ABSTRACT
Life for Havergal Brian around the start of the Great War was a time of great stress, and his response to it is evident in the stuff of his comic opera The Tigers. Brian’s mental turmoil around this time is well documented, and even though the country was at war when he penned his first sketches in 1916, his sense of the absurd was such that the work which took shape was a comic opera apparently on the folly of war. Or was it? This opera and the Third English Suite were more or less the only major works to come from his pen from the time of Pilgrimage to Kevlaar to the turn of the decade, and a great deal of mental energy went into the creation of The Tigers, taking it beyond the comic, although there is much in it which is genuinely funny.
