As I explained in Chapter Four, Alexander Goehr’s own ensemble grew out of the Brighton Festival Ensemble. The concert brochure for the first Brighton Festival in 1967 noted that Goehr had been commissioned to write a new work to be performed at the first concert on Sunday 16 April. The assumption was that this would be a theatrical piece like nearly all the other works the Brighton Festival Ensemble were performing in their three concerts. However, the work did not materialise. The commission was transferred to his Romanza for cello and orchestra played by Jacqueline du Pré and the New Philharmonia Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim the following year in the 1968 Festival. The expected music-theatre piece did not appear until nearly two months later than the Romanza, on 16 July, by which time the Brighton Festival Ensemble had changed its name to the Music Theatre Ensemble and was to perform at the City of London Festival in the Cripplegate Theatre.

The work was Naboth’s Vineyard, a dramatic madrigal with a text in Latin and English, adapted from I Kings 21, and written for two mimes, three singers and seven instruments. The description ‘dramatic madrigal’ refers to Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which the following year Goehr was to paraphrase for solo clarinet. Il combattimento, as we have seen, may be said to be the first piece of Music Theatre, as well as the first to be written in the stile concitato, the agitated style Monteverdi introduced to express warlike emotions. As detailed in Chapter Two, the action takes place outside the walls of Jerusalem, and the warlike emotions are aroused in the conflict between Tancred, the Norman hero of the First Crusade, and Clorinda, a female Saracen warrior. Both must wear armour and be masked. Most of the singing is undertaken by the narrator. Clorinda, for example, sings only when she is mortally wounded and asks to become a Christian before she dies. The main function of the combatants is to mime the actions described by the narrator, who sits at the side of the stage near the instrumentalists. Similarly, the action in Naboth’s Vineyard is performed by masked mimes, the singers representing Achab, Jezebel, Elijah and Naboth also positioned near the instrumentalists.