4 Folksong Arrangements

The Ash Grove (1941)

O Waly, Waly (1946)

La belle est au jardin d’amour (1942)

Quand j’étais chez mon père (1942)

Britten’s first folk-song arrangements were written as encores for the recitals he gave with Peter Pears in America in the early 1940s. According to the composer, they were a “wow” wherever they were performed – not least, one imagines, The Ash Grove which treats the melody with a decorous piano counterpoint in the outer sections but harmonically undermines it in reflection of the singer’s grief in the middle. Grief is perhaps more subtly expressed in a later setting of a sad song from Somerset, O Waly, Waly, where the chordal progression first heard on the piano at the beginning varies in its harmonic inflections and its emotional implications, eventually on a bar-by-bar basis, while rarely changing its three-note rhythm.   

Most of the folk-song arrangements – more than fifty of them, assembled at irregular intervals over a period of forty years or so – were written for Pears and derive from British or Irish sources. The major exception is the volume of eight “chansons populaires” compiled in 1942 for the Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss, who had given the first performance of Les Illuminations two years earlier. Applying the same economical principles to the French folk tunes as to the others, Britten furnishes piano accompaniments as discreetly effective as they are texturally and harmonically modest. A texture as ample as that formed by the triadic harmonies in the piano introduction to La belle est au jardin d’amour is rare in these settings. Its point is to set up an illusory major key before its poignant meeting with the modal reality of    the original song. With its clumsy rustic dance rhythms and its fancifully rustic French Quand j’étais chez mon père is one of the most entertaining items in the collection – even before the heightened vocal and piano colouring of the exuberant ending.