Nick, I think that Maud is a pretty isolated case in Tennyson's output, though a fair number of apparently romantic ballads, like The Lady of Shallott, do hint at dark undercurrents which I suppose might have appealed to a composer of the Schreker/Zemlinsky school - maybe Tennyson's image as a pillar of the British establishment discouraged them from exploring.
As for who has set Tennyson successfully to date, well, Britten's setting of The Splendour Falls certainly shows that Tennyson can be illuminated with a middle-of-the-road 20th century idiom. Of the earlier composers, Stanford seems to have been a pretty good judge of which Tennyson poems he could do successfully. Nothing from Maud, while in Crossing the Bar, God and the Universe, some of the Princess settings, The Voyage of Maeldune and Merlin and the Gleam he got under the skin of the poetry. On the other hand, for one of the poems with a darker undercurrent, Claribel, he remained on the mellifluous surface. For things like The Revenge and Jack Tar, I suppose we can say he gave the poems the music they deserved and leave it at that.
To come to your other point, the lack of a British equivalent to German/Austrian expressionism, well, I suppose there are a few isolated examples like late Bridge or some of Francis George Scott's songs, though these latter always strike me as flash-in-the-pan experiments rather than a fully developed personal style. I find FG Scott more convincing when in more conventionally Scottish mode. It's curious that Cyril Scott was interested enough in Stefan George to have translated some of his poems into English, yet in his own music he remained anchored to a decadent variant of impressionism. Unless some of the many works we still don't know have surprises to spring. Dodecaphony in the UK had to wait for the "Anglicized Angst" of composers like Fricker and Searle, but would you call this expressionism?
All these are subjects that deserve a treatise to themselves!
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