Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  What is thinking for?

  Your unique and moping station

  Proves you cold;

  Stand up and fold

  Your map of desolation.50

  Fairly explicit, yet unspecific: Britten wasn’t in love with Auden and, if he was indeed a sulking ‘Lover’, the most obvious object of his affection was Piers Dunkerley. Was Auden advising that Britten should take Piers to bed? He was quite subversive enough. But the poem’s message is surely more general than that: Auden simply found Britten’s chastity vexatious and couldn’t understand how he put up with it (still less, that it might be a vital part of his creative psychology). Britten’s response was a brilliant repayment in kind: he neutralised the poem by setting it as a duet for voices and piano, thereby turning it from a reproach about what he wouldn’t do into an example of what he could do. As for ‘Night covers up the rigid land’, the crucial couplet – ‘You love your life and I love you, / So I must lie alone’51 – seems to state a simple truism if it concerns Auden’s feelings for Britten, except that Auden had no intention of lying alone for very long.

  As well as collaborating on Calendar of the Year, the two men were working on Our Hunting Fathers for the Norwich Festival, who had specifically asked for an orchestral piece: it was by no means the last time Britten would disregard the terms of a commission. On 18 February, in Lowestoft to help his mother with her removal to Frinton, he had lunch at the Victoria Hotel with ‘the very objectionable, self-important, ignorant, bumptious & altogether despicable secretary of the Norwich Festival’, Graham Goodes, whom he easily talked into ‘letting me do a vocal suite (Sophie Wyss) for the Sept. festival’; Britten thought ‘it was only to give himself airs that he ever queried it’,52 although as a secretary reporting to a committee Goodes perhaps had a point. Next day, he recorded that his mother had no regrets about leaving Lowestoft: she was staying with her Christian Science friend Mrs Hill Forster while her new house was sorted out and the dog Caesar seemed happy too. As for himself: ‘I personally don’t mind a scrap – except for the fact that one suddenly realises that now, one’s youth is so to speak gone.’ Yet for someone to whom childhood mattered so much, this was a much bigger ‘but’ than he chose to admit: ‘Purely sentimental,’ he added, ‘but life is coloured by sentiment.’53 He loyally agreed to spend most weekends with her in Frinton-on-Sea: as she went off to her Christian Science meeting on the second Sunday, he glumly noted that there was ‘quite a little colony’ of Christian Scientists in the town; a month later, at Easter, they had their ‘periodical row about going to Communion’. It was, he said, ‘difficult for Mum to realise that one’s opinions change at all – tho it would be a bad outlook if they didn’t’.54 Like his communism, his atheism would eventually soften: meanwhile, in his twenty-third year, he was at last behaving like a rebellious teenager.

  There was nothing teenage about his music and its growing reputation. Nevertheless, the first performance of his Three Divertimenti, by the Stratton Quartet at Wigmore Hall on 25 February, having gone well in the morning rehearsal, was ‘a dismal failure. Received with sniggers & pretty cold silence.’ Britten, properly unrepentant, while conceding that they were ‘not great music’, insisted that they were ‘interesting & quite brilliant’ (and so they are). As he expected, Jack Westrup gave them ‘a stinking notice’ in the Daily Telegraph, leaving him mainly angry with himself: ‘It’s all silly, as I don’t usually care a jot for critics least of all J.A.W.’55 But a few days later there was a BBC broadcast of his Te Deum which ‘made some delicious sounds’ and in early March Edric Cundell at the Aeolian Hall conducted the Sinfonietta ‘not badly’: ‘I can’t help liking some of this work,’ he modestly noted. ‘It is absolutely genuine at anyrate.’56 Between these came the premiere of ‘War & Death’ – later known as Russian Funeral – at the Westminster Theatre, as part of a double bill with Brecht’s Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken). In March, he took on two new film commissions: one was a ‘rather lovely thing about English Villages’ (Around the Village Green); the other, more urgently, ‘a short film on peace’ (Peace of Britain), to be directed by Paul Rotha for Strand Films. This was rapidly completed and at once ran into trouble with the censor, thus creating far more interest than it might otherwise have hoped to generate: ‘½ centre pages of Herald & New Chronicle, & Manchester Guardian – BBC. News twice. Never has a film had such good publicity!’57 chortled Britten. Then, later in April, he was off to Barcelona – with the novel excitement of flying from the aerodrome at Croydon – for the ISCM Festival, where Antonio Brosa was to join him in a performance of his Op. 6 Suite for violin and piano.

