Exhibitions. New writing. Concert commissions. Academic research. Public events, in venues and online. And at the core of everything, preserving and promoting our extensive Anthony Burgess archive.
Your donation to the Burgess Foundation supports our mission to promote the life and work of Anthony Burgess in so many ways.
An eight-minute work for SATB chorus, In Time Of Plague (1984) is a setting of the poem by Thomas Nashe which broods on the inevitability of mortality. One of Burgess’s very few works for chorus, Burgess use the voices in a number of different combinations and achieves a variety of effects; there are no time signatures and the key modulates from D minor through to E by way of A minor and C minor.
Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss
This world uncertain is
Fond are life’s lustful joys
Death proves them all but toys
None from his darts can fly
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
– the first strophe of In Time Of Plague by Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)
Click the image below for the score (opens in a new tab).