"O dear, o dear, how I sometimes wish I were respectable & dead, &
that people wouldn’t get so cross.” Benjamin Britten is now dead (he would
have been ninety-five this month), and, if the ubiquity of his music is a
measure, highly respected if not quite respectable. Go to the Britten–Pears
Foundation website and a calendar of performances shows several live
performances of Britten works, large and small, every day of the year, all
over the world. Most of his works have never been out of the recorded
catalogue. Of the generation of classical composers who came to maturity in
the wake of the Second World War, he is the flagship, the emblem, the
victor. Yet, and in the face of music which is heartfelt, embedded in the
great tradition, largely consonant, while at the same time avoiding kitsch
or ironic reworking – in other words music with its own confident voice – he
remains curiously unloved. Suspected for his supposedly pederastic leanings
– an issue which John Bridcut has brilliantly reconfigured in his book and
television documentary Britten’s Children, recognizing the desire not to
abuse but to remain a child which lay at the heart of Britten’s imagination
– he is also presented as a twisted figure, with his “corpses” (friends and
associates who lost favour) and his fawning court.
A more empathetic understanding might see the difficulties involved in
maintaining a virtually open homosexual marriage in the sexually repressive
1950s; might appreciate how fame and distinction both attracted and repelled
a composer whose working motivation always had a puritanical edge. Loyalty
was understandably important, and despite the feuds and petty
unpleasantnesses of life in Britten’s Aldeburgh milieu (the dismissal of the
English Opera Group’s General Manager Basil Douglas is conveyed here in all
its nastiness by a brief sequence of letters), the composer evidently had
both some self-knowledge as regards his capacity to wound, and a sense of
guilt. During the tour of The Rape of Lucretia in the late 1940s, he
recalled “one very serious quarrel which I myself was involved with, with
one of my closest friends in the company. And I can remember Kathleen
[Ferrier] taking me aside one day and saying ‘Look, do try and be nice’. And
so I tried to be nice – and it worked”.
One thing that emerges in a casual way from this latest volume of letters is
Britten’s capacity both to be irritable, but also to apologize. Here he is,
writing to Myfanwy Piper during the stressful period leading up to the
completion of The Turn of the Screw, with the composer having both to write
the music and worry about the financing of its English Touring Opera
premiere at La Fenice in Venice:
My dear Myfanwy, So sorry I was so short & sharp on the telephone this
afternoon; only it’s been a vile day, just on the edge of thunder, &
work doesn’t seem to come very easily, & figures on the top of
everything is a bit much!
Britten’s letters are full of such stuff. He himself recognized his
limitations as a writer – “Letters are so feeble, unless one is a writer,
that it seems senseless to bother to put pen to paper”. Compared to Mozart’s
correspondence with his father, or the diaries of Prokofiev, Britten’s
letters are mostly unilluminating about the details of artistic creation,
and flat in tone, astonishingly lacking in urbanity (Communist Yugoslavia is
“adorable – wonderful people, young enthusiastic, brave and musical”; Nehru
“a wonderful saintly man, yet gay as well”) or literary interest. One feels
a little cheated. This, after all, was a dedicated pacifist, a homosexual
pioneer, a man who was central to the Auden circle in the 1930s, who worked
with assurance in the setting of literary text in song, and in the dramatic
construction of opera, with the unique achievement of a Shakespearean
operatic masterpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, using the playwright’s own
words (roughly half the text of the play). Though Britten could display a
remarkable literary sensitivity (who else could have set the dark knotty
intensity of John Donne with such a stamp of authority?), his own literary
skills were nugatory. The most extensive statement of his artistic creed,
the elegant speech he made on receiving the first Aspen Award, was reputedly
put together by Pears. In the end, one of the hidden themes of this volume
is Britten’s escape from the literary lions with their more or less
justified pretensions – Auden, Montagu Slater, Ronald Duncan, E. M. Forster
– and his embrace of more serviceable, more tractable librettists (William
Plomer and Myfanwy Piper) who, in deferring to Britten’s acute literary and
theatrical instincts, produced much better structured work.
That doesn’t mean that this latest volume isn’t full of fascinating material,
much of it to be found in the copious notes to the letters written by the
editors, and the extensive reprinting of reviews of the works which
dominated the period in question, the two operas, Gloriana and The Turn of
the Screw, and the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas.
