Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  The oddly arranged Norwich concert on Friday began with a performance by the Hungarian violinist Jelly D’Arányi of the Brahms concerto, conducted by Heathcote Statham, who was the cathedral organist and conductor of the Norwich Philharmonic Society; then Vaughan Williams conducted his Five Tudor Portraits, which were followed by a ninety-minute lunch interval; after this, Britten conducted Our Hunting Fathers. ‘The Norwich audience had a bad day,’ as Michael Kennedy explains in his study of Britten: ‘Vaughan Williams’s settings of what were then considered to be the bawdy poems of Skelton caused the elderly Countess of Albemarle to turn purple in the face and walk out, loudly exclaiming “Disgusting”, while the text of Britten’s work contained a dance of death indicting those – many of them among the Norfolk gentry – who killed animals for pleasure.’79 The latter proved the less controversial only because so much of the text was unintelligible on first hearing, but Our Hunting Fathers certainly made its impact. According to Britten:

  I conduct 1st perf. of my Hunting Fathers with Sophie Wyss – who is excellent indeed. The orchestra plays – better than I had dared to hope – tho’ one or two slips. I am very pleased with it & it goes down quite well – most of the audience being very interested if bewildered. A very complimentary & excited gathering in the artists’ room afterwards – including F. Bridge & Mrs B., – Vaughan Williams, J. Moeran, Patrick Hadley, Ralph Hawkes, Basil Wright, J. Cheetal Rupert Doone, Robert Medley, Alstons galore Mum & Beth, Ronald Duncan etc. etc.80

  The supporting group of just about everyone who mattered – Auden, only just back from Iceland, was the notable absentee – is impressive and touching. Frank Bridge, however, read the mood of the occasion rather differently: ‘The quintessence of disappointment on your young face was so marked that had I had a few minutes alone with you, I might have consoled you with the fact “that many a good work has begun its public life in much the same indifferent way.” It is extremely hard to bear, but one must & I suppose does anyway.’81 Bridge, as it happened, didn’t altogether care for the work and had the tactful good sense not to say so until later.

  As with his Sinfonietta, Britten had chosen to present a challenging work at a moment when something less demanding might have won him more friends, but this at least enabled him to take some comfort from any reception: he would be gratified if the audience loved it; if they hated it, that would be because they were (as he had always suspected) stupid. As an additional insurance policy, he provided an unhelpful and even slightly offputting programme note, a typical young man’s strategy. Its opening statement seems straightforward enough: ‘Poems on animals in their relationship to humans – as pests, pets, and as a means of sport – have been chosen by W. H. Auden as a basis for this work. To these he has added a prologue and an epilogue.’ After this, the paragraphs on individual movements tend to be mystifying (‘quick quaver figures in the flutes and bassoons indicate a more subjective aspect of the pests’), uninformative (the fact that ‘Messalina’ is about the death of a pet monkey isn’t mentioned) or simply evasive (‘Something depressing appears to have happened…’).82 No wonder the audience failed to make much sense of it. A good deal of the music, with its echoes of Berg’s Wozzeck and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Britten had heard a concert performance in March and written about it for World Film News), they must have found simply terrifying. Some of them may have perceived the brilliance of invention but none of them could have picked up the ways in which Our Hunting Fathers connects with both earlier and later works: the obsessive, pleadingly repeated ‘Fie, fie, fie, fie!’ at the end of ‘Messalina’ seems to juxtapose childishness and grief, looking back to Quatre Chansons Françaises and forward to The Turn of the Screw (and we may notice how harp, clarinet and oboe, three of Britten’s favourite sounds, purify the grief); in ‘Dance of Death’, there’s a gloriously infantile little tune (‘We falconers thus make sullen kites…’) before the hectic climax which anticipates the ‘Dies Irae’ of the Sinfonia da Requiem. The birds’ curious names include ‘German’ and ‘Jew’, which are isolated and repeated together in the movement’s coda, although the significance of this doesn’t appear to have been noticed at the time.

  If Britten was stoical about the performance, his stoicism was further tested by the reviews. While the Daily Telegraph and Eastern Daily Press both trod cautiously, The Times thought this was ‘just a stage to be got through’ and wished Britten ‘safely and quickly through it’. The Observer’s review, by A. H. Fox Strangways, is a sharp reminder of the loathing that these clever young men, Auden and Britten, could inspire in their less gifted elders: the music was ‘dire nonsense’; Auden’s poems ‘remain obscure after a tenth reading’; and since ‘what he [Britten] had done was hardly worth doing … he would have served his reputation better had he remained … anonymous’.83 The work clearly wasn’t about to gatecrash its way into the standard concert repertoire, but it did receive a broadcast performance on 30 April 1937 under (of all people) Boult, which went surprisingly well – ‘They do my Hunting Fathers very creditably – I am awfully pleased with it, I’m afraid’84 – although Bridge gently pointed out that words which had been difficult to understand in the concert hall were wholly incomprehensible over the air; after that, it remained unperformed until June 1950 – when, at Chelsea Town Hall, Peter Pears sang it with the Chelsea Symphony Orchestra conducted by Norman Del Mar – and unrecorded during the composer’s lifetime. Thus the most important and original of Britten’s early works became, not greatly to his surprise, neglected and forgotten.

