Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings
I have previously mentioned my years, basically middle school through college, as a horn player. During that time, I frequently heard the name of Dennis Brain as the undisputed master of the instrument. Brain (1921-1957) had died quite young in an automobile wreck, but his legacy was undimmed.
Brain’s father was the horn instructor at the Royal Conservatory of Music. His older brother became a prominent horn player. (Another brother had a career as an oboist. All held principal posts in major orchestras. During World War II, Brain was conscripted into the military and served in the Royal Air Force Band and Orchestra.
Benjamin Britten (more fully discussed here) had moved to America shortly before the war, in part because his pacifist leanings were out of step with British sensibilities. But during the war in 1942, Britten and his friend, tenor Peter Pears, moved back to England. In 1943, at the request of Dennis Brain, Britten composed his Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31. Brain and Pears performed the premiere.
The work is a remarkably effective setting of texts by various poets. United by themes of night and death, it nevertheless has considerable emotional breadth. It is a hauntingly beautiful work framed by a solo horn prologue and epilogue. Both are played on the natural horn (without the use of the valves). The epilogue is played off-stage.
The movements are as follows with links to the text:
- “Prologue” (horn solo)
- “Pastoral” The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton
- “Nocturne” The Splendour Falls by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- “Elegy” The Sick Rose by William Blake
- “Dirge” Lyke-Wake Dirge, English Folk Song
- “Hymn” Hymn to Diana by Ben Jonson
- “Sonnet” O Soft Embalmer by John Keats
- “Epilogue” (reprise of Prologue)
