After Britten's death there was no appreciable lapse of interest in his music; its audience rather increased during the last quarter of the 20th century. Perhaps the tide that swept away serialism, atonality and most forms of musical modernism and brought in neo-Romanticism, minimalism and other modes of expression involved with tonality carried with it renewed interest in composers who had been out of step with the times. Britten's 12-note manipulations could now be seen as retaliatory and subversive rather than as conciliatory and accommodating. His instinct for success, some would observe, had put him ultimately on the winning side. A simpler idea would be that his music is very good, and quality is irresistible. To maintain this as true (difficult in a postmodern environment) leads to the question
‘how good?’ and to unseemly comparisons. It is enough to note that Britten turned out to be more than the ‘local Shostakovich’ of Thomson's 1940s taunt – accurate to the extent that Britten was indeed to the UK what Shostakovich was to the USSR, and that he made an increasing issue out of locality. But to set Britten against the modernist ‘giants’ of the previous generation is as pointless as comparing him with innovatory popular musicians of a younger generation who reached a far wider audience still. Like most remarkable composers he was inimitable, possessed of a distinctive voice which renovated every aspect of the classical tonal tradition in which he worked, a voice and sound too dangerous to imitate.
The extent of his influence might nevertheless be taken up as an indication of his stature. Probably no subsequent British composer can have been entirely unaffected by his life and work, if not at a musical then at an organizational and operational level. He is a key figure in the growth of British musical culture in the second half of the 20th century, and his effect on everything from opera to the revitalization of music education is hard to overestimate. More formal homage came from composers everywhere as Britten's life drew on.
Britten reception, scholarship and criticism provides an avenue for exploring signs of his ultimate valuation. His financial success made possible the founding of several monuments to him and Pears in the
Aldeburgh area, including a well-staffed library at the Red House where the autographs, sketches and papers are kept. A team of scholars headed by Donald Mitchell (Britten's musical executor) has produced an enormous amount of documentary and musical material as well as critical insight in a very short time. In some cases, as in Mitchell's sensitive musico-biographical sketch accompanying Letters from a Life, the level of critical thought has been high; but on the whole the tone has (almost inevitably) been both laudatory and protective. Into this world the arrival of the professional biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, came as a cold shower. His unfettered account of Britten's life produced a recognizable human being with a psychological profile in which anger, cruelty and evasion figured large (and in which Pears often appears as Svengalian); he also revealed details about Britten's love of adolescent boys which some had thought unmentionable. Possibly his concern to reveal Britten's pathology meant that he rarely looked beyond the psychological traits towards their grounding in social causes and conditioning; and Auden's famous diagnosis and prescription (Letters, 1015–16) figured large in his interpretation, especially in dealing with the music. At a polar opposite to this approach, musical analysis had been prominent in Britten criticism from the start (as represented by the distinguished work of Stein and Keller, for example). Peter Evans's analytical study (D1979) was the first major, single-author book on Britten's entire output to appear. Arnold Whittall, whose earlier work focussed heavily on ‘extended tonality’ but later took a broader view of analysis and ventured beyond its pure application into genre criticism, has continued this tradition, and in the 1990s North American theorists began to engage interestingly with Britten's music. An encouraging sign is the appearance of a younger generation of writers with new and sometimes interesting viewpoints (several are represented in Cooke, D1999).
Britten's canonical status has never been unassailable, and there have always been resistances to the personal nature of his achievement. As he grew older he became on the one hand more
‘English’ and on the other more committed to Asian musics, neither of which has won him praise from British music critics anxious for wider European viability for the national artistic product, scornful of the thinness of his melody-orientated music and perhaps uneasy about its religious overtones, strange brand of exoticism and political affiliations. Criticism by Paul Griffiths (D1991) and Robin Holloway (D1992) points in the one case regretfully to Britten's retreat from European eclecticism into cosy provincialism and in the other to a failure of musical nerve at important moments. Those unconcerned with questions of national identity may recognize what was gained in the move that disturbs Griffiths; the Wagnerian model conjured up usefully by Holloway to highlight Britten's institutional success, moreover, is hardly apt for a selfconscious figure of the mid-20th century, and many will share the feeling about both Britten and the Stravinsky of the 1920–50 period that the powerful emotional effect depends on the musical restraint. Dangerous enough was the Mahler
connection, apparent in everything except the desire for totalization of the artistic experience, which Britten almost always successfully avoided.
