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Benjamin Britten's 'Pierrot' Ensembles

This statement is provided to clarify the ways in which this chapter offers significantly distinctive insights from my other publications on Britten.

This essay, published prior to my sole-authored book (The Pierrot Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012), offers a much more detailed analysis than the remit of my later book allowed.

My chapter begins by questioning why, when Pierrot was like a flare in the night sky to most European critics and composers, its reception in Britain was initially subdued. The seven-year gap between its first two British performances did little to remedy this; only its revival in the early 1930s would kick-start interest in the work. By chronicling these early concert histories I examine how attitudes to Schoenberg changed and how the collaboration of British and European players shaped later performances of Pierrot – both lay behind events that would inspire Britten. Drawing on scores and footage held by the Britten-Pears Archive (Aldeburgh) and British Film Institute (London) respectively, I analyse Britten’s unpublished Pierrot-scored music for three documentaries made by the British Commercial Gas Association (1935-36). These show a composer at once constrained by the musical indifference of some film-makers, yet also liberated by their progressive, socially-committed politics. In doing so the chapter traces Britten’s Pierrot ensembles in light of Pierrot’s earliest British performances is to reveal his pioneering role within this lineage.