by Alex Ross
But is he alone? At the beginning of this most mysterious of the interludes, a flute motif recalls a little flurry of notes that played as Ellen sat with the boy on Sunday morning. Other instruments join in with “Grimes is at his exercise” as the orchestra collectively plays a massive chord of E—the key in which the viola sang its ghostly song at the end of Act II. As in the original Crabbe poem, Grimes seems surrounded by the ghosts of his victims. Indeed, in the “mad scene” that follows, he sings fragments of his previous music and talks to the two boys who have died (and even to a third whom he has not yet met). Meanwhile, the chorus continues to chant his name offstage, seventy-nine times in succession: “Grimes!…Grimes!…Grimes!…Grimes!…Grimes!…Grimes!…”
The man’s sense of self breaks down, and all he can do in the end is to sing his own name in response, in a drawn-out melisma. He sees himself only as the town sees him. Balstrode and Ellen appear, but Grimes does not hear them. Balstrode stops singing and simply talks: “Sail out till you lose sight of the Moot Hall. Then sink the boat. D’you hear? Sink her. Goodbye Peter.”
As a new day dawns, the music of the first interlude returns. The residents of the Borough go about their tasks. Boles and Auntie watch a boat sinking out to sea. “What is it?” Auntie asks. “Nothing I can see,” Boles replies. “One of these rumours!” Auntie replies, to the tune of “Grimes is at his exercise.” With the outcast banished from its midst, the Borough appears to have forgotten all about him. The chorus sings again of the uncaring majesty of the sea: “In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide…it rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep.” Dense chords, like the ones that played when Grimes first walked into the courtroom, grunt in the bass. An ocean of sound, neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor, marks the fisherman’s grave.
Britten’s Cold War
The premiere of Grimes took place at the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company on June 7, 1945. The ensuing triumph changed British music and Britten’s life. Interest in the opera grew so intense that late in the run a London bus conductor entered the title into his litany of destinations: “Sadler’s Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman!” European and American performances followed. In America the opera played first at the Tanglewood Festival and then at the Metropolitan Opera. The composer’s face appeared on the cover of Time. Even Virgil Thomson was forced to admit that Peter Grimes was “not a bore.”
From that storied first night onward, Britten was England’s most celebrated living composer. He bore his national duties without difficulty, composing prolifically until his death a little over thirty years later. He went on to write thirteen more operas, equaling the output of Richard Strauss. His selection of literary sources was dauntingly ambitious, encompassing a Roman tragedy by the French playwright André Obey (The Rape of Lucretia, 1946); a social comedy by Guy de Maupassant (Albert Herring, 1947); a multilayered seafaring story by Herman Melville (Billy Budd, 1951, with a libretto by E. M. Forster); a historical drama of Elizabeth I’s affair with the Earl of Essex (Gloriana, 1953); two tense and enigmatic stories by Henry James (The Turn of the Screw, 1954, and Owen Wingrave, 1971); a Shakespeare setting (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1960); three church parables (Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son, 1964–68); and, finally, Death in Venice (1973). Britten’s songs drew variously on Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Goethe, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Robert Lowell, and, most memorably, Wilfred Owen—the soldier-poet who supplied the core of the antiwar oratorio War Requiem of 1962.
Amid the raging paranoia of the Cold War era, however, Britten’s position was never entirely secure. During the Second World War he had registered as a conscientious objector, and he remained committed to pacifism and other leftist causes throughout the anti-Communist witch-hunting era. Homosexuality also counted against him. If any whisper of those romantic friendships with boys had reached the press, Britten would have been destroyed in an instant. Furthermore, as in Cold War America, homosexuality was considered the mark of a duplicitous, anti-patriotic nature. After the defection of the gay spy Guy Burgess to the Soviet Union in 1951, Scotland Yard began hunting down homosexuals in the upper reaches of English society. Britten apparently submitted to an “interview” with Scotland Yard at the end of 1953, although no action was taken. Across the ocean, J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on Pears and Britten, listing them as “prohibited immigrants,” which meant that every time they wanted to visit the United States they had to go through an elaborate visa-application process. A page from the composer’s FBI file is so heavily redacted that only his name remains; the rest is blacked out.
As the Western world turned into the Borough writ large, a community of ill will, Britten kept pursuing his favorite themes: love among men, the beauty of boys, the endangerment of innocence, the pressure of society on the individual, the persistence of secret wounds, the yearning for unblemished worlds.
Homosexuality, implicit in Grimes, becomes more or less explicit in Billy Budd. The Melville story presents a kind of love triangle among male subjects: the beautiful sailor Billy, who loves all; the rapacious master-at-arms Claggart, who lusts after Billy and swears to destroy what he cannot possess; and Captain Vere, who hides his own sentiments for Billy behind an austere facade. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of fomenting a mutiny; Billy strikes him dead in a rage; military justice demands that Billy die. Vere, though, is torn. He summons Billy for a “closeted interview,” presumably to explain why the death sentence cannot be reversed.
