Cantata: Boyhood's End

• Opening of Boyhood's End

In 1940, Morley College in London, where Tippett had just become Director of Music, was hit by a landmine. In the rubble of the library, he found some volumes of the Purcell Society Edtion and took them away to study. Purcell's methods of word-setting, in his Odes and dramatic music, in particular, impressed him greatly; and he became particularly fascinated by Purcell's more extended songs or cantatas, such as Mad Bess, The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation and Epithalamium, with their free mixture of recitative, arioso and song.

When the opportunity occurred for him to write a work for Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, who had just returned from the USA, Tippett decided to write a Purcell-style cantata. He took his text from the autobiography of the naturalist and writer, W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago. In this extract, the author looks back at the crucial period of his boyhood's end when he feared he might be losing his special gift of awareness of wild animals and plants. The words allowed Tippett to conceive a flexible musical structure in several sections, at different tempi, and in his setting of words he often makes use of florid Purcell-ian melismas.

The first performance of Boyhood's End was given by Pears and Britten at Morley College on June 5, 1943

Excerpt from recording by:
Philip Langridge (tenor), Andrew Ball (piano)
Hyperion CDA66749