Britten, (Edward) Benjamin
(b Lowestoft, 22 Nov 1913; d Aldeburgh, 4 Dec 1976). English composer, conductor and pianist. He and his contemporary Michael Tippett are among several pairs of composers who dominated English art music in the 20th century. Of their music, Britten’s early on achieved, and has maintained, wider international circulation. An exceedingly practical and resourceful musician, Britten worked with increasing determination to recreate the role of leading national composer held during much of his own life by Vaughan Williams, from whom he consciously distanced himself. Notable among his musical and professional achievements are the revival of English opera, initiated by the success of Peter Grimes in 1945; the building of institutions to ensure the continuing viability of musical drama; and outreach to a wider audience, particularly children, in an effort to increase national musical literacy and awareness. Equally important in this was his remaining accessible as a composer, rejecting the modernist ideology of evolution towards a ‘necessary’ obscurity and developing a distinctive tonal language that allowed amateurs and professionals alike to love his work and to enjoy performing and listening to it. Above all, he imbued his works with his own personal concerns, some of them hidden, principally those having to do with his love of men and boys, some more public, like his fiercely held pacifist beliefs, in ways that allowed people to sense the passion and conviction behind them even if unaware of their full implication. He also performed a fascinating, as well as problematic, assimilation of (or rapprochement with) the artistic spoils of the East, attempting an unusual integration of various non-Western musical traditions with his own increasingly linear style.
1. Childhood, adolescence, 1913–30. 2. College and the profession, 1930–39. 3. North America, 1939–42.
4. Return to England, 1942–50. 5. Success and authority, 1951–5. 6. Transition and triumph, 1955–62. 7. Further travels, 1963–9.
8. Final testaments, 1970–76.
9. Reception, influence, significance. WORKS
ARRANGEMENTS BY BRITTEN
ARRANGEMENTS BY OTHERS OF BRITTEN WORKS WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PHILIP BRETT (text), JENNIFER DOCTOR, JUDITH LeGROVE, PAUL BANKS (works), JUDITH LeGROVE (bibliography)
Britten, Benjamin
Britten was the youngest of four children born into a middle-class family in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast. The family house was a substantial villa overlooking the sea. His father, a dentist, appears to have been a bit severe, even ‘hard’, and not a contributor to the family's extensive musical life, though charming and supportive in letters to his son. Benjamin received encouragement from his mother Edith, herself a singer and pianist. She was determined that he should succeed and controlled his life rigorously until his death in 1937. She was clearly the centre of his emotional world. The coincidence of his birthday with St Cecilia's day must have seemed a good omen for her ambitious dream of his becoming ‘the fourth B’: like many aspects of the composer's childhood, it has been celebrated in Britten lore and literature. An early attempt at play writing and fervent exploration of the piano as well as a substantial number of compositions written before he was ten have been taken to suggest an almost Mozartian precocity in his otherwise standard progress to preparatory school, a small local day school which he entered at eight.
At school, he appears to have diverted any adult disapproval and schoolboy bullying occasioned by his music and sensitive nature by proficiency at sports (he was a keen cricketer) and a certain toughness. He had piano lessons with Edith Astle, passing the Associated Board Grade 8 at 13, and began viola lessons at ten with Audrey Alston, who encouraged him to attend concerts in Norwich. It was through her he met the composer Frank Bridge. Mrs Britten had failed in attempts to draw wider attention to the prolific output of her son, who at 14 had 100 opus numbers to his credit (several have been published, mostly since his death; see Mark in Cooke, D1999). But Bridge was impressed, and persuaded Britten's parents to allow him to travel to London for composition lessons. These may have injured his ego, but they also helped Britten to introduce a certain rigour into his composition. The cardinal principles of Bridge’s teaching were ‘that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other … was his scrupulous attention to good technique’ (Britten, Sunday Telegraph, 17 Nov 1963). The String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, is among the first substantial works written under Bridge, whose influence is also evident in a song cycle with orchestra, Quatre chansons françaises, composed that summer for the older Brittens’ 27th wedding anniversary. These settings of Hugo and Verlaine allude to Wagner filtered through Gallic gestures, but the diatonic nursery-like tune for the sad boy with the consumptive mother in L'enfance is entirely characteristic.
In September 1928 Britten entered Gresham's, a public school at Holt in north Norfolk. This was a difficult and belittling experience, for the music master disparaged his composition, and the bullying (of other boys, not himself) outraged his always incendiary sense of justice. He felt keenly his first separation from home. One outlet was intensely passionate letters to his mother, another talk of suicide in his diary, yet another lapsing into psychosomatic illness, an involuntary defence that continued as a safety valve throughout his life. The music master
eventually came round, at least to the extent of performing his Bagatelle for violin, viola and piano in a school concert in March 1930. But the family allowed him to leave after two years when he unexpectedly passed his School Certificate in 1930.
The lessons with Bridge continued to stimulate and direct his need to compose. The single-movement Rhapsody for string quartet of March 1929 looks forward to the two Phantasy compositions of the early 1930s. The following year came the Quartettino, with its conscientious if garrulous motivic working out of a five-note motto; and there were several works featuring the viola, including a solo piece (published posthumously as Elegy), written just after Britten left Gresham's and perhaps hinting at his unhappiness there. It was followed by two sketches (published posthumously as Two Portraits), the first a vigorous movement for strings depicting his school friend David Layton (whom Britten described in his diary as ‘clean, healthy thinking & balanced’, Carpenter, C1992, p.75) and the second entitled ‘E.B.B.’, with solo viola playing a melancholic folklike tune, evidently a self-portrait. The well-known Hymn to the Virgin, composed during his last term at Gresham's, was long one of the two earliest compositions in his published catalogue of works, together with the setting of Hilaire Belloc's The Birds composed a year earlier.
Britten, Benjamin
2. College and the profession, 1930–39.
The Birds, A Wealden Trio (a carol for women's voices) and several instrumental pieces had been sent off as part of a successful application for a scholarship to the RCM. Although this was an improvement over Gresham's, Britten did not in later years conceal his dismay at the ‘amateurish and folksy’ atmosphere he encountered among the students. Arthur Benjamin was his piano teacher, and he went to John Ireland for composition lessons, though Bridge remained more influential. Britten seems to have aroused defensiveness (and perhaps seductiveness) in the erratic Ireland, and the lessons have often been portrayed as a dismal failure. Later, Britten admitted to Joseph Cooper that ‘Ireland nursed me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence’ (Letters from a Life, A1991, p.147).