In Melville’s telling, the interview between Billy and Vere is wrapped in “holy oblivion,” in double negatives and circumlocutions, but the author lets slip that the captain may have “caught Billy to his heart”—words suggesting a physical embrace. In setting the interview to music, Britten brings the emotion, if not the action, into the open. Before an empty stage, the orchestra moves slowly through an array of thirty-four major and minor chords, each of which harmonizes a note of the F-major triad. The chord changes are often jarring: a tritone move from D minor to A-flat major, gentle C major in the strings giving way to rasping F-sharp minor in the brass, dynamics changing in almost every bar, as if in total-serialist fashion. But the tension slowly subsides, and the sequence ends in a peaceful alternation of F major and C major, with a muted D-major chord supplying one last gentle jolt at the end. This is the music of mute passion—“love that passeth understanding,” as Vere says in the epilogue—and it nearly reverses the tragic momentum of the story.
The Turn of the Screw ventures into still riskier territory. The Henry James story tells of a governess who is hired to care for two children in a remote house and finds that they are seemingly under the spell of two ghosts, those of the former manservant Peter Quint and the former governess Miss Jessel. As in Billy Budd, Britten spells out what his nineteenth-century source merely implied. Quint becomes a fully supernatural presence, rather than a mental projection, while his designs on the boy, Miles, are given an erotic thrust: it is said that Quint “liked them pretty…and he had his will, morning and night.” But the opera is really centered on the governess, who, like Ellen in Grimes, finds herself complicit in the children’s fate even as she tries to rescue them. And, as in Grimes, the complexity of guilt is shown in the slippage of leitmotifs from one situation to another.
The opera takes the form of variations on a twelve-note theme, each of whose notes is sustained while the others enter, until all twelve are sounding. The score is hardly a riot of dissonance, though; all manner of melodies are teased out of the master matrix. We associate the theme with the malice of Quint, but it becomes clear as the opera proceeds that the theme also has much to do with the governess, and that Quint is slowly taking over her consciousness. When, at the climax of the opera, she urges Miles to say aloud the name of the specter haunting him, she finds herself singing through the “screw” theme. Unable to bear the shock of uttering Quint’s name, Miles falls dead. The opera thus illu
strates James’s—and Britten’s—favorite theme of characters thinking good and doing evil. It also shows how a child can be damaged by excesses of adult emotion, even if the emotion is not sexual.
The plots of Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw all pivot on the death of a boy or a young man. Each could be summarized with a line from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper put into the mouth of Peter Quint: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Britten identified strongly with the victims, but he may also have seen something of himself in the predators. Even as he was rehearsing The Turn of the Screw for its 1954 premiere, he became infatuated with the twelve-year-old David Hemmings, who played the role of Miles.
Hemmings himself did not feel preyed upon; he later attested that although he and Britten slept in the same bed nothing overtly sexual happened. None of the boys whom Britten befriended over the years subsequently spoke ill of him, with one significant exception: Harry Morris, who had met Britten back in 1937, when he was thirteen, many years later told his family that Britten had made an apparent advance, which he fended off by screaming and throwing a chair. Then twenty-three, Britten may have understood the harm his desires could cause, and drawn a boundary that he did not cross again.
If The Turn of the Screw is the most comprehensively disturbing of Britten’s operas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes amends. In writing it, Britten possibly exorcised the darkest strains in his nature and found some semblance of the innocent haven that he had always sought. Working in the tradition of such twentieth-century “literature operas” as Pelléas, Jenfa, Salome, and Wozzeck, Britten set Shakespeare to music directly, word for word, although, with Pears’s help, he reduced the play to a manageable size. The mechanism of the “screw,” the invasion of the supernatural and the unnatural, now turns in reverse: when troubling emotions arise in parallel human and fairy-tale realms, Puck’s magic resolves them, mostly by undoing the mischief that it has caused. Britten casts his own spells, inventing a language of sweet noises, harmonic pratfalls, and supremely graceful melodies that vanish before they can be caught. At the end of Act II, Puck and a chorus of fairies send the four mortals into what the fairy king Oberon calls “death-counterfeiting sleep.” As Puck prepares to squeeze juice on Lysander’s eyes, the fairies sing:
On the ground, sleep sound…
And the country proverb known,
In your waking shall be shown:
Jack shall have Jill;
Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again,
And all shall be well.
Britten describes the potion of sleep by way of sweet chords that add up to a twelve-note row: D-flat major, D major with B attached, E-flat major, and the notes C and E. Over iridescent orchestration, the boys sing a rising-and-falling melody in thirds, a lullaby from another world. Nothing more fragrant has ever emanated from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone principle. Something equally magical happens in the coda, when the orchestra plays through the verse once more, violins taking the place of the voices. The sequence of four chords stops moving, instead coming to rest on warm D-flat, and utter peace seems at hand. Yet, as the thirds of the melody sink back down, their meaning changes: for the briefest instant, major turns to minor, and a shadow darts across the mind.
