Britten, Benjamin

an essentially fair-copy manuscript, written in Britten's assured, youthful hand, scored for voice and piano, notated in black ink on up to four three-stave systems per page, with added indications of scoring ("...Vl.I....Vla...Harpa...") and a few other additional entries in faded blue ink, signed by the composer at the beginning and at the end ("EBenjamin Britten"), the poet's name entered at the upper left-hand corner of the first page by Britten ("Tennyson."), the song comprising four numbered verses (I...II...III...IV"), beginning "Airy, fairy Lilian[.] Flitting, fairy Lilian"), with autograph dating at the end ("Feb. 19^th1929"), containing some erasures and corrections, at least one correction in pencil

4 pages, 4to, 12-stave paper, mounted, framed and glazed (overall size c.36.5 x 61cm), no place, 15-19 February 1929, creasing to corners, some extremely light dust-staining and spotting; together with a signed letter of presentation, by Donald Mitchell, to the former owner, from the Britten-Pears Library (13 June 1984)

Dating from John Evans, 'Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): A Chronology of his Life and Works', in A Britten Source Book, compiled by John Evans, Philip Reed and Paul Wilson, (Aldeburgh, 1987), pp.14-15; not listed in TNG or in Paul Banks, Benjamin Britten: A Catalogue of the Published Works (1999), or in Christopher Mark, 'Juvenilia (1922-1932)', in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge, 1999)

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A remarkable, apparently unpublished early manuscript of a complete song, written by the fifteen-year-old composer.

Britten's songs rank among the finest in the repertoire. Some background to his earliest works for voice was provided by Britten himself in a prefatory note to the collection Tit for Tat (published 1969):

...between 1922 and 1930 when I was a schoolboy, I must have written well over fifty songs - most of them straight off without much thought; others were written and re-written many times in a determined if often unsuccessful effort to 'get them right'. The choice of poets was nothing if not catholic. There are more than thirty of them, ranging from the Bible to Kipling, from Shakespeare to an obscure magazine poet 'Chanticleer'; there were many settings of Shelley and Burns and Tennyson, of a poem by a schoolmaster friend, songs of texts by Hood, Longfellow, 'Anon', and several French poets, and one to the composer's own words...

This delightful, subtly varied strophic song dates from the beginning of 1929, when Britten was at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, and at the same time having lessons in composition from Frank Bridge in London. Tennyson's poem "Lilian" first appeared in the 1830 publication Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.