ABSTRACT
Discussions of the Donne poems that compose Britten’s opus 35 cycle have favored intra- rather than inter-sonnet approaches, concentrating, that is, almost exclusively on qualities of individual sonnets rather than on those of the set as a whole—their sequencing, possible clustering, or why Britten may have chosen just these nine from the nineteen available to him and ordered them as he did. Studies of the music, similarly, have focused on individual songs, with little attention paid to groupings of songs or to overarching design.
This chapter argues that Britten’s selection and arrangement of nine of Donne’s Holy Sonnets weave narrative threads that move through processes of guilt, deliberation, and affirmation at two levels of organization—within three successive groupings of three songs, and across the design as a whole. It then shows how this design manifests in the musical settings. Britten clarifies the bi-level organization with a key scheme that traverses three parallel three-song designs, the whole connecting the b minor of the opening song to the B major of the closing song. Within each three-song sub-group, tonal and rhythmic processes unfold their own narratives to mirror the dramatic narratives of the sonnets.