  He returned to London and the scramble of a freelance life, which had already begun to get him down. ‘My brain is getting completely fogged with so many different activities,’ he wrote on 10 September, before listing the seven things he had done that day:

  (1) I write some more of the music for Travel Association Film [Around the Village Green] after breakfast (2). I go to Ralph Hawkes at 12.0 to arrange about Capitol film [Love from a Stranger] (3) I rehearse with Sophie (back from Bognor) ‘Our Hunting Fathers’ for Norwich – & she sings it well … (4). I spent aft. discussing music for Group Theatre prod. of Agamemnon with Rupert Doone & he reads the whole play (3.30.–6.30) (5). I get ’phone calls & letters about articles for World Film News (6) I try also to get together some ideas for the Ob. & piano work [Temporal Variations] for Hallis concerts (7) & Our H.F. proofs are to be done.85

  After all this, he spent a ‘very pleasant evening’ with the Bridges: supper and then a concert conducted by Frank Bridge. Most of his days were comparably hectic, and even he had to admit that it was ‘just abit too much’. And there was more to come before the year’s end, such as the reworking of the Rossini arrangements he had made for Cavalcanti’s The Tocher into Soirées Musicales, Op. 9, as well as music for The Ascent of F6, the new Auden/Isherwood play which he received on 7 October, and Strand Films’ The Way to the Sea. He had discovered two eternal truths about the creative freelancer’s life: promising projects turn dull (the Group Theatre’s Agamemnon would become especially tiresome) and payment seldom keeps pace with work (‘There is so much to come in & nothing seems to come’).86 By October his health was affected. First, there was ‘this beastly cold which is ravaging us all’, he told his mother, adding, ‘but of course you have escaped it’ – a cheeky reference to the immunity supposedly conferred by her belief in Christian Science. Next came ‘a very bad nose-bleed (a real pourer)’, brought on by ‘Overwork & excessive nose-blowing with the cold’:87 a Dr Moberly ordered him to take a few days’ complete rest and, implicitly, to take on less work.

  The very next week he was back to his old ways. On Tuesday 20 October, after ‘much business’, he went to Blackheath to correct the parts and in the afternoon to record the incidental music for three GPO films (Calendar of the Year, The Savings of Bill Blewitt, Lines to the Tschierva Hut). The following day, when he heard the playback, he snapped: ‘It is lousy & completely bum – bad recording & all that playing wasted. This is the last stra
w – what with all this stuff to think about & above all the Group theatre to try & organize I go then in the aft (after Boosey & Hawkes for abit) & see Rupert & really tell him I cannot do everything.’ Yet, that evening, he was cheered up by recording his music for Around the Village Green: ‘Folk & traditional tunes (some from Moeran) – lovely stuff, & I must admit my scoring comes off like hell.’ It was his first proper attempt at folk-song arrangement, and his acknowledgement of Moeran’s contribution is significant. Afterwards, there was ‘riotous supper & ping-pong, till 12.0. Come back feeling that life is worth living inspite of Group Theatre – if one doesn’t think of Spain, of course.’88 But how could one not think of Spain?

  There was domestic upheaval too: on 30 October, Ben and Beth moved house, leaving West Hampstead for a larger flat above her dress shop at 559 Finchley Road, NW3, where they soon installed a lodger called Kathleen Mead. While the removers dismantled everything around him, Britten still managed to write a section of music for Agamemnon, working ‘on any odd bit of furniture that escapes their clutches’. He supervised the other end of the move in the afternoon, then rushed off to Liverpool Street to meet his mother, who was staying with Barbara while she helped with the new flat, before going with Antonio Brosa and Henry Boys to a concert at Wigmore Hall, in which the Boyd Neel Orchestra performed his Simple Symphony (‘which goes swimmingly, & gets a rousing reception!’) and the ‘new’ (1934) Suite for Strings by Schoenberg. ‘It goes down very badly,’ Britten noted, without surprise; he, on the contrary, thought it ‘a miracle in every way – very striking & full of deep passion & content’.89

