Spring Symphony, Op.44

Part I

Introduction: lento, senza rigore -

The merry cuckoo: vivace -

Spring, the sweet spring: allegro cn slancio -

The driving boy: allegro molto -

The Morning Star: molto moderato ma giocoso

Part II

Welcome, Maids of Honour: allegretto rubato -

Waters above: molto moderato e tranquillo -

Out on the lawn I lie in bed: adagio molto tranquillo

Part III

When will May come: allegro impetuoso -

Fair and fair: allegretto grazioso -

Sound the Flute: allegretto molto mosso

Part IV

Finale: moderato alla valse - allegro pesante - tempo 1

Britten’s Spring Symphony was conceived on a picnic somewhere in the Suffolk countryside near Aldeburgh in 1948 - or so it is thought by those who were with him at the time. It was “a glorious spring day,” a companion recalled, “one of those that seem to be out of time.” He had been thinking about his choral symphony ever since it was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra but, until that spring apparently, it was going to have Latin words and would probably have been closer in form to the traditional symphony than the score we now know.

Whatever it was that changed his mind, by the summer Britten was busy reading English poetry on spring-time themes and assembling an anthology that was eventually to amount to no fewer than thirteen texts - all of them except W.H. Auden’s “Out on the lawn I lie in bed” from 16th and 17th century sources. Clearly, any work including settings of so many different poems is likely to have more in common with the song cycle than with the symphony. So while the Spring Symphony is divided into four main parts broadly approximating to the conventional symphonic structure, only the last of them is in one continuous movement.

Part I

Including the Introduction, Part I is in as many as five sections which, although there is only a minimal break between them, are clearly separate items. As the composer has pointed out, however,there is a progression from the “black winter” of the first piece to the “flowery May” of the fifth. The Introduction is “such cold music,” Britten confessed as he worked on it, “that it is depressing to write.” Even so, from its eerie beginning on harps and percussion, its icy vibraphone harmonies and its uneasy choral counterpoint, his setting of the anonymous 16th century text develops into an elaborate and extended structure. Between the choral entries, strings, woodwind and brass each introduce their own, vividly contrasted fugal ideas that are then combined in a dramatic central climax.

Like most of the following pieces, The merry cuckoo is accompanied by only a section of the orchestra - in this case just three trumpets, reflecting no doubt Edmund Spenser’s reference to the cuckoo’s “trumpet shrill.” The full orchestra joins the voices in their joyful greeting of Thomas Nashe’s “sweet spring,” withdrawing only for the three episodes of semi-improvised bird calls from the soloists. The Driving Boy introduces the boys’ choir which - with woodwind, tuba and tambourine - cheerfully represents George Peele’s schoolboys and, at John Clare’s sugestion, whistles an accompaniment to the radiant soprano solo in the middle section. The new season is firmly secured by brass and bells and an ultimately jubilant chorus in The Morning Star.

Part II

The three pieces of Part II are dedicated, according to the composer, to “the darker side of spring - the fading violets, rain and night.” The slow movement of the symphony, it begins with a sensitively melodious Herrick setting in Welcome, Maids of Honour where the alto soloist is accompanied by brightly coloured arpeggios on woodwind and harps alternating with dark-hued harmonies on lower strings divided into six parts. Violins return as the sole instrumental feature of Waters above adding a delicate drizzle of tremolandos, played mainly on the bridge or the fingerboard, to the solo tenor line.

The June night of Out on the lawn I lie in bed, scored for woodwind and brass, is not as idyllic as it seems. The wordless chorus with which it begins is peaceful enough and it remains so on its next three appearances, as the alto soloist contemplates the stars and the rising moon through a poetic texture of woodwind arabesques. But even as early as 1934, when he wrote these lines, Auden was aware of the vulnerability of peace, as Britten acknowledges in his post-war setting by shattering it with a violent explosion of fanfares on trumpets and trombones.

Part III

The scherzo of the symphony gradually reassembles the orchestra in preparation for the generously scored Finale. Strings (without basses) alternate with harps in the impetuous rhythms of the tenor soloist’s When will my May come. Melodiously mobile woodwind lines are tickled by pizzicato strings (still without basses) in the delightful soprano and tenor duet Fair and fair. The eager ostinato rhythms of Sound the flute link brass with the tenors and basses of the chorus, woodwind with the sopranos, and altos and strings with the boys’ chorus, completing the ensemble (with only percussion missing) before the end.

Part IV

Britten spent a long time looking for a suitable text for the Finale of his symphony before he found the speech of the Maylord in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. A great find, it not only proved to be suitable material for a continuous single-movement construction but also inspired the uninhibited festivity the work needed at this point. Britten himself described it as “a May-day festival, a kind of bank holiday” and that is what it is - although, in the gentle waltz-time introduction, it is only the primitive sound of the cow horn that gives due warning of the excesses to come. The middle section of the movement is a brilliantly sustained high-energy episode for all solo, choral and orchestral forces. But the closing section, beginning with another blast on the cow horn and the return of the waltz tune, exceeds it in exuberance as the dance is driven to a frenzy and, at the ingeniosly engineered climax of the work, combined with “Soomer is icoomen in” in a quite different rhythm in the boys’ chorus.

If the Spring Symphony is not a symphony - and it is more like a symphony than the same composer’s Simple Symphony but less like a symphony than the Sinfonia da Requiem and Cello Symphony - it is a vital and highy original item in the choral and orchestral repertoire.

Gerald Larner ©2006