Sonata Structures in Early Britten

Abstract

Until Britten returned from America in 1942 it would have seemed reasonable, despite the sensitivity he had revealed in setting texts as unexpected and heterogeneous as those of Auden, Rimbaud and Michelangelo, to assume that instrumental composition was to form the core of his work. He had first made his mark in the chamber media, though his Opus 1 perhaps also represented as close an approach to the orchestra as was judicious at a time when opportunities of performance did not easily come the way of an unknown young composer. Structurally these first two works, the Sinfonietta and the Phantasy for oboe quartet, demonstrated notably original modifications of the sonata thesis. The first of his own orchestral textures the composer heard were those of the symphonic cycle, Our Hunting Fathers, but the ‘symphonic’ qualities were those which should control, not determine the nature of, material conceived in response to potent verbal stimuli. The Frank Bridge Variations were individually brilliant character pieces and together a virtuoso display of thematic derivation, and Britten's command of such techniques was to prove no less apt in the Diversions for piano (left hand) and orchestra. But meanwhile the Piano Concerto had also drawn characters more effectively than consequences, and the Violin Concerto, though more creatively at odds with traditional sonata procedure in its first movement, had pointedly thrust the greatest expressive burden on to a final variation structure. Only with the Sinfonia da Requiem and the First Quartet did Britten fully recapture the convincing individuality of sonata practice he had shown in his first two scores.