[4] One of the numbers, a setting of Emily Brontë's poem "A thousand gleaming fires", was the first piece of music Britten wrote for Pears, with whom he had recently begun a friendship that became a lifelong personal and professional partnership.

[8] Reviewing that performance, Hilary Finch wrote in The Times, "bearing up the mawkish tales of angelic rescue and hymning of watchers and holy ones, is a robust cyclic plan, some healthy string writing (Britten had recently completed the Frank Bridge Variations) and, best of all, a direct, unselfconscious engagement with the word so characteristic of early Britten."

She concluded: The composer's pleasure in bending and unbending plainchant to his own rhythmic and harmonic will is almost palpable; the metrical spoken (shouted) male chorus of "War in Heaven", a tour de force of earlier film techniques; the naivety of the Emily Bronte setting … in no way faux.

The work abounds in fingerprints for the spotting (a Mahlerian funeral march,[n 2] a fanfare heralding Les Illuminations, Britten's first "congregational" hymns; and it is primarily of documentary and musicological interest.

Spoken text follows, "He maketh the angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire" by Theodosius, "When all the sons of God shouted for joy", about Lucifer, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Hell heard th'unsufferable noise" by from Paradise Lost by John Milton.

A speaker continues with "It was the rebel angel, Lucifer" by Richard Ellis Roberts, then movement 3c for soprano, choir and organ reflects the annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:26–28, 48).

Choral movement 4 sets a hymn Archbishop Rabanus Maurus translated by Athelstan Riley, "Christ the fair glory of the holy angels".

A speaker continues with another text by Roberts, "And as it was in the beginning ... the light shall triumph", leading to the final movement 5 in Part 2, "War in Heaven".

[11] Part 3, "Angels in Common Life, and at our Death" begins with movement 6 for soprano, choir and orchestra, "Heaven is here" from an unknown source.