Gloriana was one of the “great disasters of operatic history”, as George
Harewood described it in his memoirs. With a libretto by Plomer (in one of
cultural history’s more unexpected cross-currents, Plomer was the dedicatee
of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, with an enthusiasm for things Japanese
reflected as much in Britten’s later Noh play-influenced Curlew River, for
which he wrote the libretto, as in the Bond thriller about a Japanese
suicide garden, You Only Live Twice, which he edited), it was a deft
interweaving of the public and private lives of Elizabeth I. It had plenty
of scope for ceremonial, in a piece intended for Coronation celebrations at
Covent Garden, but its main narrative focus was on a crisis of authority
typical of much Britten opera (the Governess, Aschenbach, Captain Vere),
centring on the ageing Queen’s vexed relationship with her dashing Earl of
Essex, drawing on Lytton Strachey and the more recent work of the historian
J. E. Neale. Britten was clear from the outset: “it’s got to be serious. I
don’t want to do just folk dances and village green stuff”.
What emerges from the letters and their apparatus is the touching commitment
of the new Elizabethans, Elizabeth II and her consort, to the project. They
attended a dinner party organized by Harewood at which some of the music was
sung round the piano, were appreciative and engaged, and prepared for the
premiere to such an extent that Plomer claimed Prince Philip knew the
libretto better than he did. What did for the opera’s medium-term reputation
was a premiere before a Covent Garden audience more great than good, and
largely uninterested in music – “an audience of stuck pigs”, as the composer
viciously dubbed them. They, and a large segment of the establishment,
resented the fact that Britten had not produced a Merrie England for its
time. “We all feel so kicked around, so bewildered by the venom, that it is
difficult to maintain one’s balance”, Britten wrote to one close friend in
America. In the context of 1950s homophobia (it was around this time that
Britten and Pears were allegedly being considered for criminal investigation
by Scotland Yard), it is tempting to see moral panic at work, a desire for
easier certainties than Britten, despite his cooption into British high
society, was prepared to provide. More generally, Britten had shown from the
outset, with Peter Grimes, that he was not interested in operatic cliché. As
he wrote of Gloriana: “Make [Essex] into the traditional hero, or his
relations with the Queen more simple and direct, we cannot. This part of the
story must always remain elusive, but to me always fascinating”. But if
narrative simple-mindedness was to be eschewed, transparency of musical
means was not:
. . . what I’m pleased with, and what has got people down, is the simplicity
and directness, the fewness of the notes. This has been confused with
thinness of invention. Time will show if they are right about this, but from
a point of view of attitude or technique I’m sure I’m right, for this work
at any rate. There is also room in the world for Lulu.
The next opera, of course, Turn of the Screw (which he was writing at the time
he wrote this letter), was to be very much a homage to Berg’s other, very
different opera, Wozzeck.
A large section of the book is devoted to Britten’s trip to the Far East,
crucial to his development as a composer in providing a new set of musical
practices which, while outside the norms of Western tonality, could be
dissolved into it, avoiding the sort of arid avant-gardism which had come to
dominate so much post-war composition. The first major result of this
experimentation (though Britten had used gamelan sonorities before, in works
like Turn of the Screw) was the full-length ballet score The Prince of the
Pagodas. Working on this was the greatest struggle of Britten’s professional
life. “That b. Ballet is FINISHED [double underlined], & I feel as
if I’ve been just let out of prison after 18 months hard labour”, he wrote
to his close friend Prince Ludwig of Hesse. It was an unprecedentedly long
orchestral piece for the vocally inclined composer, and the arms-length
working pattern with the choreographer John Cranko was nothing like the
hand-in-glove composer-librettist relationship he had grown used to. Also,
Peter Pears, according to Britten’s close associate Imogen Holst, was little
interested in works in which he played no role, a painful absence no doubt
(though how much Holst’s own jealous possessiveness of Britten had to play
in this view of Pears is not clear). In the end, the Prince has not become
part of the Britten mainstream, but its idiom looked forward to another
masterpiece, the last opera, Death in Venice, and back to the Russian
tradition Britten so loved, and whose late twentieth-century inheritors
(Shostakovich, Richter and Rostropovich) were so important to him from the
1960s on.
