Lennox Berkeley’s choral setting of John Donne’s ‘Legacie’

Chester Music is to publish a neglected choral work by Berkeley called Legacie, a setting for mixed voices of a poem by John Donne dealing with the confusions of love and parting. It will join Berkeley’s other English choral settings, such as Spring at This Hour, There Was Neither Grass Nor Corn and The Midnight Murk. Legacie dates from 1943 when Berkeley was working for the BBC, and it may have been written for Fr McElligott’s Wireless Singers who performed Berkeley’s incidental music for a BBC drama called Yesterday and Today in April that year. The composer was feeling particularly isolated and vulnerable at this time because his new young friend, Peter Fraser, was away in Iceland with the RAF, and his thoughts may have been turning back to his previous relationship with Benjamin Britten (who was celebrating his thirtieth birthday that year). Matthew Berry, formerly Choral Promotion Manager of Chester Music – and joint founder of the chamber choir Commotio which has sung so much Berkeley – found the work in the British Library. James Welland, Managing Editor of Chester Music, will publish Legacie in the summer.