Britten's music for organ: some new discoveries

Musical Times, Summer 2004 by Bond, Timothy

Timothy Bond will give the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's Voluntary on Tallis' lamentation in the Royal Albert Hall at a BBC Promenade Concert on 1 August. His world premiere recording of the complete solo organ music of Benjamin Britten, together with works by Tippen, Vaughan Williams, John Lambert and Herbert Howells, will be released this summer on the Regent Records label.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY solo organ music by prominent British composers is not so plentiful that one can afford to overlook anything. So it is exciting to discover that Benjamin Britten, known until now to have written only the Prelude and fugue on a theme of Vittoria of 1946 for organ, wrote three other mature pieces for the instrument, slightly earlier in his career. Though modest in length, they are all intriguing, one especially so.

I was first alerted to these hitherto unknown pieces last year, by a reference in the New Grove to the incidental music for a West End play of 1938, They walk alone, scored for organ. I spoke to Colin Matthews about it, and he promised, in his role as trustee of the Britten Estate, to look up the music when he was next in Aldeburgh. In the event he discovered not only the music for the play, but two further organ pieces - one related to the play, the other apparently independent. The performable part of the incidental music, together with the two other works, will be published in due course, in an edition we are preparing together, and I am very grateful to him for also being able to find some evidence of the circumstances of the composition of the first two of the works, summarised in the following two paragraphs.

They walk alone, by Max Catto, ran for six months in the West End in 1938 and was produced on Broadway two years later. The score consists of a complete short piece lasting about three minutes (almost certainly the prelude to the play) and four short fragments, each lasting only a matter of seconds and not viable for concert performance (they are probably versions of special effects music, at the moment a body is discovered on stage). It seems that Britten had taken the score with him on his visit to the USA in 1939 and left it and the other organ pieces behind when he and Peter Pears returned to the United Kingdom in 1942; they subsequently formed part of the Elizabeth Mayer collection, given to the Britten-Pears Library after Britten's death (he and Pears had been guests of their friends the Mayers in their Long Island house for much of their stay in the States).

Colin Matthews considers that the second piece, Village-organist's piece, essentially an elaboration of the prelude to the play, was probably written for Dr Harold Einecke, organist of the Congregational Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for whom Pears sang in a Bach festival in 1941. As to whether it was ever performed is uncertain; but this cannot presumably be ruled out since, although the surviving pencil score breaks off after 30 bars, there are corrections in ink which seem to suggest Britten may have produced a fair copy. The third manuscript, probably written in 1940 or 1941 but definitely no later than 1942 and untitled on the actual score, was later given a title, probably in the 19805, by a library researcher in Aldeburgh. It consists of a complete four-minute piece, in the form of a simple prelude or voluntary and the start - just a few bars - of a fugal Allegro in the manner of a toccata. The quality of the material in this latter fragment is not very high and a considerable let-down after the prelude; in any event Britten seems to have lost interest and never went any further with its composition. The music of the completed prelude, however, would be impressive enough to warrant publication and performance even if its material were not so similar to that of the War requiems Agnus Dei. The similarity is, as Colin Matthews says, 'rather uncanny'. Britten could not have had access to his earlier score when composing the War requiem some 20 years later, and it must remain a matter of conjecture whether the similarities are deliberate or just coincidental. Can he have remembered something of the character of the earlier piece? There are no exactly parallel passages or quotes, as there are in the case of the borrowings from the canticle Abraham and Isaac in the Offertorium of the War requiem; but the principal material of the organ piece, which begins as in ex. 1, is clearly very close: a chord-stream of three parts in longer notes over a walking bass which sometimes refers to wholetone scales (but less systematically than the later work does), a similar tempo and its general character all seem to anticipate the Agnus Dei. The primary material for the organ piece is, however, hymn no.235 in the English hymnal, 'Talus' lamentation' (the melody from Day's Psalter of 1562, and attributed there to 'M. Talys'). So the title of the Britten prelude, as suggested by the researcher, might as well stand as Voluntary on Tallis ' lamentation.