Living in London, however, gave the young composer the opportunity to widen his knowledge of the repertory. Although Bridge had steered his interests in the direction of modernism (he would not have encountered Schoenberg at the RCM, as Henry Boys later noted: Letters, 397), the young Britten was still in love with Beethoven and Brahms during his early years there and showed little of his later hostility to the English ‘pastoral school’. His diary entries from January 1931, however, chronicle a fascinating array of performances and reactions to them: he ‘could not make head or tail’ of Schoenberg's Erwartung; found Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ‘bewildering & terrifying’ but his Petrushka ‘an inspiration from beginning to end’; and the Symphony of Psalms quickly became a
classic for Britten. Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen was ‘a lesson to all the Elgars & Strausses in the world’ – Mahler was of course to become a major influence on his orchestral technique and sense of compositional irony, and in 1943 he wrote about the Fourth Symphony that ‘I have almost more affection for that piece than for any I know’. Britten found himself ‘absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar, for more than 2 minutes’. He later told Walton that hearing his Viola Concerto and overture Portsmouth Point at that time ‘was a great turning point in my musical life … you showed me the way of being relaxed and fresh, & intensely personal & yet still with the terms of reference which I had to have’. Many of the observations have to do with individual performers, not just conductors and soloists, but also players in the orchestra. After a performance by the Berlin PO under Furtwängler in 1932 he wrote: ‘F's readings were exaggerated & sentimentalised (esp. so in last item [Tchaikovsky's Symphony no.6] – no wonder a member of the audience was sick!! The orch, is a magnificent body, tho’ slightly off colour to-day (e.g. wind intonation, 1st clar. & 1st Horn) Strings are marvellous. Timpanist great. Marvellous ensemble and discipline’.
By 1933 his attitudes were clarifying. From 3 March dates his comment on ‘two brilliant folk-song arrangements of Percy Grainger … knocking all the V. Williams and R.O. Morris arrangements into a cocked-hat’. Early in 1935 he complained to the composer Grace Williams about the ‘“pi” and artificial mysticism combined with … technical incompetence’ in Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, and later in the year he lamented to Marjorie Fass, a quaint intimate of the Bridges, the news of Berg's death: ‘The real musicians are so few & far between, arn't they? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schönbergs & Bridges one is a bit stumped for names, isn't one? Markievitch may be – but personally I feel that he's not got there yet. Shostakovitch – perhaps – possibly’. In October 1936 Britten condemned the Sibelius in Moeran's G minor Symphony: ‘This is going to be almost as bad as the Brahms influence on English music I fear’. By 1952 Britten admitted that ‘I play through all his [Brahms's] music every so often to see if I am right about him; I usually find that I underestimated last time how bad it was!’. That quotation comes from the frankly canonizing anthology edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller in which Lord Harewood presented what is tantamount to an official lineage: Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Schubert, Verdi, Mahler, ‘even Tchaikovsky, if he is played in a restrained, though vital way’, Berg and Stravinsky.
At the end of the second year at the RCM Britten won the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize with his Phantasy in F minor for string quintet. It received its first professional performance at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert in 1932 together with three two-part songs on poems of de la Mare (his first published works). The Phantasy is more adventurous and focussed than the String Quartet in D of the first year and shows a tug of war between Ireland, who appears to have been pushing Britten to the vocal-pastoral version of Englishness (he wrote mainly vocal music during his first year with Ireland), and Bridge.
More remarkable is the Sinfonietta, his op.1, written in three weeks during summer 1932 and first performed at another Macnaghten-Lemare concert in January 1933, with Britten himself conducting it at the RCM in March (the Mendelssohn prize for which it was submitted went to another student, though Britten received a consolatory £50). Its opening A–B dissonance and adventurous scoring aggressively advertises an allegiance to European modernism, and even when it lapses into English rhapsodic lyricism in the slow movement the tautness of the ensuing violin duo rescues it from any debility. The debt to Schoenberg's first Kammersymphonie (pointed out by Erwin Stein in Mitchell and Keller, D1952), ultimately extends perhaps to the manner of thematic derivation that Peter Evans has argued as central to Britten's technique. The careful working out of themes and contrasts also dominates the Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, also written in 1932, and first performed in August 1933 on the BBC. As remarkable as either is an ambitious Double Concerto in B minor for violin and viola begun in May 1932 and interrupted for the composition of the Sinfonietta. It shares features with op.1, such as the three-movement plan, the rhapsodic middle movement leading directly into the tarantella-like finale. Though perhaps less self-consciously modern, with its virtuoso solo writing, it is longer than the Sinfonietta and equally well sustained and argued. (It has been realized from Britten's annotated composition sketch, his customary original short score written in pencil.)
In December 1932 Britten graduated and garnered a £100 travel grant. He returned to Lowestoft after a further Macnaghten-Lemare concert which included the unfinished quartet Alla quartetto serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’. He intended to use the money to go to study with Berg, but his parents, to whom the RCM authorities had suggested that Berg was in some way ‘immoral’ and ‘not a good influence’, scotched the plan.
So he stayed at home, riffling through his voluminous juvenilia for material for his Simple Symphony and getting the first performance on the BBC of A Boy was Born, an ambitious set of choral variations in which his hard-won instrumental technique was problematically assigned to voices. Even here, though, the unusual juxtaposition of an accompanimental texture built on the ‘snow on snow’ image in Christina Rossetti's ‘In the bleak midwinter’ and the regular strophes of the Corpus Christi carol sung by a boys' chorus is characteristic of later Britten. In March 1934 he visited Florence for a performance of his Phantasy oboe quartet at the ISCM festival, which brought him to the notice of the international new music community. Later in the year came the Te Deum in C and the Jubilate Deo in E for St Mark's, North Audley Street, London, whose choir furnished the boys for the BBC performance of A Boy was Born. Apart from his father's death in April 1934, things were beginning to turn out well for Britten's 21st birthday: the BBC performed the Sinfonietta; OUP decided to publish more works (Boosey & Hawkes were to step in barely a year later with an exclusive contract and, slightly later, a regular stipend); and
he finally visited Vienna – though with his mother as chaperone and without meeting Berg – where he began work on the Suite for violin and piano.
At this point Britten started job hunting, and in May 1935 found ideal employment under Albert Cavalcanti in John Grierson's General Post Office Film Unit, working on the documentary The King's Stamp. It offered the challenge of writing to order at high speed, devising sound-effects and matching aspects of film technique that had a lasting impact on his composition. More important, it gave him entry into an artistic and intellectual world as liberating for him as the Diaghilev circle had been for Stravinsky. At its centre, and the most influential of all Britten's close friends, was the poet W.H. Auden, who quickly gave him the vacant post of composer in his ‘gang’ of artists and writers (Carpenter, 69). It included those associated with the GPO Film Unit, including Christopher Isherwood, and with the experimental Group Theatre, for which Britten wrote incidental music, including that to the Auden-Isherwood The Ascent of F6. Also involved in the GPO films was Montagu Slater, eventually the librettist of Peter Grimes, for several of whose plays Britten wrote the music. Films that involved an Auden-Britten collaboration, such as Coal Face and Night Mail, though celebrated, are only a small proportion of his projects, which included Lotte Reiniger's film about the Post Office Savings Bank, The Tocher, from which in 1935–6 was drawn material for the choral and orchestral suites based on Rossini. Britten's facility in this field led to work with other film companies and to an even longer association with the BBC (1937–47) on feature programmes and radio dramas whose music is only now beginning to reveal latent trends as well as a wide range of parody. If the clever cabaret songs (some to words by Auden) written for Hedli Andersen cause no surprise, the pseudo-Bach arias in one of R. Ellis Roberts's pretentious BBC religious features, ‘The World of the Spirit’, show how easily Britten could have fallen into a more conventional ‘neo-classicism’.