He was in most respects an exceptionally aware composer; the areas in which that awareness failed are therefore all the more telling.
Homosexual artists and thinkers have often shown great sensitivity to the oppression of women in patriarchal society. Britten made a gesture in this direction in Act 2 scene i of Peter Grimes, when Ellen is united musically with Auntie and her loose-living nieces in gender solidarity. The scene is an exception in Britten's output. Lucretia's sacrifice is overshadowed by reference to Christ's. A full half of the dramatic works (those in Herbert, E1979), include no women's voices or (like Paul Bunyan and Death in Venice) no significant female roles.
Gloriana movingly portrays a woman's struggle with a traditionally male role; the Madwoman in Curlew River, arguably Britten's most touching female character, is sung by a man. This leaves the purposely ambivalent portrayal of the Governess in The Turn of the Screw as the chief contribution to gender variation in the operas (the fearsome group of female characters in Owen Wingrave would need special pleading under any circumstances). The musical depiction of Phaedra as ennobled rather than mad may be a last-minute reprieve, yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘for the most part [Britten]
confines his women to traditional roles and stereotypes, often identifying them with the society that restricts or even destroys his main characters’ (McDonald, E1986, p.83). This limitation is perhaps the chief reason why claims for Britten's greatness need to be qualified. Compounding this limitation is the failure of ‘such a champion of the oppressed … to see the underlying connections among different kinds of oppression’ (ibid., p.100).
An un-Forsterian lack of connection can also be discerned in Britten's appropriation of Asian music and drama. He did not identify with his sources (towards the Japanese he adopted a distinctly patronizing attitude); nor did he limit the uses to which they were put, which included traditionally exotic colouring, the projection of aberrant sexual desire and even the utopian portrayal of such things as
‘peace’, the Platonic perfection of Beauty and, inevitably, nescience.
His status as a homosexual oppressed in his own culture can be argued as a mitigating circumstance: his ‘Orientalism’ – to apply Edward Said's critique, and his terminology, to this phenomenon – was not of the same kind as Durrell's or Flaubert's (see Brett, E1994).
Britten's enclosing of his own meanings in the protective borrowed frame, and in Curlew River his appropriating aspects of Japanese nō that appealed to him while discarding the Buddhist elements that did not, may argue the opposite (Sheppard, in Revealing Masks, E.
forthcoming). Such examples, rather than distancing Britten from the
‘colonizing impulse’, put him in collusion with it, placing him in line with the Elgar he would have despised as the inheritor of limited and unthinking attitudes to other peoples of the world even while he was admiring of, as well as benefiting financially and artistically from, their artistic prowess.
Issues of gender and race are the more important because Britten shines out as one of the few composers of the 20th century with claims to effective political and social engagement in other areas. His political commitment, begun under the tutelage of Auden and Isherwood and developed through contact with Forster and others, stems from a complicated sense of himself as a homosexual. Sensing the difficulties surrounding the place of the homosexual in society, and positioning himself so that his partnership with Pears, projected as ‘normal’, masked his paedophilia, Britten pursued a political agenda far removed from the liberal socialism of his predecessor Vaughan Williams. It was similarly rooted in the past, and involved ‘a sense of disengagement from immediate politics’ that increased as Britten grew older (Carpenter, 486). Along the lines of interwar homosexual pacifist ideals, it placed personal relations above allegiance to institutions; it put the individual before society; it tended to show institutions such as the law, the military and the church as hypocritical, unjust or simply evil; it favoured erotic relations over marriage; it portrayed the patriarchal family as shallow and oppressive; it passionately argued justice for the victim and the victimized; and it presented the difficulty of homoerotic relations as a legacy of this society. Britten's assimilation into the British establishment, and his silence on contemporary issues, effectively camouflaged the devastating extent of this social and political critique in his works.
