Phantasy Quartet Op.2 (1933)

As a student at the Royal College of Music in 1932 Britten submitted an entry, a Phantasy String Quintet, for the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize and won it. W.W. Cobbett had endowed the prize in 1905 to encourage British composers to develop his idea of the “phantasy,” a single-movement form which would combine the freedom of the Elizabethan consort “fancy” with the cyclic structure of the nineteenth-century “fantasia.” Britten seems to have felt that Cobbett had a point. Certainly, within a few months of being awarded the prize he had written a Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings in the hope not of winning 13 guineas with it but of persuading Leon Goossens, its dedicatee, to perform it – which he duly did in a BBC broadcast in August 1933.   

The Phantasy Quartet is very much in line with Cobbett’s “phantasy” prescription. It is designed as a kind of palindrome beginning with a march progressing from silence to fortissimo and ending with the same march receding from fortissimo back into silence. Within that framework there are the exposition and development of a vigorous Allegro giusto, an Andante with episodes for a lyrical string trio and a rhapsodic oboe, and an abbreviated recapitulation of the Allegro giusto. The structure is further secured by the fact that all the thematic material is derived from the tune introduced by the oboe over the marching tread of the strings in the opening section. If this seems excessively schematic, the dramatic articulation, the melodic inspiration and the expressive spontaneity of the work confirm that the young composer was not in the least inhibited by it.