Among twentieth-century composers Britten and Hindemith are those who have made perhaps the most notable use of the passacaglia—one of the few points of affinity between them. To Hindemith, predominantly a composer of instrumental music of sonata or symphonic proportions, the passacaglia is a confirming movement. It confirms a tonal centre, recalls earlier thematic material, and in general gives a sense of finality through its systematic progress and growth. Britten too has used the passacaglia as a confirming finale, but he also employs it to create a point of stability around which other movements can gravitate. More important, he has found its tension-building qualities a good means for expressing and intensifying certain moods in his operas and vocal works, where the passacaglia's persistent ground becomes a kind of animated pedal-point that supports the unfolding of the dramatic situation. The contrapuntal polarity between the ground and the expressive flow of the vocal line is one that is carefully controlled to convey the text's innermost expression. He often elevates the passacaglia to some crucial dramatic high point of an opera or song-cycle to reflect on a tragedy or intensify a dialogue. Several examples immediately come to mind associated with the subject of death. The well-known passacaglia in Peter Grimes, an instrumental interlude between scenes, depicts the derangement of Grimes and is, as it were, oppressed with the sense of his impending death. In The Rape of Lucretia there is a dramatic passacaglia after Lucretia's suicide, in which the other characters express their feelings on the finality of death.

With Shostakovich's Twelfth Quartet, Op. 133, completed in 1968 and published this year (why the delay?), the contemporary problem stands on its head, on and off, for close on thirty minutes—if, that is to say, we take the reactions of some of the most interesting members of our musical culture into account (composers, advanced and conservative, critics, musical music lovers); and without reactions, without music's social situation, there wouldn't be any problem anyway: the Grosse Fuge was absolutely unproblematic before it was repeatedly played, and some of it understood. But that was, has been, the contemporary problem standing on its feet—chronically advanced music: in advance, that is to say, not only of its own time, but of successive later eras, with the result that we still don't altogether understand the work (as I call it), or the movement (as others call it)—or I don't anyway; why does it end so abruptly? All I get in reply to my question is my own musical depression: people don't even notice that it does end abruptly.

In his recent biography of Schoenberg, Willi Reich quotes the composer's acknowledgement of ‘the compulsion of an inexorable but unconscious logic of harmonic construction’, and of ‘an inner compulsion that is stronger than education’, without making the point that musical analysts still tend to find atonal logic inextricable, and that the compositional procedures of a piece such as Op. 11 No. 3 can still not adequately be taught—even if it has made an appearance in a recent GCE syllabus. Reich himself ‘explains’ the emancipation of the dissonance as a thickening of polyphonic thought: there are ‘no dissonant chords’ in a horizontal line. It is, of course, a great deal less simple than that.

• Souster's Triple Music II (Michael Nyman)

• Henze's El Cimmarón (David Matthews)

• Maw's The Rising of the Moon (Anthony Payne)

• Messiaen's The Transfiguration (Brian Dennis)