Britten's political awakening was much accelerated by his fresh circumstances. Dazzled by his new friends, he embraced their values and politics, which allowed him the ‘outsider’ status and rebellious stance he needed to jettison the safety of Lowestoft: he must have enjoyed, and been pained by, arguing about communism with his mother and refusing to go to Communion with her, as well as the slight disapproval of the ‘Brits’ (the Bridge ménage à trois) towards his clever new friends. Politics went hand in hand with a growing awareness of his sexuality and its social implications. He had carried off the asexual British schoolboy role rather well – for one thing, it concealed the obscure wounds also revealed in the stories, probably fictional, of early sexual abuse from a schoolmaster and his father's liking for boys, told to Eric Crozier and Myfanwy Piper (Carpenter, 19– 25) – but his undoubted desire for ‘his own kind’ was beginning to break through. Many of his new friends, including Auden, who imparted a carpe diem message and undoubtedly lectured Britten on the topic, were almost openly gay, at least among themselves, and he
must have realized that the left-wing, pacifist, agnostic and queer model they offered him provided a suitable identity niche in which to lodge his particular personal concerns, though few of his friends believed that he was ever entirely comfortable with it.
The immediate result of the friendship with Auden, apart from the flood of film scores, was a large orchestral song cycle on human relations to animals that would both attack the fox-hunting set at home and act as a parable for the worsening political situation abroad. Early in 1936, Auden chose three poems and wrote a prologue and an epilogue. In April Britten attended the ISCM festival in Barcelona, where he played his Suite with Antonio Brosa and heard Berg's Violin Concerto. The important new work, Our Hunting Fathers, went forward during the summer, and predictably met some disapproval at its first performance at the Norwich Triennial Festival in September. Later even Britten himself treated it as something of an embarrassment. Perhaps Auden's voice ventriloquizes too insistently; yet it is Britten's first major work to encapsulate a social or political issue in a way calculated to challenge received opinion because of the unusual combination of high drama and biting irony in an up-to-date eclectic score brilliantly orchestrated. If this way of thinking about music and art were all that Auden gave Britten, it was ultimately the gift that turned him into a composer of lasting impact. On this aspect of his work, Britten later wrote (in connection with Sinfonia da Requiem), ‘I don't believe you can express social or political or economic theories in music, but by coupling new music with certain well known musical phrases, I think it's possible to get over certain ideas’ (Letters, 705).
In January 1937, Edith Britten died unexpectedly after on illness. Britten was both devastated and, at a level just beginning to find expression in his diary, relieved to be free from her controlling influence. An immediate result was an exploration of those submerged sexual feelings that Auden, Isherwood and others had attempted to urge to the surface. On 6 March, at lunch with the conductor Trevor Harvey, he met a tenor, named in his diary as ‘Peter Piers’. A year later they were sharing a London flat. For some time there was a parental element in Pears's relation to Britten preventing a complete union, which only came about as a result of happy sexual experiences early in their time in North America (1939–42). It was a fortunate match for Britten on account of his real need for protection. On a cultural level it was unusual for being between two individuals of the same race, class and age, each with commensurable and connected talents that led to their spurring one another on.
In 1937 and for some time after, Britten was still trying out potential liaisons of a similar kind. But much of his own affectional and sexual imagination he invested in people younger than himself. In summer 1938 he renewed contact with Wulff Scherchen (son of the conductor Hermann), who had made an impression four years earlier in Florence. Scherchen, now 18, responded with alacrity and an affair appears to have ensued. Piers Dunkerley, a slightly younger boy
whom Britten had met in 1934 while visiting his old preparatory school, brought out a typically parental, advisory streak in the composer: ‘I am very fond of him – thank heaven not sexually’, he wrote, ‘but I am getting to such a condition that I am lost without some children (of either sex) near me’ (Letters, 403).
So it was prove: the ease with which he could enter into children's worlds, as well as the precipitous moments in his encounters with young boys, are outlined in some detail by Carpenter (especially 341– 54). It seems that Britten was captured at many levels by the notion of return to a perfect state symbolized by childhood – it has been called ‘innocence’, but a more useful concept is that of the ‘pre-symbolic’ explored by disciples of Lacan or of ‘nescience’ in the words of Hardy's poem ‘A time there was’ (set in Winter Words). The entry into the ‘symbolic’ (language) and the patriarchal order make this state impossible to recapture, and much of Britten's music is about the difficulty and pain of separation from it, but it is arguably his principal fount of non-verbal inspiration. Lack produces desire (in the already lost adult); and the sexual element that occasionally obtrudes, and can never satisfy or be satisfied, is a symptom of that lack. What Britten discovered – possibly aided by his constant invocation of pre-symbolic elements such as the mother's voice (many noted that Pears's voice strongly resembled his mother's) – was a way of accessing powerful messages from beyond the pre-verbal barrier, even perhaps occasionally of breaking that barrier, at a time when musical modernism was setting up barbed wire fences everywhere and driving ‘art’ music increasingly into the cold unfeeling camps of masculine intellect and order.
Meanwhile, the stream of film and incidental music was augmented by some important events, such as the amazingly rapid completion of a major new work, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, for the Boyd Neel Orchestra to play at the Salzburg Festival in August 1937. With its penetrating and unexpected parodies of genres and styles, and magnificent fugue and finale containing other references to Bridge's music, this work became for a time a standard against which other Britten works were judged. His adopting the congenial variation form had been foreshadowed in the slight Temporal Variations for oboe and piano written and performed at the end of 1936 and abandoned – the Times critic's reaction was to become a standard refrain: ‘It is the kind of music that is commonly called “clever”’ (Letters, 784). The same might have been said of the Auden song collection that followed the Bridge Variations. On this Island open with a Baroque flourish and Purcellian melisma that no sensitive English songwriter of the previous 50 years would have countenanced, and ends with a throwaway dance-hall tune to match Auden's parody of bourgeois materialistic existence. December 1937 saw the completion of the suite of Catalan dances, Mont Juic, written in collaboration with Lennox Berkeley in memory of Peter Burra, a close friend of Pears's. Berkeley was to move to the Old Mill at Snape that Britten had bought using his inheritance from his mother.
