Hymn to St Cecilia

As the patron saint of music, you’d expect St Cecilia to be well represented in the concert hall. But after Purcell and Handel’s famous Odes, there’s a gap in English musical history until Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia (1942). Setting three poems W.H. Auden had dedicated to Britten himself (whose birthday fell on St Cecilia’s Day), the composer created a musical portrait quite different to the reverent formality of his predecessors. Resisting the temptation of the saint’s own instrument, the organ, Britten creates an elusive, mercurial work for unaccompanied voices. We meet Cecilia initially as woman rather than saint, “In a garden shady”, lulled by swaying choral branches. The hazy, haloed stillness of the opening (reworked subsequently into a litany-like refrain “Blessed Cecilia”) contrasts with the chattering, quicksilver energy of the central scherzo, upper voices chasing one another in pealing scales. The idea of innocence—both offered and lost—introduced by that scherzo movement becomes richer and more complicated in the final movement, where Auden and Britten each wrestle with the gulf between Earth’s failings and music’s heavenly visions.