ABSTRACT
The initial part of Lord Berners’ career as a composer is dominated by piano music and songs. The encouragement Berners received for his early piano music gave him the confidence to tackle larger forces and bigger scale works, and these became the predominant interest in his later musical life. Piano duet form allows Berners to use extreme contrasts of register, and to build up the sound in a much more dramatic way than in a piece for solo piano. The use of a poem to head the score suggests that Berners had programmatic intentions for Le poisson d’or, and it might therefore be expected that the form would be largely dictated by the events of the poem. Berners completed the Vaises bourgeoises in 1917, between the solo piano works Trois petites marches funebres and Portsmouth Point. In the solo piano music Berners’ harmonic idiom tends to be chromatic with leanings towards bitonality or even polytonality.
