Following a frank but friendly exchange of personal mails with Robert
Peters, I thought some lovers of the work might like to read a brief
descriptive analysis of "Queen and Huntress", the song around which
debate originally centred.

This was written in the light of a question I posed to Robert as to how far
a snap judgement (that this is a "comic" song, or "intentionally funny")
can adequately represent the potential richness of a sophisticated piece,
even of this brevity.

I was not interested in fixing a single interpretation on the song, let
alone examining its place in the cycle or its musical cross-references
to its fellows.  All I have done is to scrape at the surface and suggest
a selection of the images, musical and pictorial, that go to make this
more than a simply pigeon-holed lightweight scherzo.

QUEEN AND HUNTRESS

"Presto e leggiero", fast and light, The 6/8 tempo, key and horn
introduction suggest an English hunting song, but on a miniature or
playful scale, and in a nocturnal setting.  The piece is in the form of
a baroque "da capo" aria, and baroque configurations abound in the vocal
and instrumental lines.  A "Serenade" is also a song of devotion to the
beloved, and of all the songs in the cycle the Hymn comes closest to
matching that description, too.

The effect of the galloping horn introduction is to suggest a stylised
picture of the Queen's hunt careering through the brake by night -
curiously the horn line recalls the galloping last movement of the Horn
Trio by Britten's loathed Brahms more than any of the Mozart Horn
Concertos.

"Queen and huntress" ...  the poem is, of course, even out of its dramatic
context, a compliment to Queen Elizabeth as much as a plea to the Virgin
Hunt Goddess Diana, and the courtly diction of Elizabethan madrigal is
evoked in Britten's carefully marked "pp quaver/staccato" vocal line when
the tenor soloist joins the chase in imitative duet with the horn.

The triple repeat of the word "Goddess" suggests an urgent invocation, in
Purcellian vocal style (Britten became increasingly interested in Purcell's
music about this time) and the embellishing fioriture on "excellent" are
developed and expanded in each verse to augment and build the sense of
courtly, stylised praise.  He had used comparable vocal techniques in "Let
the Florid Music Praise" from "On this Island", an Auden text where a
florid, celebratory text draws equally florid, celebratory music from
Britten.

So we are presented with elements of Elizabethan courtly praise, Purcellian
vocal writing, and religious invocation set within the context of a fairy
hunting song.  The "excellently bright", in exactly the similar rhythm at
the end of each strophe, no matter what has gone before, has the effect of
a neat and witty tying up of loose ends.

Scene and mood darken, though the tempo doesn't relax.  The second strophe
is marked "tenebroso" for the singer, who low in his register evokes the
threatening earth and shade which are in opposition to air and the light
from the hunter's moon, a contrast emphasised by growling repeated notes,
stabbing sforzandos and harmonics from the horn.  The beast has gone to
earth, the opposed element to air, just as the moon in Jonson's verse has
gone behind the clouds.

The urgently repeated "Bless us then with wished sight" is the turning
point, a prayer to the once-more triply invoked goddess; and another
scurrying run from the singer, taken up into the stratosphere by the horn,
takes us out once again under the familiar clear, moonlit sky and back into
the pursuit.  This second strophe - the 'B' section of the aria - presents
us with oppositions to the first, earth to air, darkness to light, Dionysus
to Apollo (Cynthia's shining orb the moon doing duty for Apollo's sun),
earth's sexuality to moon's virginity.  "Wished sight" is a plea for the
return of this paradoxical moonlight, the continuation of Elizabeth's reign
so threatened by dark external forces.  Britten paints this darker picture
as deftly as the lighter vision of his first strophe.

Relief, as the key changes back to the tonic B flat major and "sight"
is granted.  A pause, as delicate cross-rhythm staccato strings (ff
marcatissimo) evoke the laying aside of the Queen's bow and the quiver
before the last strophe gets under way.  This is not a simple repeat, but
centres on a plea from the singer (in another rising vocal line) to "give
unto the flying hart space to breathe" - hart/heart suggests the customary
Elizabethan yoking of sexual fulfilment and death - before he reaches the
surprising conclusion.  So surprising a conclusion, indeed, that the
breathless singer has difficulty articulating it, on yet another rising
vocal line:  "Thou that mak'st a day of night, Thou that mak'st a day of
night, Thou that mak'st ... Thou ... Goddess ..."

This hunt is physically exhausting as well as exhilarating ...  whilst the
triple invocation this time wittily inverts the vocal line from the first
strophe.

And, "surprising"? Because in the midst of this stylised fairy hunt scene,
the suggestion in text and music is of super-natural power, one that can
turn day into night, invert the natural order of things at the same time
as re-establishing it.  Britten's singer highlights this paradox for us in
his very hesitancy, ambiguously suggestive as it is of another, more earthy
climax.  The power of his deity clearly merits the extravagant release of
the singer's final roulade, capped by a witty vocal obeisance, leaving the
hunt (horn, and staccato strings) to go on its way.

Natural and unnatural (both in the poem and the stylised vocal means),
night and day, playful and sinister, dark and light, sexual union and
virginity ...  these are just some of the deep antitheses held in perfect
musical balance within this surprisingly rich and suggestive miniature
English hunting aria.

 [ A revealing comparison may be made here with the bleak ironies of an
earlier Britten hunt scene, the Dance of Death in "Our Hunting Fathers",
another 6/8 number with the galloping list of dog's names leading to blood,
mayhem and murder.  Here in the Hymn the vocal means are similar, but the
effect - thanks to the lightness and pizzicato airiness of the string
scoring - is totally different ]

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