In November 1940, a German air raid nicknamed Operation Moonlight Sonata ravaged Coventry and made a ruin of a cathedral that had stood in the city since the Middle Ages. Twenty-two years later, on May 30, 1962, a new cathedral was dedicated next to the shell of the old, and Britten’s War Requiem had its first performance. It is the composer’s “official” work, his grandest public statement.
The complex literary and musical structure of the War Requiem may owe a debt to Michael Tippett, whom Britten respected as much as any colleague. The libretto for Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, written during the early years of the Second World War, unfolds on two ingeniously intersecting levels—Tippett’s own solemn, T. S. Eliot–like poetic meditations on the mid-century crisis and redemptive selections from James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Spirituals (“Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Deep River”). In a similar vein, the War Requiem intersperses the Latin text of the Requiem Mass with antiwar poems by Wilfred Owen, which give rich new resonances to words that have been set to music thousands of times. Three soloists are positioned against two orchestras and two choruses, creating a multidimensional musical space which rivals that of Stockhausen’s Gruppen. The complex architecture has the effect of folding the personal into the political, the secular into the sacred.
The climactic moment in the War Requiem comes in the “Libera me,” where the composer pleads for peace, for liberation from “eternal death.” After a mammoth choral-orchestral explosion, the tenor and the baritone recite to each other lines from Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting,” in which a freshly dead English soldier meets the German soldier he killed the day before. “It seemed that out of battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel,” the Englishman declares. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” the German answers. By giving a tremor of eroticism to this meeting of strangers—sonorities marked “cold” give way to warm vibrato chords, the indications “expressive” and “passionate,” a sense of a shivering midnight assignation—Britten cuts through the false complexities of politics. He could be echoing his ex-friend Auden’s unforgettable cry of “We must love one another or die.”
Britten and Shostakovich
In September 1960, Dmitri Shostakovich came to London to hear his Cello Concerto played by Mstislav Rostropovich. At that performance he was introduced to Britten. In the next several years Britten and Pears made several visits to Russia, usually in the company of Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya. The friendship between the two composers blossomed in the summer of 1965, when Britten and Pears traveled to a Soviet composers’ colony in Armenia, where the Rostropoviches and Shostakovich were staying. Despite obvious differences in temperament—Britten was warm and affectionate with those whom he trusted, Shostakovich nervous to the end—the two quickly found sympathy with each other, and their connection may have gone as deep as any relationship in the life of either man.
Britten had long admired Shostakovich’s music, as the Lady Macbeth–like Passacaglia in Peter Grimes shows. Shostakovich, for his part, knew little of Britten’s music before the summer of 1963, when he was sent the recording and score of the War Requiem. He promptly announced to his old friend Isaak Glikman that he had encountered one of the “great works of the human spirit.” In person he once said to Britten, “You great composer; I little composer.” Britten’s psychological landscape, with its undulating contours of fear and guilt, its fault lines and crevasses, its wan redeeming light, made Shostakovich feel at home.
Both men seem almost to have been born with a feeling of being cornered. Even in works of their teenage years, they appear to be experiencing spasms of existential dread. They were grown men with the souls of gifted, frightened children. They were like the soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s poem, meeting at the end of a profound, dull tunnel.
Shostakovich met Britten only one week after he had experienced yet another in his seemingly endless series of political humiliations. He had been asked by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as the general secretary of the Communist Party, to lead the Composers’ Union of the RSFSR, and shortly after, he became a candidate member of the Party itself. Previously, Shostakovich had sworn to friends that he would never join an organization that used terror to carry out its aims. He now gave conflicting accounts of the train of events that led him to go back on this resolution, one being that he was drunk. “They’ve been pursuing me for years, hunting me down,” he told Glikman, tears streaming down his face. Lev Lebedinsky claimed to have heard him say such things as “I am scared to death of them,” “I’m a wretched alcoholic,” and “I’ve been a whore, I am and always will be a whore.”
This latest crisis prompted Shostakovich to write his scathing, self-punishing Eighth Quartet, one of the most extraordinary autobiographical pieces in musical history. It was written in just a few days, following a visit to Dresden, where the director Lev Arnshtam was making Five Days, Five Nights, a film about the Allied bombings of February 1945.
No doubt the Dresden experience contributed to the Eighth Quartet’s fraught tone, but Shostakovich’s letters indicate that the dedication “to victims of fascism and war” was something of a cover for his own private anguish. To Glikman he wrote: “The title page could carry the dedication: ‘To the memory of the composer of this quartet’…It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that while I was composing it I shed the same amount of tears as I would have to pee after half-a-dozen beers. When I got home, I tried a couple of times to play it through, but always ended up in tears. This was of course a response not so much to the pseudo-tragedy as to my own wonder at its superlative unity of form. But here you may detect a touch of self-glorification, which no doubt will soon pass and leave in its place the usual self-critical hangover.”