The following year brought an unusual triumph when on 18 August 1938 Britten played the first performance of his Piano Concerto, a display piece dedicated to Berkeley, at the BBC Promenade Concerts under Sir Henry Wood. An eloquent passacaglia-style Impromptu supplanted the weakest movement, the cheekier Recitative and Aria, in a 1945 revision. But the original slow movement belongs more fully to a work that is as much a milestone as the Bridge variations. After the responsible, serious instrumental pieces of the 1930s, this display of high spirits touched with sentimentality indicates a willingness to abandon a too-limiting decorum and give in to sensuality. The reference in this simply joyous, often almost campy work is Poulenc rather than Shostakovich, Prokofiev or any more approved master. No wonder Britten's friends and chief defenders, as well as the avuncular journalistic critics, deplored it: according to Marjorie Fass, the Brits ‘all utterly agree with the drastic criticisms of The Times & Sunday Times & Observer & Telegraph’ (Letters, 577), and even Peter Evans refers to ‘the irritatingly smart vulgarity of the final march’ (D1979, p.47). Britten himself could not ‘see anything problematic about the work. I should have thought that it is the kind of music that either one liked or disliked – it is so simple’ (Letters, 576).
After this, apart from incidental music for a big Basil Dean production (J.B. Priestley's Johnson over Jordan) opening in February 1939, there were several parting salutes to Britten's radical affiliations: incidental music for the Group Theatre production of the Auden-Isherwood play On the Frontier, and a partsong Advance Democracy, written for the Co-operative movement to words by the editor of Left Review, Randall Swingler (both in November, 1938); and in February–March 1939 an orchestral cantata, Ballad of Heroes, to words by Swingler and Auden in commemoration of the British members of the International Brigade who fell fighting the fascists in Spain.
Britten, Benjamin
3. North America, 1939–42.
Britten left for North America in April 1939. There were many reasons for him to try his hand abroad: the growing cloud of fascism over Europe; the plight of pacifists in the war that seemed inevitable; the departure of Auden and Isherwood in January; the frantic pace of his career and the need to determine his own direction; discouragement from patronizing or hostile reviews (to which the thin-skinned composer had already begun to show sensitivity); the opening up of new opportunities; and the curtailing of difficult emotional and sexual situations from which, from his letters, he appears to be trying to rescue himself – with Scherchen, Berkeley and perhaps others. The way was now clear for a commitment to Pears, and the union of the two men took place early in the visit, which began in Canada. After a trip to New York, they visited Copland at Woodstock in the Catskills and rented accommodation there for part of the summer. They then went to Amityville on Long Island to visit Pears's friend Elizabeth
Mayer, who accommodated them and also provided a surrogate mother for Britten.
The music of Britten's American years reflects his emotional turmoil. Young Apollo, written in summer 1939 for a CBC broadcast with the composer as piano soloist, was inspired not only by the last lines of Keats's Hyperion but also by Scherchen; originally designated op.16, it was withdrawn and not heard again until after Britten died, either because of the personal association, or (more likely) because of its dependence, musically, on an elaboration of the A major triad, a kind of musical minimalism that was not the order of the day. Les illuminations, completed in October, presents a fuller and more complicated picture of (homo)eroticism, focussed on the inevitably confused subject who ‘alone holds the key to this savage parade’. It incorporates a typical double focus on the major triads on B and E which is used not only to sustain ambiguity over long musical stretches but also (as in the opening fanfare) to express simultaneously exhilaration and confusion. Whatever one makes of the dedication of Antique to Scherchen and Being Beauteous to Pears, or of the direct sexual imagery with which the latter ends, or indeed the cruising depicted in Parade (its theme taken from the abortive Go play, boy, play suite), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the piece as a whole encapsulates a certain hard-won victory over the distancing effect from the purely corporeal to which British middle-class education was dedicated. It joyously and unashamedly reclaims music as an immediate, physical act. It is ironic that the decade of technical struggle towards professionalism should have led to the moment at the end of Phrase, after the transfigured exclamation ‘et je danse’ on a top B , where the string orchestra turns into a giant guitar to accompany a delirious diatonic melody supported by root position major chords. Copland – surely the ‘older American composer’ who said of Antique that he ‘did not know how Britten dared to write the melody’ – was shocked; even Pears labelled this incandescent work ‘a trifle too pat’ (Mitchell and Keller, D1952, pp.65–6): it is difficult to trust erotic joy on hearing it (at least, when it is unclouded by chromaticism), and musical solutions of personal problems are suspect. It is for reasons like this that one can see the Britten of this period castigated by friends and enemies alike for being too ‘clever’ and why even Copland ‘picked certain things in Ben to pieces’, as Colin McPhee put it, adding that ‘he must search deeper for a more personal, more interesting idiom … good craftsmanship is not enough’ (Brett, E1994, p.237).
The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, completed almost exactly a year later and written for and dedicated to Pears, can be taken as a further gesture towards this reclamation of the physical (as before, through another language and culture) and the official inception of their partnership. Among the other works, Sinfonia da Requiem, ‘combining my ideas on war & a memorial for Mum & Pop’ (Letters, 803), is a culmination of much of the earlier symphonically conceived music and is characteristic of later works in combining personal and
social concerns. The Japanese government, who paid for it, would not perform it at the festival celebrating their empire's 2600th anniversary; one can only wonder at Britten's naivety in accepting the commission.
1939–42 was a prolific period, for Britten also completed the Violin Concerto in the summer and autumn of 1939 when Britain declared war. The work opens in a suitably foreboding manner and ends in melancholy and nostalgia – so different from the ebullient Piano Concerto of little more than a year earlier. There was also the rather homespun Canadian Carnival, a Sonatina romantica to wean a keen amateur pianist host from Weber, Diversions for piano (left hand) and orchestra, two two-piano works, a second Rossini suite, to be used by Balanchine in a work for Lincoln Kirstein's American Ballet Company, String Quartet no.1 and the eccentric-sounding Scottish Ballad for two pianos and orchestra. Among works completed early in the visit, besides the Violin Concerto and incidental music for a further BBC play, was a setting of seven poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, intended for Pears's Round Table Singers, but abandoned. In late 1941 came another occasional piece (now called An American Overture) heavily indebted to Copland and written for Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra; when it came to light in the early 1970s, Britten commented that his ‘recollection of that time was of complete incapacity to work; my only achievements being a few Folk-song arrangements and some realisations of Henry Purcell’ (Letters, 985). One important project of the American period, Paul Bunyan, was also one of its most problematic, a patronizing attempt by W.H. Auden to evoke the spirit of a nation not his own in which Britten was a somewhat dazzled accomplice – he was vague about the nature of the title role's manifestation and staging only six months before it opened. A bruising response from ‘old stinker Virgil Thompson’ [sic] and the other New York critics did not help matters. The work was withdrawn and reinstated as op.17 only when Britten took it up near the end of his life (a good overture, wisely abandoned as too long, was subsequently orchestrated and published). The composition and production of Bunyan involved Britten and Pears in exchanging the luxury of the Mayer Long Island household for Auden's louche and alcoholic lifestyle in a Brooklyn Heights villa; from this bohemian atmosphere they fled soon after the production of Bunyan at Columbia University in May 1941. They took up an invitation to stay with the duo pianists Rae Robertson and his wife Ethel Bartlett at Escondido in California (where the Scottish Ballad, dedicated to them, was mostly written); there they came across the radio talk by E.M. Forster printed in The Listener that began: ‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England’. Dissatisfaction with American life had already surfaced in Britten's letters (‘the country has all the faults of Europe and none of its attractions’, he wrote to a friend: Letters, 797), as well as in one of those illnesses that often signalled his dissociation from his surroundings. Forster's article served as a catalyst to initiate the next stage in Britten's progress.
