Lachrymae changes the usual order of theme and variations. Its encounter with Dowland allows the ending to disclose the source of a musical journey already undertaken.

A theme and variations usually begins by giving us something to remember. The tune is stated, its outlines become familiar, and the following sections invite us to recognise it under changing conditions. Britten’s Lachrymae, Op. 48, withholds that convenient point of departure. The source becomes fully recognisable towards the end, after we have already travelled through its reflections.

Written in 1950 for viola and piano and dedicated to William Primrose, the work bears the subtitle Reflections on a Song of Dowland. The song is If my complaints could passions move. Its eventual appearance changes the significance of what we have heard: details that first seemed independent can be understood as transformations of a source whose identity had remained partly concealed.

This arrangement gives musical memory a different task from the one it performs in a conventional variation set. At first, the listener attends to contrasts of gesture, pace and sonority without possessing an immediately available original against which to measure them. When the song emerges, recognition travels backwards. The conclusion supplies a relationship that has been active throughout the piece, although we could not initially hear it in the same way.

The viola is particularly exposed within this process. Its line can be sustained, broken into short gestures or interrupted by other kinds of articulation. The piano can support that line, place it against a contrasting texture or leave it to register with little surrounding sound. Changes in the relationship between the instruments help separate the reflections while allowing them to belong to one continuous enquiry.

The title itself invites care. Lachrymae evokes a familiar territory of Dowland’s musical reception, but that association does not make every work connected with tears interchangeable. The precise identity of the borrowed song matters, especially when following a transformation across several centuries. A resemblance of title can be a useful point of entry; the musical source provides the more exact relationship.

Britten later made a version with string orchestra, completed in 1976. That reworking offers another perspective on the same formal idea, yet the original partnership of viola and piano has a concentrated chamber scale of its own. The return of the source is entrusted to two players, whose differences of attack and sustain remain part of how the music is articulated.

There is a particular pleasure in hearing Lachrymae again once its ending is known. The source begins to announce itself through details that passed differently on a first encounter. Surprise gives way to anticipation, without exhausting the work’s expressive possibilities. Britten has made the direction of listening part of the composition: we move forwards through the reflections, then reconsider them in the light of a song finally allowed to come into focus.

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