Sacred & Profane

All life—animals and seasons, men, women and saints, birth and death—collides in Benjamin Britten’s Sacred and Profane. The composer’s last major choral work, composed in 1974-5 when Britten was weakened by the heart condition that would ultimately prove fatal, is a defiant statement. Its collage of eight medieval lyrics supply richly coloured illuminations—each a Brueghel world in miniature. We open in the realm of the sacred with “St Godric’s Hymn”. But is it sincere? There’s something about the perfumed, Poulenc-esque intensity of the musical prayer, at odds with its ancient English text, that raises doubt. It’s a marked contrast to the heartfelt wrestle with faith and suffering we hear in “Yif ic of luv can”, the pious anguish of “Ye that pasen by”, both meditations on Christ’s Passion. The profane world of nature bursts into teeming, yelping life in “I mon waxe wod” and pastoral “Lenten is come”, but the cycle ends by looking decay in the face with pitch-black grotesque humour—“A Death”.