Canticle I: My beloved is mine and I am his, Op.40, is a composition for high voice and piano by Benjamin Britten, the first part of his series of five Canticles. It was composed for a memorial concert. The text is taken from Francis Quarles's poetry based on the biblical Song of Songs. It was published by Boosey & Hawkes under the shorter title Canticle I: My beloved is mine.
Background and history
Britten composed his five Canticles over an extended period of almost 30 years, between 1947 and 1975.[1] They have in common to be written for voices, all including a tenor with Peter Pears in mind, as a result of "the personal and creative relationship between Britten and his most important muse".[2] All are set to religious but not biblical texts. The first such work was possibly titled Canticle because it set a paraphrase of verses from the Song of Songs, sometimes referred to as the Canticles. In the works, Britten followed the model of Purcell's Divine Hymns, and wrote music that can be seen as miniature cantatas, and as song cycles.[1]
On 1 November 1947, Pears and Britten performed the world premiere of the Canticle at the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, as part of a memorial concert for Sheppard[4] It was published by Boosey & Hawkes for high voice and piano. The duration is given as 7 minutes.[5][6] Peter Pears wrote in 1952 that he regarded the Canticle as "Britten's finest piece of vocal music to date".[1]
In 2017, the Canticle was featured in a Queer Talk exhibition, as "a work which bravely expresses same-sex love at a time when it was very dangerous to do so."[4]
Text and music
The text for Canticle I was taken from A Divine Rapture by Quarles, a paraphrase of sections from the Song of Songs from the Old Testament. It arrives several times at the refrain line "I my best beloved’s am – so he is mine".[4] As already the original biblical poetry, it is "full of beautiful, sensuous imagery".[4]
The piano writing evokes images like waves at a shore,[7] paired with "expressive and sometimes highly melismatic freedom of vocal writing".[1] Composed for Britten's partner Peter Pears, and performed by the two men in the first performance, it carries further meaning beyond an allegory of love of God and the Soul.[4][8] Britten's biographer David Matthews described it as one of the composer's most serene works, which "ends in a mood of untroubled happiness that would soon become rare in Britten's music".[9]