Two critical responses to the Other, or the marginal, have been discerned (see Champagne, The Ethics of Marginality, Minneapolis, 1995): the liberal humanist response, granting it greater subjectivity by trying to remake it in the image of the dominant or centre; and valorizing or privileging the marginality of the Other by making a resistant and transgressive use of the very lack at the centre that caused the construction of the margin. As a person compromised by his position in society, Britten nevertheless managed to cling to some semblance of the second view. ‘All a poet can do is to warn’, reads the War Requiem epigraph: but to warn, or do anything else, the poet has to be heard. It may be that North America taught Britten that to work for centrality at home would ultimately be more artistically and therefore politically effective than marginality abroad – as a means of articulating a message to society from that margin where Britten, at least, always imagined he lived. His old left friends like Slater and Auden were irritated to see him as a ‘courtier’, and gay politics, from which he distanced himself, have moved far beyond his nervous position. Yet one still needs to acknowledge his consistency and integrity in pursuing, sometimes to his friends’ acute discomfort, a fairly incisive and certainly passionate line on pacifism and homosexuality in relation to subjectivity, nationality and the institutions of the capitalist democracy in which he lived. This line he maintained in his work rather than his life, where he acted out a role of charm and compliance laced with occasional brutality. The political stance is all the more remarkable because it barely exists anywhere else in art music outside avant-garde circles already too self-marginalized to
offer any hope of serious intervention in the status quo. Further, it scores over the credo of the many later composers who, though openly gay, vow that homosexuality has nothing whatsoever to do with their music; they do not see it as a site from which to disrupt present notions of subjectivity and the organization of power and pleasure, as Britten demonstrably did.
Britten's artistic effort was an attempt to disrupt the centre that it occupied with the marginality that it expressed. If in life he was less discerning than Forster, his achievement as an artist makes interesting counterpoint with that of the novelist who, though he contributed a great deal in A Passage to India to the eventual downfall of the British Empire, never specifically addressed the persecution of his own kind until Maurice, which appeared posthumously. ‘We are after all queer & left & conshies which is enough to put us, or make us put ourselves, outside the pale, apart from being artists as well’, wrote Pears in 1963 to Britten, who in his public life predictably ‘wanted to be just an absolutely normal person’
(as reported by Reiss to Carpenter, 419–20, 445). It was Britten's achievement (reinforced rather than contradicted by Tippett) that British art music during his years of ascendancy came to embrace what was indelibly ‘queer & left & conshie’: and, instead of being instantly marginalized, it has travelled all over the world. There is no need to argue that in the process of assimilation Britten’s music may have had some transformative effect; it is enough to note that, for anyone inclined to explore beyond its deceptively ‘conservative’ and desperately inviting surface, it offers not only a rigorous critique of the past but possibly also the vision of a differently organized reality for the future.
Britten, Benjamin WORKS
stage
incidental music orchestral
instrumental ensemble vocal
chamber and solo instrumental Britten, Benjamin: Works stage
original works
dates are of first publication; earlier printed rehearsal editions are in GB-ALb and Lbl
Op. Title Genre, acts Composition
17 Paul Bunyan operetta, prol,
2 1939–41
Libretto : W.H. Auden
First performance :
cond. H. Ross, New York, Columbia U., 5 May 1941
rev. version 1974–5
First performance :
cond. S. Bedford, BBC, 1 Feb 1976; stage, cond. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 4 June 1976
Publication; autograph : vs 1978, fs 1993
33 Peter Grimes op, prol, 3 1944–5
Libretto :
M. Slater, after G. Crabbe: The Borough
First performance :
cond. Goodall, London, Sadler’s Wells, 7 June 1945
Publication; autograph :
vs 1945, study score 1963; US-Wc
37 The Rape of
Lucretia
op, 2 1946; rev.
