Robert Peters writes of Queen and Huntress:

>I think the comic nature of the song is obvious, at least in the recordings
>by Pears and Bostridge.  The unfestive pace, the coloratura in "excellent"
>(like a deliberate parody), the silly repeat of the word "Goddess" (utterly
>uncelebratory), the brisk and most funny "bright" at the end of each
>strophe.  Well, all thinks speaks out for a deliberate comic nature of
>the piece.  (at least IMHO)

Do you find "Dido and Aeneas" comic? You'll find all the features you
isolate there, too.

Perhaps if you realign your hearing of the Britten setting in the light
of his love and understanding of Purcell, your observations (which seem
so weirdly skewed against what Britten is actually doing) will fall into
place.  Perhaps you'll even agree that "festivity" in English music can be
exhilarating, light as air and fleet-footed as well as solidly bucolic.

That is precisely how Britten confounds our expectations.  He does so
brilliantly, and very truly in the spirit of Jonson's text - which is not
so lightly "occasional" as all that, by the way, but a highly compressed
moral comment on human desire and bodily activity in his subtlest Ovidian
mode.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"