Orchestration as Form in Elisabeth Lutyens’s And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966) 

A work of haunting beauty and mystery, And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966) is a cantata for tenor and orchestra by English modernist pioneer, Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983). The cantata is highly representative of Lutyens’ serialism of the mid 1960s, and is similar to other works of this period, especially The Valley of Hatsu-Se (1965), in terms of scope, the serial structure, lyricism and the approach to orchestration. The evocative poetry of the cantata was written by Sicilian modernist poet and Nobel prize laureate (1959), Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968), and translated into English by Jack Bevan in 1965.[i] Lutyens first wrote the work to the English translation, later adding the original Italian (as determined from examining the composer’s autograph).[ii] In this work, Lutyens sets four poems by Quasimodo, each in its own movement, with instrumental interludes on either side of each poem. The cited recording was conducted and sung by Herbert Handt (who premiered the work) with members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1967. In this analysis, I examine how Lutyens creates and demarcates form through orchestrational groupings in her cantata, which alongside pitch serialism, is the main compositional determinant.