Britten's first masterpiece, A Boy was Born, paid tribute to the English choral tradition which had played so prominent a part in our musical history, albeit with a technical virtuosity very different from the manners, if not the modes, of conventional British pastoralism. Although A Boy was Born is not strictly speaking a religious work, it is about the burgeoning of life in innocence, and Britten's ‘cleverness’ involved a knack of discovering musical images that ‘enact’ aurally and even physically the visual images of the poems: a marvellous instance of which is the simultaneously burning and freezing major and minor seconds that aurally ‘realize’ the Bleak Mid-Winter of Christina Rosetti's poem.