The Company of Heaven

The Company of Heaven
by Benjamin Britten (1937 (1937))
Höllensturz by Eugène Delacroix, 1861 (fresco, Saint-Sulpice, Paris), corresponding to the texts about angels which are spoken and sung.

The Company of Heaven is a composition for soloists, speakers, choir, timpani, organ, and string orchestra by Benjamin Britten. The title refers to angels, the topic of the work, reflected in texts from the Bible and by poets. The music serves as incidental music for a mostly spoken radio feature which was first heard as a broadcast of the BBC in 1937.

Britten composed the music in between 8 August and 22 September 1937 as incidental music for a radio broadcast for Michaelmas on 29 September 1937. The associated text on angels, related to Michael as one of the archangels, was compiled by R Ellis Roberts. The broadcast was produced by Robin Whitworth, with an acting company headed by Felix Aylmer and singers led by Sophie Wyss and Peter Pears, with the BBC Chorus and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The conductor was Trevor Harvey. The complete work lasted just under 45 minutes. Britten confided to his diary, "the poetry side of it is pretty long". One of the numbers, a setting of Emily Brontë's poem "A thousand gleaming fires", was the first piece of music Britten wrote for Pears, with whom he had recently begun a friendship that became a lifelong personal and professional partnership.

Although Britten and Roberts discussed publishing the piece or reworking it for concert performance, Britten did neither. The score came into the possession of Harvey around the beginning of the Second World War, and after the war he arranged a concert version, which he conducted on BBC radio on 20 May 1956. Harvey's version comprised Nos. 2, 6, 7 and 8 Another version was published in 1990. The first concert performance of the complete work (then described as a cantata) was given at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1989. Reviewing that performance, Hilary Finch wrote in The Times, "bearing up the mawkish tales of angelic rescue and hymning of watchers and holy ones, is a robust cyclic plan, some healthy string writing (Britten had recently completed the Frank Bridge Variations) and, best of all, a direct, unselfconscious engagement with the word so characteristic of early Britten." She concluded: