L'«invisible worm» della «Serenade» op. 31. William Blake nella ricezione di Benjamin Britten

The Australian poet and music critic Peter Porter wrote in 1984 that the English composer Benjamin Britten “had an antediluvian sense of the unity of musical and poetical vision”. However, in many studies on Britten’s work, the processes of reciprocal expansion-exploration between music and literature limit themselves to intuitive formulations, and textual analysis – when actually practised, often with great technical-musicological competence – ends up systematically by certifying an embarrassing imbalance towards its musical component. To be adequately evaluated on the compositional plan, instead, Britten’s poetical choices should be seen in the context of a literary Rezeptiongeschichte which nourished the composer’s anthropological experience and intercepted the logical deep-seated matrices of his musical thought: those poetical choices often prompted Britten to re-define his experience as a (usually) semantic reader of an English writer he had already set to music and to carry out a new critical reading through a new musical transcodification, produced in a new context (i.e., changed from the personal, social, cultural, et al. points of view). This essay adopts this hermeneutical perspective and analyses Britten’s Elegy on a poetic text by William Blake (his first Blakean choice to reach publication in 1943) in the compositional economy of his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings op. 31.