Canticle I: My Beloved is Mine Op.40 (1947)

The first of Britten’s five Canticles, My Beloved is Mine, was written at much the same time as his earliest Purcell realisations which included not only seven songs from Orpheus Britannicus but also the three Divine Hymns. The last were surely the models for his setting of Francis Quarles’s A Divine Rapture, a metaphysical fantasy on a line from the the Song of Solomon in the Book of Canticles, “My beloved is mine and I am his.” Written like all the subsequent canticles for Peter Pears, it is both a reflection of Quarles’s mystical contemplation of divine love and, by way of the poet’s use of physical love as a metaphor for the more sublime variety, an expression of the composer’s joy in his relationship with the singer. Although it is through-composed the canticle clearly falls into four parts. The first, marked Andante alla barcarola,    comprising Quarles’s first two stanzas, symbolises the “two little bank-divided brooks” in cooly melodious two-part counterpoint in the piano part until they are swallowed in the flood of passion at “we both became entire”. The third stanza is presented as an emphatically eloquent Recitative which, by-passing the fourth stanza of the original poem, leads directly into a Presto treatment of “Nor Time, nor Place” as an elated three-part canonic scherzo. The Epilogue anchors the work in the firm faith of Quarles’s last two stanzas in a setting that, carried throughout on a two-note Lombard rhythm in the piano part, finally achieves the G major harmonies promised at the start of the canticle but withheld until now.