1947
Libretto :
R. Duncan, after A. Obey: Le viol de Lucrèce
First performance :
cond. Ansermet, Glyndebourne, 12 July 1946
Publication; autograph :
vs 1946, vs 1947 (rev. edn), study score 1958
39 Albert Herring comic op, 3 1946–7
Libretto :
E. Crozier, after G. de Maupassant: Le rosier de Madame Husson
First performance :
cond. Britten, Glyndebourne, 20 June 1947
Publication; autograph : vs 1948, study score 1970
45 The Little
Sweep [Act 3 of Let’s Make
an Opera,
op.45]
‘an
entertainment
for young
people’
1949
Libretto : Crozier
First performance :
cond. N. Del Mar, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 14 June 1949
Publication; autograph : vs 1950, study score 1965
50 Billy Budd op,4 1950–51
Libretto :
E.M. Forster and Crozier, after H. Melville
First performance :
cond. Britten, London, CG, 1 Dec 1951
Publication; autograph : vs 1952
rev. version op, 2 1960
First performance :
cond. Britten, BBC, 13 Nov 1960; stage, cond. Solti,. London, CG, 9 Jan 1964
Publication; autograph : vs 1961, study score 1985
53 Gloriana op, 3 1952–3; rev.
1966
Libretto :
W. Plomer, after L. Strachey: Elizabeth and Essex
First performance :
cond. Pritchard, London, CG, 8 June 1953
Publication; autograph :
vs 1953, vs 1968 (rev. edn), study score 1990; GB-Lbl
54 The Turn of
the Screw
op, prol, 2 1954
Libretto :
M. Piper, after H. James
First performance :
cond. Britten, Venice, Fenice, 14 Sept 1954
Publication; autograph : vs 1955, study score 1966
57 The Prince of
the Pagodas ballet, 3 1955–6
Libretto : J. Cranko
First performance :
cond. Britten, London, CG, 1 Jan 1957
Publication; autograph : study score 1989
59 Noye’s Fludde 1 1957–8
Libretto :
Chester miracle play
First performance :
cond. Mackerras, Orford Church, 18 June 1958
Publication; autograph : vs 1958, fs 1959
64 A Midsummer
Night’s Dream op, 3 1959–60
Libretto :
Britten and Pears, after W. Shakespeare
First performance :
cond. Britten, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 11 June 1960
Publication; autograph : vs 1960, study score 1962
71 Curlew River church parable,
1 1964
Libretto :
Plomer, after J. Motomasa: Sumidagawa
First performance :
dir. Britten, Orford Church, 12 June 1964
Publication; autograph : rehearsal score 1965, fs 1983
77 The Burning
Fiery Furnace church parable,
1 1965–6
Libretto :
Plomer, after Bible: Daniel i–iii
First performance :
dir. Britten, Orford Church, 9 June 1966
Publication; autograph : rehearsal score 1968, fs 1983
78 The Golden
Vanity vaudeville for boys and pf 1966
Libretto :
C. Graham, after old Eng. ballad
First performance :
Vienna Boys’ Choir, dir. A. Neyder, Snape Maltings, 3 June 1967
Publication; autograph : 1967
81 The Prodigal
Son church parable,
1 1967–8
Libretto :
Plomer, after Bible: Luke xv.11–32
First performance :
dir. Britten, Orford Church, 10 June 1968
Publication; autograph : rehearsal score 1971, fs 1986
85 Owen
Wingrave op, 2 1969–70
Libretto : Piper, after James
First performance :
cond. Britten, BBC TV, 16 May 1971; stage, cond. Bedford, London, CG, 10 May 1973
Publication; autograph : vs 1973, fs 1995
88 Death in
Venice op, 2 1971–3; rev.
1973–4
Libretto : Piper, after T. Mann
First performance :
cond. Bedford, Snape Maltings, 16 June 1973
Publication; autograph : vs 1975, fs 1979
realizations and completions
J. Gay: The Beggar's Opera, realized Britten (ballad op, 3, Gay, T. Guthrie), op.43, 1947–8; cond. Britten, Cambridge, Arts Theatre, 24 May 1948; vs (1949), study score (1997)
H. Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, z626, ed. Britten and I. Holst (op, 3, N. Tate), 1950–
51, rev. 1958–9; cond. Britten, Hammersmith, Lyric, 1 May 1951; rev. version, cond.