The flight to North America had enabled Britten to find out more about himself in general, to mature as an artist and person, and to find a certain level of acceptance among others and, more important, in himself about his sexual orientation (although many people recall continuing signs of shame). It had also given him an opportunity to reflect on his direction. The epiphany brought about by Forster's article not only sent him and Pears to Crabbe for the extraordinary subject of his first real opera but also may have given him the idea that if he did return it should be with the intention of becoming the central ‘classical music’ figure in Britain (as Copland was struggling to do in the far more diffuse culture of the USA).
Whether or not this was a fully conscious process, Britten began to define his relation to the British musical tradition during the American years. There was, for example, the need to release aggression towards it, palpable in the 1941 essay ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’, a statement so angry that it studiously avoids mentioning Vaughan Williams or Holst; Parry and Elgar are projected as the binary opposition haunting English composition, the one favouring ‘the amateur idea and … folk-art’, the other somewhat surprisingly seen as emphasizing ‘the importance of technical efficiency and [welcoming] any foreign influences that can be profitably assimilated’. The authenticity of folksong is intelligently attacked, and composers' dependence on it as raw material is deemed either unsatisfactory or the sign of a need for discipline which the second rate cannot find in themselves. Actual English folktunes are allowed a certain ‘quiet, uneventful charm’ but ‘seldom have any striking rhythms or memorable melodic features’. Yet the ambivalence, reflected in so many aspects of his life, did not prevent Britten from making a considerable investment in arranging them – ostensibly for himself and Pears to perform, though as time went on and volume after volume succeeded the first (printed in 1943) ulterior motives might be suspected. They gave Britten the chance, for example, to declare his independence from the ‘Pastoral School’ by conceiving the exercise of arrangement very differently. Unlike Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, who assigned an idealized, essential artistic quality to the melodies which their accompaniments were thought to reflect, Britten recognized that the venue changed the genre and turned them in effect into lieder or art-song, and proceeded brilliantly on that premise. To see how far he got one should turn from the easy seductiveness of The Salley Gardens and the psychological perceptiveness of The Ash Grove to the exquisite and exhilarating settings of Moore's Irish Melodies published in 1957.
Equally important in this redefinition of himself are Britten's ‘realizations’ of the music of Purcell and his contemporaries – the Tudor composers (except for Dowland) were out of bounds because of their adoption by Vaughan Williams and the pastoralists. Two song arrangements date from at least 1939, several were done in the USA, and a much larger number were prompted by the 1945 celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death. The choice was in tune with Britten's aesthetic as an aspiring dramatic composer: he had
already adopted a rhetorical style far beyond the parameters of contemporary English songwriters with their devotion to speech-rhythm, and was later in the booklet accompanying Peter Grimes to make a manifesto-like statement about restoring ‘to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell’ (Brett, E1983, p.149). The results are not so easy to assess as the folksong arrangements. Partly it is a matter of culture and epoch: ‘realization’, prevalent up to the 1950s, became extinct in the light of understanding of the appropriate delivery of 17th-century song. To historically informed taste, Britten's contribution appears to vie for attention with Purcell's melodies or declamatory gestures, and the bifocal effect inevitably becomes distracting. Britten is at his best when Purcell's music is at its strangest: Saul and the Witch at Endor, for instance, is inspired in its use of piano sonorities to re-compose the work. The character and extent of these pieces (which number 40, far greater than the demand for mere recital fodder) raise another issue, however, about whether the process is more to do with appropriation or competition than homage, not a simple musical act enabling Purcell to be ‘heard’ but rather another Oedipal episode in Britten’s complicated trajectory.
With a relation to indigenous and historical music more clearly defined, one further element of the British tradition demanded attention. As if to think of England were to think of choral music, on the journey home Britten wrote two substantial pieces, the unaccompanied Hymn to Saint Cecilia and A Ceremony of Carols for boys' voices and harp. These pieces combine a secure technique and an exquisite sound palette, a modernistic coolness in expression with a plentiful supply of emotional intensity, a musical language distinguished at once by its pronounced character as well as its restraint: all the marks of a classicism that cannot easily be discerned in earlier British music of the century.
Britten, Benjamin
4. Return to England, 1942–50.
Any bid for pre-eminence, as Britten must have realized on arriving back in England in April 1942, was a matter not simply of matching Vaughan Williams's achievement but of contributing something new and powerful to British musical life. The choice was opera. Vaughan Williams had been unsuccessful in this sphere and, further, no English opera had made its way into the standard repertory. But the risk of failure was greater, as Britten was aware. He still played childlike superstitious games to bolster his confidence as a composer (Carpenter, 239–40), and made comments like the one remembered by Tippett, with whom Britten and Pears struck up a close friendship: ‘I am possibly an anachronism. I am a composer of opera, and that is what I am going to be, throughout’ (Carpenter, 193–4).
Pears had worked on the scenario of Peter Grimes, the story that the two had culled from Crabbe's The Borough after reading Forster's
article. It was an unlikely and unpromising tale of a rough fisherman who beat and lost his apprentices, went mad and died. Isherwood, who turned down the job of librettist, was ‘absolutely convinced that it wouldn't work’ (Brett, E1983, p.36). But they persevered, turning Grimes into a more sympathetic figure of ‘difference’, a misunderstood dreamer. Montagu Slater, whom they now contacted, further shaped the libretto in a way that uncannily connected the private concerns of a couple of left-wing, pacifist lovers to public concerns to which almost anyone could relate.
