Music and the Church
THE Aldeburgh Festival differs from other post-war festivals in its strong religious emphasis. Nor is its religious character similar to that of those old-established choral festivals (the Three Choirs and the Leeds) where religious music predominates. Its religion is neither that of the middle and upper classes of the West Country, brought up comfortable, secure and unquestioning in a high Anglican tradition, nor the Nonconformist evangelism of the working classes of the North, but that of converted modern intellectuals, once nearly all sceptics, brought back to the refuge of the Church by their horror and despair at the events of the last twenty years.
Britten himself, the organiser of the festival, has always been, on the evidence of his works, a fairly orthodox Christian, whose religious works exceed those of any of the Three Choirs composers not only, as goes almost without saying, in originality of conception and musical style, but in sheer quantity too. Between A Boy was Born (1933) and the Hymn to St. Peter (1955) he has composed over a dozen impor- tant religious works, ranging in variety of con- ception from the liturgical Te Deum (1935) to the opera The Rape of Lucretia—the strong Christian emphasis of which is also evident, in varying degrees, in most of his other operas.
Among these works, alongside those of the Christian brought up from childhood in the Church, in unselfconscious orthodox devout- ness, but with a genius and originality of mind that lead him to unorthodox imaginative expression of it (as in, say, Rejoice in the Lamb or the Canticle No. 2, Abraham and Isaac), there are others by a more selfconscious, questioning Christian, a Christian by adult emotional and intellectual conviction and con- firmation of the beliefs he was brought up in. This is Britten the friend of Tippett, Auden, Edith Sitwell and Ronald Duncan, the com- poser of the Donne Sonnets, and more especi- ally of the Sinfonia da Requiem and the Can- ticle No. 3, Still Falls the Rain. These two works, the one written in memory of the com- poser's parents shortly after the beginning of the war, the other a setting of Edith Sitwell's poem on the atomic explosion that ended the war, written in memory of Mewton-Wood, exactly describe, in almost identical musical terms, the spiritual progress from confusion and despair to hope, by faith, of many of the more or less recent religious converts among intellectuals of about Britten's generation (mainly slightly senior to him). Both pass from the expression of the emotions aroused by the composer's personal loss, in musical terms brutally descriptive of the general catastrophe that coincided with it on each occasion, to an expression of consolation, serenity and new hope, in musical terms closely similar to those of the 'happy end' of Abraham and Isaac— terms that thus emphasise the religious message of the two works.
Religious works of both these kinds, by Britten and many other composers past and present, form a large part of the Aldeburgh programme every year. This year there has been a slight predominance of the second kind. The setting of Still Falls the Rain formed the centrepiece of a programme of Edith Sitwell's religious verse, spoken by herself, for which Britten also provided an epilogue and prologue of similar musical character. At other concerts the Donne Sonnets were given, and the recent beautiful Requiem by Priaulx Rainier, to a pantheistic text by David Gascoyne. More traditional religious works included Handel's, Samson, a cantata by Telemann, a group of arias from Bach's can- tatas, Palestrina's Stabat Mater, and shorter choral works by Tomkins, Purcell and Bach.
Most of these performances take place in the parish church, which in return for being so well served by the festival with the finest church music of all ages, provides it with the largest auditorium in Aldeburgh—and an audi- torium always full. This close association between the festival on the one hand and both church and Church on the other, is beneficial to them all. Church music, although the least explored, is probably the medium through which the serious modern composer could most successfully reach a wide audience and regain its attention and comprehension—just as the Church, by providing such an outlet for him (and other artists), could regain the attention and respect, and possibly more, of many who now hardly give it a thought. This is what is happening at Aldeburgh, which unlike our other, now partly fossilised, festivals of religious music, and unlike most of the modern works that are played at them, most of which speak a dead musical language, re-establishes, like Britten's own religious works, a vital and fruitful contact between the Church and living modern music—almost the only such contact, in this country at any rate, that exists. The success of it should commend it as an example for imitation to both churchmen and artists
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