Sarah Brightman's CD The trees they grow so high contains 19 folksongs arranged by Benjamin Britten. The following lines appear in the CD booklet of the in 1998 re-released version of that album.

 
The revival - it was almost the discovery - of British folksong in the early years of the twenieth Century, initiated by Cecil Sharp, had a hugh impact on the generation of composers after Elgar. Holst and Vaughen Williams in particular were able to free themselves from the all-pervasive influence of Wagner, and chose instead the path that folksong suggested to them. Later composers followed their lead, and Benjamin Britten, born with an innate sense of direction, was able to absorb the folk idiom without effort, seemingly reporducing its directness and simplicity in his own music.

Britten's six published volumes of folksong arrangements, containing 43 songs, appeared between 1943 and 1961 (a further set of eight for voice and harp were written in 1976, the year of his death). Volumes 1, 3 and 5 consist of songs from the British Isles, no. 2 is a set of French songs, no. 4 is of "Moore's Irish Melodies", while Volume 6 consists of English songs arranged for voice and guitar. It was in the early 1940s that Britten had made the first of these arrangements for his recitals with the tenor Peter Pears in the USA. A letter of October 1941 says that "they have been a 'wow' wherever performed so far" and they surely reflect the homesickness and nostalgia for England which were to bring the two men back from America in the spring of 1942.

Britten's folksong arrangements, far from being simple "tunes with accompaniement", are, rather, compositions in their own right. He never commented directly on what folksong meant to him, but, in another context, he stated his desire to "restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom, and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell": an aim remarkably appropriate to these arrangements.

© Colin Matthews, 1998.

<=== The trees they grow so high (1998).
Source of the text: the CD booklet.

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last modified: 26 January 2002