Dominated as the volume is by opera and ballet, it is important to notice the
small masterpieces that were emerging in the interstices. Canticle II for
voice and piano, Abraham and Isaac, setting the text from the Chester
Mystery Plays, was not only a precursor of Noyes Fludde, the children’s
opera from the same text, an analogue for the sacrificial relationship
between Vere and Billy in the recently completed Billy Budd, and a source of
musical material for the War Requiem; it also represented a real development
in Britten’s musical language, a new simplicity and greater resort to “close
motivic working” as the editors call it. It “gave me great trouble in coming
into the world”, as he wrote in a letter. Canticle III, a setting of Edith
Sitwell’s “Still Falls the Rain – The Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn”, for
voice, piano and horn, which he wrote after The Turn of the Screw, had a
similar significance: “I feel with this work & the Turn of the
Screw [. . .] that I am on the threshold of a new musical world (for me, I
am not pretentious about it!). I am worried by the problems which arise . .
.”.
It is fascinating to learn that the voice and piano cycle of Thomas Hardy
settings, Winter Words (written in the wake of Gloriana), so convincingly
cyclic in performance, emerged only gradually from a series of disparate
songs. At the first performance they were announced simply as “Hardy Songs”,
and it was Pears who suggested the title, which seems in retrospect to
acknowledge Schubert’s great winter cycle starting in the same key. One
often senses with Britten that a lot was going on underneath, bubbling up
and taking unexpected form, despite his supreme technical mastery. The
composer’s obsession in his works with dreams and the intertwining of
imagination and the unconscious mind is significant here; it infuses the two
English orchestral song cycles, Serenade and Nocturne, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and, of course, The Turn of the Screw.
A chamber opera setting of Henry James’s unsettling novella, this last is one
of the acknowledged peaks of Britten’s output, a staple of the operatic
repertoire despite its unconventional forces – thirteen instruments, four
adults and two children. The ambiguity of dreams, the power of
unacknowledged desires are at its core. It has always struck me that this
opera, written in the same year as Lord of the Flies, plunges into the same
sort of savagery of the child’s unconscious as Golding’s novel does, the
jungle drums of the Governess’s journey to Bly a portent of what is to come.
What the letters reveal about the piece is how little the composer wanted to
know what was going on as he wrote it, how little he was able to write words
about the creative process; how much, when he did, he was either
disingenuous or lacking in self-awareness. Here he is, discussing titles for
the new opera with his librettist and only obliquely referring to the famous
structural device by which the musical development of the opera, a series of
variations, resembles the turning of a screw:
Thank you for your suggestions of titles. I do not feel that we have arrived
yet, although something to do with “Bly” is hopeful I think. I am not
worrying about it at the moment until I am forced to, but I must confess I
have a sneaking, horrid feeling that the original H. J. title describes the
musical plan of the work exactly!!
One of the most terrifying moments in the whole opera, Act Two, scene two,
when the children walk in like choirboys singing a sinister parodic
Benedicite, is painted by Britten, in a letter to the director Basil
Coleman, in the most innocuous light:
I feel so strongly, for the form & drama of the work as well as for the
music’s sake, that we must have something light and gay here, something for
the children to be young & charming in (for the last time, almost, in
the work) – & I think the idea of the hymn (a kind of “choir
procession”) to be the best yet thought of.
Yet when the work was complete, Britten’s surefootedness as a musical
dramatist, his conscious analytical mind, allowed him to express the heart
of the matter in a way in which he had not allowed himself to do during
actual composition: clear (as many confused critics of the opera are not)
that on the issue of the reality or otherwise of the ghosts in the opera,
“Myfanwy Piper and I have left the same ambiguities as Henry James did”.
Lacking in literary appeal, these letters are nevertheless an extraordinary
testament to the interaction of conscious and unconscious strands in musical
creativity, and to Britten’s ability to keep the two in play.
Philip Reed, Mervyn Cooke and Donald Mitchell, editors
LETTERS FROM A LIFE
The selected letters of Benjamin Britten
Volume Four, 1952–1957
633pp. Boydell Press. £45.
978 1 84383 382 6
Ian Bostridge’s numerous recordings include works by Schubert, Britten
and Handel. His performance of Britten: Les Illuminations, Serenade,
Nocturne with Simon Rattle, was recorded in 2005. He is also the author of
Witchcraft and its Transformations, 1650–1750, 1997.