The author Colin MacInnes confided to his private diary in the late 1940s that ‘Grimes is the homosexual hero. The melancholy of the opera is the melancholy of homosexuality’ (Tony Gould, Inside Outsider: the Life and Times of Colin MacInnes, London, 1983, p.82). Its theme of the individual persecuted by the community for no other reason than his difference cried out to be interpreted in this way, but could not then be publicly articulated. A more remarkable aspect of the allegory, however, had to do with ‘internalization’, the classic form of oppression. Those who do not have full status in society come to believe the low opinion others have of them: Grimes's fate is ultimately determined not simply by his isolation but by his capitulation to Borough opinion at the climax of Act 2 scene i, a much delayed, extremely powerful cadence on to B , the Borough's own key. On striking his friend Ellen in response to her ‘We've failed!’, Grimes takes up the offstage church congregation's ‘Amen’ in his ‘So be it’, proceeding to the long-awaited full cadence with ‘and God have mercy upon on me’ set to a motif that dominates the rest of the opera; the four triadic chords that define its limits and the angry brass canon it prompts both indicate that there can be no escape. Here Grimes internalizes society's judgment of him and enters the self-destructive cycle that inevitably concludes with his suicide. The two terrifying manhunts may have served as catharsis for Britten's own fear of persecution on returning to England as homosexual and pacifist and intensified the social message about internalization. The remaining problem, which apparently held up the opera for almost a year, was how to combat society's tendency to pathologize deviant behaviour such as Grimes's. To emphasize the social theme of the individual's tragic internalization of community values, the references to a domineering father in earlier versions of the libretto, for instance, had to be erased. The result was a brilliant appeal, made more palpable and convincing through music, to the alienation of every member of the audience: ‘In each of us there is something of a Grimes’ (Keller, in Brett, E1983, p.105).
It was a feat to get the audience to identify with an allegorical figure (easily interpreted as ‘the homosexual’) and to locate the problem as one of society's vicious treatment of difference. The opera also laid bare the paranoid nature of society's scapegoating someone wrongly felt to be threatening, and it questioned the operation of violence in which everyone is brutalized, not merely aggressor and victim. It also raised the issue of responsibility in the relation of individual and state
in modern democracies, brought to the fore by the focus on the deviant as an ordinary working man. The authors' passionately held views on these topics, realized in music of enormous persuasiveness, led to success from the moment of the opera's first performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, on 7 June 1945 (see Opera , fig.27). It was quickly taken up by other companies in Europe and the USA, and in due course became one of the rare 20th-century operas to enter the repertory.
Britten's actual return to England had been anticlimactic. Although the tribunal he faced, as a conscientious objector, called him up for non-combatant duties, he was allowed on appeal to go free. This was also true of Pears. Their giving recitals all over the country for CEMA probably counted in their favour, as did Britten's continuing work for the BBC. Pears meanwhile branched out into opera and was taken into the Sadler's Wells Opera Company; seeing him in this new context evidently persuaded Britten that he should take the part of Grimes, originally planned for a baritone. Through Pears, Britten met such people as Eric Crozier, the staff producer who was to direct Grimes, and Joan Cross, artistic director of Sadler's Wells, which led to the company's giving the first performance.
There was a lull in Britten's flow of composition around this time, owing partly to a serious attack of measles for which he was in hospital and then off work in March and April 1943. Several projects were abandoned, but during the months he was resting he composed, at Snape, the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. In this work he invented his own kind of shadowed pastoralism, not the ideal England of the folksong composers but a place in which the worm finds the bud and a darker side of medieval experience is explored (in the Lyke Wake Dirge); the high ostinato that is also the strophic vocal line enabled a particularly fruitful orchestral dialogue to suggest deeper levels to this poem. The Serenade was followed by the Prelude and Fugue for strings, written for the tenth anniversary of the Boyd Neel Orchestra, with a part for each of the 18 players in the fugue. More important was a commission from a clerical visionary in the arts, Walter Hussey, which afforded Britten the opportunity to set lines from Jubilate Agno by the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, who himself had a persecution complex. At the heart of Rejoice in the Lamb, framed by a Purcellian prelude and postlude and cheerful choruses and solos, lies a chilling choral recitative rehearsing the theme of oppression that was to boil over in Peter Grimes, and a spiritual resolution (‘But he that was born of a Virgin shall deliver me’) that looks forward to the very different scenario of The Rape of Lucretia. The Serenade was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West, an elegant new gay admirer who had helped with the choice of poems. He was working on a radio version of The Odyssey called The Rescue (broadcast in November 1943) for which Britten wrote extensive incidental music. The year ended with a setting of The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard for a music festival organized by a British soldier in a German prison camp. The delayed composition of Peter Grimes began in 1944, which otherwise
produced only a Festival Te Deum and two carols for Sackville-West's BBC programme ‘A Poet's Christmas’, one of them a setting of Auden's ‘Shepherd's Carol’.
The success of Peter Grimes led to a fresh outburst of compositional activity. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, another cycle written for Pears, much of it during illness, is among Britten's darkest works, couched in a severely modernist musical language incorporating what he had learnt from Purcell's declamatory style and (in the last song) ground bass technique. He himself attributed its despairing and angry mood to a visit to the Belsen camp where he and Yehudi Menuhin played for survivors during a ten-day tour of Germany in July 1945 immediately preceding composition. Purcell is also a presence in two other major non-operatic works: the third, final movement of the String Quartet no.2, entitled ‘Chacony’, is built on statements of a ground bass grouped in sets and separated by solo cadenzas for three of the instruments. The first movement is among Britten's most radical experiments with sonata form, both in the enormously extended exposition and the condensed recapitulation, in which the three successive phrases of the first theme are superimposed. He wrote to Mary Behrend, who commissioned it, that ‘to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made’. The third work, a set of variations on a very good dance-tune by Purcell, came about as the result of a film commission from Basil Wright (now with the Crown Film Unit, the successor to the original GPO unit) for the Ministry of Education. The film, with a commentary (by Slater) spoken stiffly by Malcolm Sargent, now seems dated, but the clarity and directness of Britten's score shines through in the concert version, entitled The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
A revolt within Sadler's Wells (several singers refused to take part in a recording of Peter Grimes) might have impeded further success in opera. But Britten had already begun planning, in summer 1945, a season at Dartington with an independent company giving opera on a small scale. In the event, Crozier and Cross broke away from Sadler's Wells, and Glyndebourne took over from Dartington. Crozier's enthusiasm for a French troupe, La Compagnie des Quinze, provided a model for the new Glyndebourne English Opera Company and led to his translating one of their plays, André Obey's Le viol de Lucrèce. Meanwhile, Britten had been in touch with the Rhodesian poet Ronald Duncan – they had collaborated over a Pacifist March in 1936–7, he had helped Britten change Slater's mad scene in Act 3 of Peter Grimes, and Britten was writing music for his play This Way to the Tomb in late 1945. Duncan put aside his planned libretto on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and set to work on Obey's play, preserving his narrators as Male and Female Chorus, to be sung by Pears and Cross. The result is not without problems. Instead of Slater's relatively workmanlike language, Britten was faced with an overwritten verse drama of the kind that T.S. Eliot had made fashionable. But the opera works well as a treatment of oppression, with gender as the mark of difference. Like Grimes, Lucretia is a victim. Roman society is also portrayed as corrupt and oppressive,
and she is raped by an Etruscan prince, Tarquinius, who embodies its worst features. But there is nothing alienated about her. Whereas Grimes, implicated in his apprentice's deaths, is musically represented as a tarnished yet innocent victim of society, Lucretia is truly innocent, a victim of a vicious patriarchal order. Equally a victim of internalization, she is forced (in a manner familiar to rape victims) to create her own guilt out of the aggressor's crime. This cruel act is accomplished musically by the recall of his ‘Yet the linnet in your eyes / Lifts with desire’ during her ‘confession’. The introduction of a specifically Christian perspective, especially in the conclusion, leads to difficulties because, although a religion fully addressed to victimization and sacrifice, it sees suicide as sin, not noble sacrifice. It is easy enough to dispel these doubts, however, while listening to the E major finale, another brilliant passacaglia; and the opera also develops a distinctly Purcellian recitative style that matches the Baroque quality of Duncan's lines. Its scoring and pacing, too, mark a distinct advance over Peter Grimes.
