"I am a native, rooted here": Benjamin Britten, Samuel Palmer and the Neo-Romantic Pastoral

• Autores: Tim Barringer
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 34, Nº. 1, 2011, págs. 125-165
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay explores pastoralism in music and art during the Second World War. It contends that Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943), is a key work of neo-Romanticism which is deeply imbricated in the visual culture of the period. In this work Britten directly engages with the English Romantic heritage, literary and visual.The cover of the score bears a reproduction of Samuel Palmer's Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star (1830), while a setting of William Blake's poem 'The Sick Rose', from the illuminated book Songs of Innocence lies at the heart of the work. Palmer and Blake offered contrasting tropes of artistic identity and opposing responses to the pastoral, held in tension in the work of neo-Romantic painters such as Graham Sutherland, John Piper and John Craxton and in Britten's Serenade.The harsher landscapes of Britten's opera Peter Grimes (1945), deriving from E. M. Forster's rediscovery of the poems of George Crabbe, added violence and intolerance to the neo-Romantic repertoire. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.