on nature and in the middle a powerful anonymous display
of Judgment Day (Dirge).

Britten himself must have felt that these six pieces are, although they
share (more or less) the same topic (night), have not a lot in common.  So
he invented a frame: the horn which accompanies the singer (or better: is
a second voice) begins and ends the Serenade in a Prologue and an Epilogue.

The horn has a certain air: it is the instrument of yearning.  In
Eichendorff's wonderful poem "Sehnsucht" (Yearning) the lonely person at
the window begins to feel a burning longing for wandering ("das Herz mir
im Leib entbrennte") when he (or she) hears a posthorn.  There is a coach
somewhere: O lucky he who could travel with it in the splendid summer
night!  ("Ach wer da mitreisen konnte / In der prachtigen Sommernacht!")
Eichendorff is one of the few Romanticist who knows more about happy
wanderers than unhappy ones.  But even his naive ramblers have such a lot
of idealism in them that the risk of frustration appears dangerously high.
Goethe's wanderers ("Der Wanderer", "Wanderers Nachtlied" etc) were people
embedded in nature and its wisdom.  They were led by the way rather than
choosing themselves where to go.  Eichendorff's hysterical longers are
leading the way to Muller's unhappy wanderer through winter time: here
someone chooses to walk away from the Lindenbaum although it would be
better to stay.  - All this comes to (my) mind when I hear a horn.

The Serenade begins lovely with the horn calling out to the listener like
a siren.  There is tenderness, passion, but also a kind of loneliness
because the instrument is heard alone.  The horn beckons the listener to
follow it into his empire of night (Prologue).

Now the first song (Pastoral) begins: A tender melody, the voice
accompanied by tender strings and the horn like a second voice, a companion
feeling the same.  It is evening, the shadows grow deep and long, the world
is going to rest.  This is the first time that you have to think of death
(the air is "cool", the world "is lead the way to rest").  The mood is
sensitive, tender and melancholy and sad without being depressive.

The second song (Nocturne) begins with lively strings: the topic is again
sunset and, yes, death but the calm mood is more expressive and strangely
but temptingly ecstatic.  Unforgettable the chorus: the voice singing
like in a trance "dying, dying, dying" following the horns of Elfland
personified in the solo horn.  The dying echoes are followed, the whole
concept of death is no sad one, the whole song speaks instead of love and
joy, a sad joy.

Now the Elegy.  The mood changes dramatically: sheer horror and danger.
It is night, the horn no longer is a soulful companion but speaks of force
and wounding.  This is a haunting song: an invisible worm flies through
the night and destroys beauty in mad, passionate, secret, symbiotic love.
The music speaks of unhealable wounds, the last horn signals mutilated like
aching, cut limbs.

The horror goes on.  In a song that IS the walk it sings from the way of
the Dead is drastically displayed using a merciless rhythm never stopped.
Here is no happy paradise to be found but a bleak scenery, a moorish
landscape full of threat and punishment.  The ever repeated "And Christ
receive thy saule" sounds more dangerous than promising.  For me this is
the core of the Serenade, the secret masterwork, more haunting than the
Elegy which sure is haunting enough.  The horn again sounds chilling,
ghastly, dangerous.  It is no longer the posthorn of yearning, it sounds
like the horn of hell or Judgment Day.

And the mood again changes and this time, I have to admit, I do not
understand Britten.  Yes, we need some comic relief, and yes, the song
(Hymn) is marvelous, a comic masterpiece with deliberately ridiculous
horn and coloratura voice.  But how does it match to the rest of the whole
cycle? I think it doesn't match at all.  I cannot help but feel that it
utterly wrecks the artistic unity of the Serenade which is a pity.

The last song (Sonnet) is an ode to sleep.  The voice begs for the merciful
state of being unconscious.  Conscience is seen as a brutal ruler.  It is
the Romanticist thought that conscious life is a fruit of Adam's fall.
Therefore the longing for deathlike sleep, for deliverance from the burden
of being a logical, cognite person.  It is Romanticist longing for the
night (the concept Goethe so utterly despised), for death.  - The poem
is deeply felt by Britten, the whole song totally convincing.  The horn
is reservedly used here, it appears to me like a sympathetic, emphatic
companion of the singer who so touchingly begs for being saved from
conscience.

The horn has the last word in (Epilogue).  It has appeared in several
disguises, it has lost its one-dimensionality as the instrument of
yearning.  It has won a lot of facets.  It has been a companion, an elf, a
demon.  Here it still calls us, temptingly, seductively, slowly vanishing
away, dying.  Do we follow it? Do we dare? Shall we?

PS Has the Eichendorff poem "Sehnsucht" become a Lied?
PPS I listened to two Serenade recordings: Pears and Britten and Brain
(1944) and Bostridge and Metzmacher and Neunecker (1995).  And I like
Pears better.  Bostridge is marvellous but he is more a little bit too
artistic, too deliberate.  Pears just sings the songs and it convinces
me.  (But maybe I think of it differently tomorrow.)

Robert Peters
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