Britten, Drottningholm, 16 May 1962; vs (1960), fs (1961)
Purcell: The Fairy Queen, z629, ed. Pears, Britten and I. Holst (masque, after Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream), 1967; cond. Britten, Snape Maltings, 25 June 1967; vs (1970)
G. Holst: The Wandering Scholar, op.50, ed. Britten and I. Holst (chbr op, 1, C.
Bax), ?1948–51; cond. I. Clayton, BBC, 5 Jan 1949; vs (1968) Britten, Benjamin: Works
incidental music film
recording sessions were in year of composition unless otherwise stated GPO produced by General Post Office Film Unit
BCGA produced by British Commercial Gas Association
The King's Stamp, fl + pic, cl, perc, 2 pf, April–May 1935 [rec. 17 May]; GPO, dir. W.
Coldstream, 1935
Coal Face (verse: W.H. Auden, M. Slater), spkr, whistler, SATB, perc, pf, May–June 1935 [rec. 19, 26 June]; GPO producer J. Grierson, dir. A. Cavalcanti, 1935
CTO: the Story of the Central Telegraph Office, fl, ob, cl, perc, pf, July 1935 [rec. 20 July]; GPO, producer S. Legg, 1935
Telegrams, boys' vv, fl, ob, cl, perc, pf, July 1935 [1st recording session 20 July];
GPO [film unidentified]
The Tocher (film ballet), boys' vv, fl + pic, ob, cl, perc, pf, July 1935 [rec. 20 July];
GPO producer Cavalcanti, animator L. Reiniger, 1938 [see also choral, Rossini Suite]
Gas Abstract, fl, cl, bn, perc, pf, Aug–Sept 1935 [rec. 3 Sept]; ?BCGA [film unidentified]
Dinner Hour, fl, cl, perc, pf, vn, vc, Sept 1935 [rec. 16 Sept]; BCGA, dir. A. Elton, 1936
Title Music III, fl, cl, perc, pf, vn, vc, Sept 1935 [rec. 16 Sept]; BCGA, dir. A. Elton, ? 1936 [film unidentified]
Men behind the Meters, fl, ob, cl, perc, glock, pf, vn, vc, Sept–Oct 1935 [rec. 16 Sept, 2 Oct]; ARFP for BCGA, dir. A. Elton, 1936
Conquering Space: the Story of Modern Communications, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, dir. Legg, 1935
How the Dial Works, fl, ob, cl, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, producer R.
Elton, R. Morrison, 1937
The New Operator, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, producer J.
Grierson, dir. Legg [soundtrack for silent film; never released]
The Savings Bank, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, dir. Legg, 1935
Sorting Office, fl, ob, cl, bn, perc, pf, Sept 1935 [rec. 1 Oct]; GPO, dir. H. Watt [soundtrack for silent film; never released]
Negroes/God's Chillun (Auden), Sept–Nov 1935, rev. Jan 1938 [rec. 8 Jan]; S, T, B, TB chorus, ob + eng hn + tambourine, perc, hp, pf + b drum; GPO, 1938
GPO Title Music 1 and 2, fl, ob, bn, tpt, perc, hp, vn, va, vc, db, ?Nov 1935; GPO [film unidentified]
Night Mail (J. Grierson, Watt, B. Wright; verse: Auden), spkr, fl, ob, bn, tpt, perc, vn, va, vc, db, Nov 1935–Jan 1936 [rec. Dec 1935–Jan 1936] (2000); GPO, producer Grierson, dir. Watt, Wright, sound dir. Cavalcanti, 1936 [see instrumental ensemble]
Peace of Britain, fl, cl, tpt, perc, pf, str, March 1936 [rec. 21 March]; Freenat Films
and Strand Films, dir. P. Rotha, 1936
Around the Village Green, 2 fl, ob, cl, tpt, trbn, timp, perc, hp, str, April, Sept–Oct 1936 [rec. 19, 21 Oct]; Travel and Industrial Development Association, dir. Spice, M.
Grierson, 1937 [see orchestral, Irish Reel]
Men of the Alps, fl + pic, cl, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, str; Sept–Oct 1936 [rec. 20 Oct]; GPO and Pro Telephon, Zürich, producer, Watt, dir. Cavalcanti, 1937
The Saving of Bill Blewitt, fl, cl, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, str, Oct 1936 [rec. 20 Oct]; GPO,
The Saving of Bill Blewitt, fl, cl, tpt, trbn, perc, hp, str, Oct 1936 [rec. 20 Oct]; GPO,