  This took place at the Casal del Metge on 21 April. ‘The concert went very well – Toni played like a God, & tho’ I was very nervous nothing went wrong in my part!’ he told his mother. They were ‘re-called three times. People seem to approve of it.’58 He didn’t appreciate the extent of this approval until he returned to London a week later, to find himself besieged by phone calls, including one from an interviewing journalist at the News Chronicle: ‘I seem to have had an enormous amount of publicity when away – photos & all – & everyone has seen something.’59 He added that he couldn’t help feeling gratified ‘after all the blows before this – and after too I expect’: a prescient note of caution. The experience of his broadcast concert with André Mangeot scheduled for the previous Friday was somewhat less gratifying: it had been cancelled at the last minute, after they had rehearsed in the studio, because of an overrunning political speech in connection with the presidential elections. There was no reason yet for him to view Spanish politics as anything other than an intrusive nuisance in his professional life.

  Like its predecessor in Florence, the ISCM Festival in Barcelona was to affect Britten in unexpected ways. The first was purely musical. On Sunday 19 April, he heard the posthumous first performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto, in which the soloist was Louis Krasner; it was to have been conducted by Webern, but he suffered a nervous breakdown during the Saturday-morning rehearsal and was replaced for the Berg part of the programme by Hermann Scherchen, who had one afternoon to study and rehearse the previously unseen concerto, with Ernest Ansermet stepping in to conduct the rest of the concert. These circumstances must have given an additional frisson to an already momentous occasion, but Britten confined his observations to the music: ‘The first half of the programme (Borck, Gerhardt, Krenek) is completely swamped by a show of Berg’s last work Violin Concerto (just shattering – very simple, & touching) & the Wozzeck pieces – which always leave me like a wet rag.’60 To Grace Williams he wrote: ‘The new Berg concerto is great – Best of the festival.’61 After returning to England, he went to the work’s London premiere on 1 May: this time, Webern did conduct (‘not good at all’) while the orchestra was ‘definitely B.B.C.-ish’. Krasner was once more the soloist in the concerto, ‘which is again a very moving experience’: ‘It certainly is a very great work, & at the end I feel pretty wet with anger about losing a genius like this.’62 Constant Lambert agreed, sadly recording Berg’s death in his preface to the second edition of Music Ho! and adding that the composer had ‘left behind him an elegiac Violin Concerto of astonishing mastery and haunting beauty’.63 It took time for the Berg concerto to be widely accepted as a twentieth-century masterpiece – in 1955, the authors of The Record Guide used two full pages (more space than for any other single work) to argue that it ‘will surely be recognized as among the most deeply affecting things in modern music’64 – but Britten’s judgement now looks incontrovertible: the work’s influence on his own violin concerto of 1939 would be profound.

  In Barcelona, Britten also made two significant new friends: the composer Lennox Berkeley and the writer and critic Peter Burra. Together with the composer Arnold Cooke, whom he already knew, they took Britten on an unexpected post-concert excursion:

  After the concert go with L.B., Peter Burra, & AC. to a night club in Chinatown – my 1st & not particularly pleasant experience – as a young harl
ot is very keen on picking my pockets tho’ I loose nothing. The dancing (mostly male – & dressed as females) is very lovely. But my god the sordidity – & the sexual temptations of every kind at each corner.65

  His unease and mixed feelings make him sound very young and completely unlike Auden and Isherwood, who would have been perfectly at home. But Britten is learning: he can admit that the dancing boys in drag are ‘very lovely’ and he nicely catches the balance of ‘sordidity’ and ‘temptations’. Next day, the same quartet took an afternoon walk ‘round the harbour, on top of Mount Juic – a heavenly view of the town & the sea-side across the aerial railway to the restaurant over the harbour’ and, two days after that, they returned to Mont Juic for a festival of folk dances. Britten became fond of Burra, who was covering the ISCM Festival for The Times, but as the week progressed it was Berkeley to whom he became increasingly attached: ‘He is a very delightful person, & with sound ideas on music.’66 They were to meet again in the summer.

