Modernism and the Sacred in the Music of Benjamin Britten

This dissertation examines English musical modernism through the lens of Benjamin Britten’s engagement with the sacred, focussing on his affinity for sacred and liturgical imagery both on and off the stage, and inside and outside of the church. Although Britten’s oeuvre is shot through with ideas and themes that are in direct conversation with both sacred traditions and cultural indices of modernism, scholars have only recently positioned him as an emblematic modernist composer. This overlook is due in no small part to his lifelong interest in exploring themes and musical structures drawn from the Anglo-Catholic church which put his music at odds with dominant discourses of high modernism. This dominant modernist discourse has been construed not only in terms of an avant-garde aesthetic, but in a distinctly secular opposition to tradition. I examine Britten’s pervasive use of the narratives, tropes, liturgies, and framework of the institutional church in England, arguing for the need to foreground the sacred in Britten interpretation more broadly. My analysis includes liturgical works (e.g. Rejoice in the Lamb Op. 30, Missa Brevis in D Op. 63) alongside others for non-liturgical contexts (“Chorale [after an Old French Carol],” Curlew River Op. 71, Children’s Crusade Op. 82). Understanding Britten’s modernism as an intentional engagement with the present by means of shared reference points and traditions, I argue these works are best understood in connection with Britten’s collaborations with clergy and church musicians, and his investment in the communities which sustained both. The constellation of issues I bring together in this study includes: (1) the tensions within our conception of Britten as both a modernist figure and as a composer of church music; (2) how familiar tropes of musical modernism in the twentieth century find new contexts and new significance through their rapprochement with the sacred and liturgical in the Britten repertoire; and (3) the untenability of a simplistic division of sacred and secular as it functions within Britten’s oeuvre. My approach is to clarify where tensions exist, rather than seeking to resolve them; indeed, such tension indelibly inflects Britten’s own engagement with both the sacred and the modernist.Ph.D