48. Candlelit Late Night
In July 1945 Britten, who was a superb pianist, joined the violinist Yehudi Menuhin on a tour in Germany to play for the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It had been only 3 months since British and Canadian troops had first entered the camp. and were totally unprepared for what they discovered. The stench of death and disease could be smelled 5 miles away. The experience coloured everything he wrote subsequently though he could not speak of it. The next work he wrote was the death-obsessed ‘Holy Sonnets of John Donne’. After that came his Second Quartet, a homage to Purcell on his 250th Anniversary. The Quartet is infused with the clarity, tenderness and strangeness that Britten saw as a feature of Purcell’s music. He calls the third movement a Chacony, twenty two variations on a ground bass, whose final three variations, despite finally reaching C major, feel like a great shout of pain and horror.