  The intervening months were troubled ones for Britten, in several distinct ways. He couldn’t help being depressed by events in and beyond Europe – Mussolini’s annexation of Abyssinia, Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland and, in July, Franco’s revolt triggering the Spanish Civil War – as well as by the ‘state of music & politics in the world & in England in particular’.67 He was struggling with Our Hunting Fathers, especially the recalcitrant ‘Rats’, although by mid-June he actually felt ‘quite cheerful’ about it: having played it over and described it in detail to his mother, he noted cheerfully that ‘She disapproves very thoroughly of “Rats” – but that is almost an incentive’.68 He rashly bought for £6 a second-hand Lagonda, from which various bits fell off or ceased to work before his sister Beth involved it in an expensive accident with a bus. And he began to worry with a new, if not terribly helpful, frankness about sex: ‘Life is a pretty hefty struggle these days – sexually as well,’ he wrote on 5 June. That weekend he had ‘lots of bother with Mum – saying things … that arn’t polite, conventional, or innocent’. An interestingly positive aspect to his unhappy state, however, was a difference in the way he heard music: after listening to the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony, he went ‘to bed with a nice (if erotic) taste in my mouth’,69 though he couldn’t have guessed that this movement would one day be inextricably linked in the world’s mind with Death in Venice. On 7 July, he set off for Crantock in Cornwall, where he hoped to spend a peaceful summer walking and composing in a chalet rented from Ethel Nettleship; she was Augustus John’s sister-in-law and sister of the singer and singing teacher Ursula Nettleship. It was ‘perfectly glorious country … and, o, the sea view!’ he delightedly exclaimed on arriving: he foresaw ‘a pretty pleasant month – working at Hunting Fathers – reading alot & walking the neighbourhood’.70

  But terrible weather seemed to be following him around. In Frinton, he had been grumbling about dull skies and the north-east wind (which should have come as no surprise to him) and now, in Cornwall, the weather was ‘just putrid’. In spite of this, he as usual walked for miles, often to Holywell Bay. Friday 17 July was ‘An incredibly violent day – wind, & rain – exhilarating in a way – it would be miraculous if one could discard all ones clothes & walk miles in it’. He was rediscovering a physical relationship with the natural world in a way which Hardy, that great bad-weather poet whose work he was later to set, would have understood; so, indeed, would Crabbe. Then, on the Sunday, the weather cleared, though not before he had been disturbed by new arrivals, with a gramophone, in nearby chalets (‘Too much like civilisation’). So he went for a ‘terrific walk’, lasting over three hours, which took him well beyond Holywell:

  I have never enjoyed a walk so much – and the climax is when I find a colossal chasm in the rocks – miles away from civilisation – climb an enormous distance down to rocky shore & undress & bathe stark naked. The sheer sensual exstasy of it! – coupled with the real danger (currents & submerged rocks) & doubts whether I shall be able to climb the tortuous path to the top. Utter bliss.71

  This is a grown-up version of his walking and bathing at Lowestoft: the experience is more intense, the response more engaged. How to get this into his music (as Mahler had in his Adagietto)? Perhaps he would find out as he neared the completion of Our Hunting Fathers. The excitement certainly seemed to last him through Monday: ‘I work hard at scoring – nearing the end of Hawking – & very excited – do 13 pages to-day. – working, morning, aft., & after dinner.’72 By Friday 24 July he was ‘exhilerated at having finished Hunting Fathers’; he spent the day on chores such as page numbering, indexing, cueing and tempo marking, all of which was ‘good fun, especially as I am at the moment thrilled with the work’. In the evening, he found time to sketch part of ‘a funeral march for those youthful Spanish martyrs’; he was thinking about teenage members of the Popular Front who, he read, had been shot in their hundreds by the Fascists. Writing to his mother, he contrasted their heroism with his own country’s political inertia: ‘Imagine English boys of 14 even knowing what Popular Front means – much less dying for it.’73

