Keywords
Britten, Dowland, Nocturnal, night music, melancholy, Elizabethan culture, rhetoric, variation form, twentieth-century guitar repertoire
Abstract
"The prevailing melancholy [of Britten’s Nocturnal] is as natural to the guitar’s sonorities as it is appropriate in a tribute to John Dowland."
—Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten.
Such summary remarks characterise what little has been written about Britten’s Nocturnal outside the guitar world. The reader’s reaction might be one of passive agreement or mild irritation, but there is rarely dialogue because discourse is limited: Nocturnal after John Dowland is often passed over by Britten scholars with scant discussion or no mention at all. In fact, little has been added to Evans’ reliable commentary, written only three years after Britten’s death. Are these scholars, one asks, ignoring the music or the medium?
For all its expediency, Evans’ remark begs a number of fruitful questions. In how many senses, then, is Britten’s work after John Dowland? How is Nocturnal melancholic? – in fact, what are the constructs of melancholy in music in general and in the music of Britten and Dowland in particular? And is there a place for the guitar’s sonorities in this argument.
I argue that despite its comparative critical neglect, Nocturnal [1963] occupies a pivotal position in Britten’s output. It refers back to the many works concerned with sleep and dreams, from the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings [1943] through Nocturne [1958] to A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1960]; and it looks forward to the heterophonic melodic style and melancholic atmosphere of later works such as Curlew River [1964] and Death in Venice [1973].
I also examine melancholy as a topic (topos), suggesting that it saturates the score of Nocturnal at every structural level. Finally, I attempt to define how two independent idioms – Dowland’s, the guitar’s – become identified with Britten’s. For it is one of the unique achievements of this masterpiece that neither idiom is pushed into the background. On the contrary: the more nakedly they are disclosed in the music – the quotation of an entire song, a chord on the open strings – the more movingly are we made aware that is Britten’s hand that strikes the open strings, and Britten’s voice that sings Dowland to us.
Notes
This article was first published in Guitar Forum 1 (2001). We are grateful to the author and to the journal's original publisher, the European Guitar Teachers Association (UK branch), for permission to make it available here.
Recommended Citation
Goss, Stephen. 2025. "Come, Heavy Sleep: Motive and Metaphor in Britten’s Nocturnal, opus 70." Soundboard Scholar 10, (1). https://digitalcommons.du.edu/sbs/vol10/iss1/11