Eleven-Fifty

‘Eleven-Fifty’ is the fourth of seven separate songs to various poets written by
Lennox Berkeley in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They were grouped together for
convenience as Opus 14, No. 2.

‘The Beacon Barn’,thethird of these songs, also has a text by Patrick O’Malley
who, according to Tony Scotland, was ‘one of the First World War poets who
served as a private in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers’. ‘Eleven-Fifty’ was composedinApril
1938 and is a brief glorification of a high-speed train where the moto perpetuo
accompaniment barely stops. Berkeley admired Honegger, bought a copy of the
score of his railway depiction Pacific 231 in 1924andreviewed enthusiastically an all-
Honegger concert conducted by the composer in Paris (‘A Paris Letter’, The Monthly
Musical Record, June 1929).