  On Saturday, he was joined by his friend from the ISCM Festival, Lennox Berkeley, who was ten years his senior and, by a remarkable coincidence, yet another old boy of Gresham’s, where he had been a contemporary of Auden: ‘He is a dear and we agree on most points & it is nice to discuss things we don’t agree on!’74 Britten’s use of ‘dear’ as code for ‘sympathetic, homosexual’ was a recently acquired habit. Berkeley had brought with him the scores of two recent symphonies – Walton’s first and Vaughan Williams’s fourth – and the pair spent ‘most hysterical evenings pulling them to pieces’; Britten had already heard a broadcast of the Walton and thought it a ‘definite retrogression on the Viola concerto’75 which he so much admired. They began jointly composing a suite, Mont Juic (Op. 12), based on the Catalan folk music they had heard together in Barcelona, and they took photographs of each other, hunched studiously over the chalet’s one writing table, pretending to work. Within a matter of days, Britten had become closer to Berkeley than to any other adult acquaintance, apart from those – such as Francis Barton and John Pounder – whom he had known since childhood. The night before Berkeley returned to London, they had ‘Long talks before sleep – it is extraordinary how intimate one becomes when the lights are out!’ That typically self-teasing phrase certainly doesn’t exclude some degree of physical intimacy; but next day, after a sorrowful parting at the railway station, Britten returned to his diary for some firm though affectionate line drawing: ‘He is an awful dear – very intelligent & kind – & I am very attached to him, even after this short time. In spite of his avowed sexual weakness for young men of my age & form – he is considerate & open, & we have come to an agreement on that subject.’ He looked forward to their working together, ‘especially on the Spanish tunes’.76

  After this, he ought to have settled down to a routine of working, walking, bathing and – a new enthusiasm – surfing. However, his mother and other family members arrived to stay nearby, together with his old viola teacher’s son John Alston, and home-like distractions such as shopping and ping-pong began to intrude; soon he was arguing furiously, especially about politics, with his brother Robert, although after supper one evening they listened on the gramophone to ‘some lovely Duke Ellington & J. Strauss’,77 an odd couple by any standard and an intriguing extension of Britten’s usual tastes. Then, just after the soprano Sophie Wyss arrived to rehearse Our Hunting Fathers with him in the village hall, an occasion which must have startled any passing eavesdropper, Britten’s holiday came to an abrupt end in a flurry of activity: two film score offers in one day and a summons back to London.

  4

  Our Hunting Fathers was meant to be a nuisance: that, among other and more respectable reasons, was why Britten felt ‘thrilled’ by it. Its deep roots stretched back to the infamous essay on ‘Animals’ which concluded his career as a schoolboy at South Lodge. In asking Auden to assemble the text – which
consists of three poems (the anonymous ‘Rats Away’ and ‘Messalina’ and Thomas Ravenscroft’s ‘Hawking for the Partridge’) topped and tailed by Auden’s own prologue and epilogue – he was asking for trouble: even before he had written a note of the music, there was a deliberate mismatch between the subversive knottiness of the words and the likely taste (and, for that matter, comprehension) of an audience at the triennial Norfolk and Norwich Festival. And to this, Britten gleefully added trouble of his own.

  The first performance took place at St Andrew’s Hall in Norwich on the afternoon of Friday 25 September 1936: Sophie Wyss was the soloist, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the composer. That last phrase seems so ordinary and familiar that we may need to remind ourselves that the 22-year-old composer had never before conducted such a work, with such a large orchestra, on such an occasion. For their part, the orchestra had never seen such a score: at a rehearsal in London on the preceding Saturday, during which Britten became ‘het up & desparate’, there was ‘fooling in the orchestra & titters at the work – the “Rats” especially brought shreaks of laughter’. Vaughan Williams, whose Five Tudor Portraits was receiving its premiere in the same programme, had to intervene and remind the players that they must behave professionally; but they were more professional than most of the musicians with whom Britten had worked, and the rehearsal ‘got better & better’. Afterwards, Sophie and her husband Arnold Gyde took Ben and Beth for a meal at the Strand Palace Hotel where, despite ‘Arnold’s optimism and kindness’, he still felt ‘pretty suicidal’.78 The following afternoon, he consulted Frank Bridge and tried to persuade him to take over the conducting – a proposal Bridge, who seems never to have put a foot wrong in his dealings with his protégé, firmly declined. On Monday, there were two rehearsals in Norwich; most of the orchestra travelled there by the same train as Britten, who was reluctant to meet them ‘after Saturday’s catastrophe’. The first rehearsal went well; the second, with an audience, less so, but by then the orchestra was tired. Britten noted that some people were ‘very excited’ about the work, which doesn’t necessarily mean they liked it.