In spite of a double cast of fine singers (one included as Lucretia the radiant Kathleen Ferrier in her operatic début), The Rape of Lucretia played to poor houses on tour after its Glyndebourne performance in July 1946. Britten and his supporters now founded the English Opera Group, independent of Glyndebourne. After Duncan's idea of a version of Mansfield Park was rejected, Crozier wrote a libretto for Albert Herring, moving Maupassant's short story Le rosier de Madame Husson from the French provinces to an imaginary Suffolk town, ‘Loxford’. Among its weaknesses are pert caricatures of, and condescending attitude towards, provincial working-class people. But the Oedipal subject matter touched an English nerve: the point of Maupassant's story lies in the subsequent ruin and degradation of the hero, not his mother-domination. One reason why the opera disturbs, why it can have the effect of Mozartian or Shakespearean tears behind laughter, is that it presents an intensified version of a complicated situation between mothers and sons. The sinister, obsessive nature of the music for Mrs Herring – one of the best of Britten's many predatory women – and the true musical pathos of Albert, as well as his rising anger in the important aria in Act 1 scene iii, create a viable central comic situation, close enough to the truth to hurt.
It is also notable that Albert does not ‘become a man’. He becomes himself, in his own way, without having subscribed to society's pattern of initiation: he returns without any trophy (the crumpled lost wreath thrown into the audience at the end a suitable symbol of his virginity). What Albert does sing in dismissing his mother and the rest of those arrayed against him is a splendid new integration of ‘light music’ into Britten's style, not simply the enjoyable pastiche of Paul Bunyan and the cabaret songs. Those whom he confronts and confounds on his return have just sung the Threnody, one of the most striking of Britten's many vocal passacaglias, one that invokes Verdi more obviously than Purcell, and that earlier critics often felt overbalanced the work. It is easy to see why they might from purely burlesque
productions (like Frederick Ashton's original, from all accounts) without suggesting the sinister potential in characters like Lady Billows and Mrs Herring as well as their absurdity. It should also be noted that once again the physical plays an important part. Sid and Nancy's sexual appetites, portrayed in music of extraordinary excitement and allure, are as powerful as their spiked lemonade (and the Wagnerian reference that accompanies it) in enabling Albert to find himself.
During the English Opera Group's 1947 summer tour of Albert Herring and The Rape of Lucretia, Pears proposed the idea of an Aldeburgh Festival. It was an inspired response to Britten's vulnerability, personally as well as musically, to the kind of hostility he had experienced in his early operatic ventures. The festival also had the advantage of institutionally personifying him and what he stood for when he and Pears were about to move into Crag House, in the centre of the town. Moreover, besides benefiting from Britten's abilities as an accompanist of the highest rank, it offered a further outlet and focus for his other performing abilities (not to mention his astute grasp of finances). With Albert Herring, he had for the first time conducted one of his own operas. Apparently he never fully enjoyed the role, yet he won the devotion of almost every musician who performed under his direction and became a notable interpreter of other composers' works. The London critics were pointedly not invited to the opening, and many of them suspected its potential for cliquishness and provinciality. But by virtue of his abilities and his principles Britten drew to Aldeburgh the foremost international musicians of the age, whether composers or performers, after forming partnerships with them (such as his Schubert duet performances with Richter or his recitals with Rostropovich) in such a way as figuratively to invert the relation of country town to capital. The closeness of the Aldeburgh family (or clique) was often, and sometimes brutally, disturbed when members were suspected of giving less than their best. To have a literal family to whom to attach himself was always a prerequisite for Britten; having colleagues whom he trusted in a place that he knew was an extension of that. Like all unhappy families, it became increasingly unhappy in its own particular way and for a variety of reasons (explored particularly by Carpenter, 319–21, 368– 70, 376–7, 520–29 and passim), including Britten's continuing insecurity. But, it was a positive force in British music, and encouraged Britten's work immensely.
A trio of joyful works followed in 1947, the first such outpouring since the lull before the composition of Peter Grimes (1946 had seen merely the Occasional Overture, commissioned to celebrate the opening of the BBC Third Programme and later withdrawn by Britten, and a slight organ work). The 17th-century cantata form exemplified in Purcell's longer songs impressed Britten into adopting it for Canticle I, a setting of Francis Quarles's poem ‘My beloved is mine’, inspired by passages from The Song of Solomon. In contrast to this serious and full-hearted work for his tenor, A Charm of Lullabies was a pleasant cycle written for a favourite mezzo-soprano, Nancy Evans,
recently married to Eric Crozier. The third was a cantata for the opening of the first Aldeburgh Festival on 5 June 1948, with an official première a few weeks later (24 July) to celebrate the centenary of Lancing College (Pears's old school). Britten must have been by this time secure enough in his underlying convictions as a composer to ignore the undoubted disapproval of modernist taste for any endeavour involving a large number of amateur musicians. Apart from Peter Pears as the adult saint, Saint Nicolas required only a professional string quartet and percussionist, with a proficient organist and duo pianists. The school choir was supplemented at Lancing by parts for choirs of other linked schools, and the work included two hymns for the audience. This was not among Britten's most adventurous or even most accomplished works, and would have appeared ludicrous to the postwar avant garde. But from the lilting A major-Lydian waltz to which the story of Nicolas's birth and growth to adolescence is told to the broader issues of both involvement in Christian history and shared experience, it seems now as courageous and adventurous as the experimental music of the time. Forster, who had met and admired Britten and Pears, and was attending the first Aldeburgh Festival as lecturer, called it ‘one of those triumphs outside the rules of art’ (The Listener, 24 June 1948) and reported with enormous enthusiasm about the entire festival.
