[6] Lambert's friend, the conductor and composer Hyam Greenbaum provided support, ostensibly with the choral parts, but also with advice on the composition.
King George V had died just over a week before, and the sombre mood of the country was undoubtedly inimical to a work replete with references to plague, disease and death, and to the persistent aura of fatalism which affected much of Lambert's music.
[8] Although this tepid response could well have been anticipated under the circumstances, Lambert considered he had failed as a composer, and completed only two major works in the remaining sixteen years of his life.
[7] A limited edition of the two-piano score, with six drawings by Michael Ayrton as frontispieces to the main movements, was issued by Oxford University Press in 1946.
[10] The sections of Summer's Last Will and Testament are: King Pest is also an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's story of the same name.
[4] This was released in 1992 by Hyperion Records, with David Lloyd-Jones conducting the English Northern Philharmonia, the Leeds Festival Chorus, and baritone soloist William Shimell.