Unveiled at the 1958 Leeds Festival by the BBC Symphony with Pears again as soloist, Britten’s Nocturne is a pendant of sorts to the Serenade. It also features eight movements—all of them songs for tenor in the latter case—around descriptions of night, dreams, and sleep. But unlike the Serenade, it flows without any break or interruption between songs, and instead of one featured instrumentalist, each of the middle six sections pairs the tenor soloist with an obbligato instrument, rotating through bassoon, harp, horn, timpani, English horn, and flute with clarinet.

The Nocturne also didn’t come as fluidly from Britten’s pen as the Serenade; the composer compared writing each note to squeezing “that last dollop of toothpaste out of an empty tube.” Perhaps due to this effort, personal and professional struggles caused by anti-homosexual legislation in Britain, insight that comes with age, or all three, the night scenes of the Nocturne are subtler and more unsettling than the previous Serenade.

“It won’t be madly popular because it is the strangest & remotest thing—but then dreams are strange and remote,” Britten wrote of the piece.

The Nocturne opens with a rocking motif in the strings—this theme recurs throughout, often providing a musical connective tissue between songs. The first movement, “On a poet’s lips I slept,” from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, renders a liminal space on a bed of strings. But the narrator quickly descends into a nightmarish scene from Lord Tennyson’s The Kraken, with the obbligato bassoon portraying the monster in the deep.

Solo harp flitters through the dreamiest of the songs—Coleridge’s depiction of a “beauteous boy” collecting fruit in the moonlight. The rocking motif then returns and leads into the “Midnight’s bell goes ting, ting, ting,” an onomatopoetic and ominous account of nocturnal creatures.

Rumbling timpani introduces Wordsworth’s harrowing recollection of the September Massacres, when bloodthirsty mobs killed hundreds of political prisoners and priests during the French Revolution. A sinuous English horn ushers in a haunting dirge with a second view of war, from the perch of those who sleep peacefully on the “walls of boys on boys and dooms on dooms.” The verse comes from the poem “The Kind Ghosts” by Wilfred Owen, who died in service to the British army in World War I. Britten would return to Owen’s wartime poetry a few years later as a basis for the War Requiem.

The penultimate song is set to a cheery text from Keats’ “Sleep and Poetry” and features warbling flute and clarinet over mysterious webs of strings. All the instruments come together in the Mahlerian final movement, a meditation on the truth we glean from our dreams from Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 43. The connection to Mahler is more evident in Britten’s dedication to the composer’s widow, Alma Mahler. —Amanda Angel