Meanwhile, the English Opera Group needed new material to keep going, and Britten had promised a version of The Beggar's Opera for their 1948 season, to be directed by Tyrone Guthrie (who had recently produced Peter Grimes at Covent Garden). Fortunately, Britten worked from an early edition of the original in which the tunes lack Pepusch's bass lines. He could therefore abandon the constraints of the Purcell realizations and construct both harmony and orchestration; he even brought numbers together in interesting cumulative sequences. The project signifies the culmination of a process of selfconscious rapprochement with history and national identity, part of what Britten thought necessary, as a newly connected and ‘located’ artist, to fulfil his role. Today, the work seems over-elaborate, trading immediacy for musical invention: the music goes upscale, like the accents of the opera singers who generally take the roles, and compared with the Brecht-Weill Die Dreigroschenoper it sounds musically tame and lacking in bite. The drama is in line with the critique of society, religion, the law, family and social order that Britten's works notably encompass. But the tone, as in Albert Herring, often veers towards cosiness in a way that undercuts the portrayal of brutality and mendaciousness that Britten would earlier have condemned more roundly in musical terms. The process is best understood with reference to Britten's own ambivalent position as a ‘discreet homosexual’ (Alan Sinfield's term), which encouraged both protest or subversion but also accommodation to the status quo. The particular consistency of that mix at any given time is a key to a deeper understanding of his career.
For the 1949 season, Crozier again worked on a project involving audience participation, the ‘entertainment for young people’ Let's
Make an Opera, which included four audience songs. The opera that formed the second half of the event was The Little Sweep, a scaled-down version of the oppression theme in which the middle-class audience can identify with the stage children, who help poor mistreated working-class Sam, the chimney-sweep, to freedom. This constituted genuine release and fulfilment for Britten even if Carpenter (p.176) is right to comment on its regressive psychology. Britten was deliriously happy while writing the opera in spring 1949; less so with the project it interrupted, the Spring Symphony. He described his ‘doubts and miseries’ over it to Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned it. The doubts must have been largely about projecting an orchestral song cycle as a symphony. He explained the symphony as ‘not only dealing with the Spring itself but with the progress of Winter to Spring and the reawakening of the earth and of life’, and its form as ‘in the traditional four-movement shape of a symphony, but with the movements divided into shorter sections bound together by a similar mood or point of view’ (Britten, 1949–50, p.237); he saw no need to produce a traditional symphonic ‘argument’ but rather wanted to project a series of controlled gestures in four distinct parts, the second and third analogous to the slow movement and scherzo of a symphony, and with a single poem for the more extended, joyous finale. The separate settings have an effect comparable to the series of discrete numbers through which Britten had learnt in his operas to generate cumulative feeling and climactic structures. The first invocatory movement is in ritornello form, and a fairly strict thematics of instrumentation persists, suggesting Baroque ‘affects’ rather than Romantic arguments. In the finale, a celebratory episode complete with rude blasts on the cowhorn, things are kept in motion by a rousing waltz tune upon which is projected, in a climactic peroration, the famous Sumer is icumen in cast in duple time. The emotional centre of the work, however, lies in the final section of the second part, a setting of W.H. Auden's Out on the Lawn. Britten would have known the significance of this poem (from which he selected four of the 16 stanzas) as a description of an actual spiritual experience of June 1933 which the poet called a ‘Vision of Agape’ and which prefigured his later conversion to Christianity. Britten's setting, which incorporates some of his most distinctive orchestral and vocal effects, recalls for an anguished moment in its last stanza the mood of the more radical Our Hunting Fathers, again providing a reminder of the darker reality of life, a touch that balances and therefore validates the ‘retrogressive’ search for ‘innocent’ states of mind in other parts of the score.
In late 1949 Britten found time to write a wedding anthem, Amo ergo sum, for his friends Lord Harewood and Marion Stein on a text by Ronald Duncan, and in early 1950 a charming and classic set of choral songs, the Five Flower Songs, for the Elmhirsts of Dartington Hall.
Britten, Benjamin
It was natural, in the light of Britten's success as a composer, especially in opera and its performance, for the Arts Council to commission a major opera from him for the 1951 Festival of Britain. For his part, he must have realized that his first substantial work written specifically for Covent Garden ought also to break new ground, and in the event Billy Budd, besides representing a considerable musical advance, also marks a distinct transition in Britten's operatic output from a focus on oppression and its internalization to an exploration of authority and its ramifications. The issue of authority is of particular importance and also confusion to homosexual people. Pertinent in Britten's case is the conflict over parents, who are loved and adored on the one hand as encouraging protectors and mistrusted on the other as figures of authority, as uncomprehending as the rest of society in assuming universal heterosexuality and censuring homoeroticism. A crisis on this issue would predictably be generated as the composer moved into the ‘establishment’ (symbolized by his being created a Companion of Honour in 1953).
Inviting a major literary figure like E.M. Forster to become his librettist was possibly to risk a recurrence of the difficulties with Auden, but Forster was a master of prose, not poetry, and the author of Howard's End and A Passage to India held the promise of helping Britten move beyond his preoccupations with the innocent and the oppressed. After some discussion, the two settled unshakably on Melville's Billy Budd (see P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: a Life, London, 1977–8, ii, 283–6). In adapting the story, Forster wanted to ‘rescue Vere from Melville’ (that is, from the excessive respect for authority and discipline implicit in Melville's account of him), to ‘make Billy, rather than Vere, the hero’, and to suggest redemption through love, or at least eternal hope, through the image of the ‘white sail’, mitigating and limiting Melville's belief in Fate. But the Prelude–Epilogue frame in which the aging Vere recalls the action places the dramatic emphasis firmly on his moral choice and predicament. In this respect, one of Britten's main achievements was to develop the ambiguity and uncertainty implicit in Vere's actions and words through purely musical means. Notable is the way the stratified texture at the opening of the Prologue projects the conflict between B and B , which then persists as a musical ‘problem’ reflecting what attracted Britten to the topic, ‘the quality of conflict in Vere's mind’ (see Rupprecht, E1996). The famous ‘interview’ interlude in which, with triadic chords each harmonizing the notes F, A or C but contrasted by dynamics, orchestration and tessitura, Britten suggests the indeterminate nature of the private moment in which Vere tells Billy that he has been condemned has also been shown to promote an uneasy, unstable tonal dialectic expressing an essentially equivocal mental state rather than any firm triumph of F major (Whittall, E1990). Near the end of the Epilogue, Britten appears to dissolve and dispel the forces of both good and evil (the melody of Billy's farewell, a reference to the interview chords, and the ominous brass motif associated with Claggart as evil) in a final, radiant B chord. But that very epiphanic moment sets off once
