Three Divertimenti (1933–36)

March

Waltz

Burlesque

The first performance of the Three Divertimenti – by the Stratton Quartet at the Wigmore Hall on 25 February 1936 – was not a happy experience for the composer. The work was received, he recalled, “with sniggers and pretty cold silence. Why, I don’t know.” A disapproving review from J.A.Westrup in the Daily Telegraph did nothing to encourage him and the score was shelved, never to be heard again in Britten’s life time.

There were probably more fundamental reasons behind the withdrawal of the work than the immediate disappointments associated with the first performance. The three movements were part of a project which had been struggling to find a form since 1933, when Britten had started on what he called Alla quartettto serioso with the subtitle “Go play, boy, play” (a quotation from The Winter’s Tale). It was to be a suite in five movements. at least some of them portraying old school friends. An early setback, however, was that having reluctantly agreed to a performance in December 1933 of the three movements he had completed – then called PT, At the Party and Ragging – he didn’t much like what he heard and undertook to revise them. At some point in the revision process he must have decided to abandon the five-movement Alla quartetto serioso idea and to limit the work to the three complete pieces, which he now called March, Waltz and Burlesque and presented under the definitive title of Three Divertimenti at that first performance in 1936.

Recovered along with much other valuable youthful material from the composer’s papers after his death, the Three Divertimenti were published in 1983 and revealed to be in no way worthy of the “sniggers” with which they had been received 47 years earlier. They are as authentic an indication of Britten’s genius as anything else he wrote in his mid-20s and are immediately recognisable as the work of the composer of, say, the Phantasy Quartet or the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge or, indeed, many much later scores.

The march, for example, was a favourite form from the Alla Marcia of 1932 (incorporated in the Les Illuminations seven years later) to the Third Cello Suite of 1971. It was favoured not, of course, for its military associations but because of the rhythmic and colour invention it stimulated. The first of the Three Divertimenti, which varies between unison aggression and fine textural delicacy, converting trumpet calls into attenuated string harmonics, is a characteristically imaginative march-time example. As delightfully melodious as it is seductive in its scoring, the Waltz represents another favourite form. The Burlesque is a vigorous and resourcefully sustained forerunner of the several tarantella-like moto perpetuo movements Britten was to write over the next few decades.

Gerald Larner © 2010