  Auden’s new collection of poems, Look, Stranger!, was published in October: he thought the title, supplied by Faber during his absence in Iceland, sounded ‘like the work of a vegetarian lady novelist’;90 the American edition, adapting the next three words from that famous poem’s opening line, was retitled On This Island. Britten bought his copy (it seems extraordinary that he wasn’t sent one) on 2 November, finding in it ‘some splendid things’ and adding, rather drily, ‘He has written two for me included in it.’91 Auden himself had spent much of the autumn working with Louis MacNeice on Letters from Iceland, which also included something for Britten in ‘Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament’: ‘For my friend Benjamin Britten, composer, I beg / That fortune send him soon a passionate affair.’92 He arrived in person on Britten’s doorstep at teatime on 1 December, ‘to stay for a time while we work on the Strand Film. It will be nice having him, if I can conquer this appalling inferiority complex that I always have when with vital brains like his.’93 Auden’s turbulent reputation as a house guest evidently hadn’t reached Britten’s ears, and on this occasion he seems mostly to have behaved himself; Beth even recalled that ‘Both Mum and I liked to have him to stay, he had such beautiful manners’.94 That evening, Auden announced his intention of going to Spain after Christmas to fight (in the event, he drove an ambulance) and refused to be dissuaded by Britten’s argument, which we shall meet again, that the pursuit of his art was of infinitely more value to the world than his probable ineffectiveness as a soldier. As it turned out, the weeks the two men spent working on The Way to the Sea were the most relaxed in their entire relationship: after dinner with Lennox Berkeley and Peter Burra one evening, ‘Wystan & I talk late into night & he is a great comfort. He is the most charming, most vital, genuine & important person I know & if the Spanish Rebels kill him it will be a bloody atrocity.’95 On 15 December, after a ‘very rowdy & pleasant’ meal with Auden and MacNeice, the three men went on to a concert at Wigmore Hall which included both Britten’s new piece for oboe and piano (Temporal Variations) and Two Ballads, settings of ‘Mother Courage’ by Montagu Slater and Auden’s ‘Underneath the abject willow’, performed by Sophie Wyss and Betty Bannerman; quite what Auden made of his subversive poem’s transformation into an almost Victorian-style duet we can only guess.

  The Way to the Sea had been commissioned by the Southern Railway to mark the electrification of their line from London to Southampton; its underlying premise is slightly odd, since crowds eager to visit the seaside were likelier to choose a more obvious resort such as Brighton. The tone of Auden’s commentary is odder still, awkwardly combining travelogue pastiche with didactic nudges: in a merciless pun on the electric ‘power’ which is the ostensible theme, we are shown south London lineside terraces, ‘the homes of those who have the least power of choice’; an exemplary white factory surrounded by fields turns out to be a Co-operative Dairy; and the apparently pacifist wishes – ‘Let the intricate ferocious machinery be only amusing, / Let the nature of glory be a matter for friendly debate among all these people’ – come strangely from someone intending to go off and fight.96 As Britten had acutely noted in a parenthesis after watching The Dog Beneath the Skin earlier in the year, ‘how W.H.A. loves his moral!’97 He, though his sense of personal morality was far sharper than Auden’s, was altogether more pragmatic when it came to public and political matters. For instance, when Edward VIII abdicated on 10 December, he thought an opportunity had been missed: ‘It would have been good politically to unite England & U.S.A. – she [Wallis Simpson] would have been an excellent Queen democratically … they wanted to get rid of a King with too much personality & any little excuse surficed.’98 Typically, this seems both naive and, in another way, far-sighted; typical, too, is his unfocused and half-hearted dislike of ‘they’, an ‘establishment’ he was quite keen to join. When his wealthy publisher Ralph Hawkes drove him around in one of his expensive cars, he was as delighted as Mr Toad: ‘certainly wizzing thro’ London in a 37 h.p. Hispano Suiza has it’s points’, he admitted,99 while a few weeks later they were off to Buckinghamshire ‘in his superb Cadillac (we do 85 on the Western Avenue!)’.100 He wanted a fast car of his own and before too long he would have one. He wouldn’t be following Uncle Wiz to Spain.

  5

  Though depressed by the ‘approaching thunder clouds’ of the international situation, Britten greeted the new year of 1937 with understandable optimism. He was pleased with what he had recently achieved in the two main areas of his professional life – serious new works for public performance and bread-and-butter commissions for stage and screen – and conscious of his good fortune in having Ralph Hawkes as a ‘splendid publisher & general patron’. He had plenty of ideas for the future. The domestic outlook had been unsettled, however, by Beth’s announcement of her engagement to Kit Welford, a friend from Peasenhall in Suffolk who was now a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital, and he unnecessarily told his diary that he had ‘No prospect & little inclination for marriage’ himself.101

  But before the end of January his life was thrown into utter turmoil. The trouble began with a trip to Paris with Henry Boys and Ronald Duncan, the poet and playwright, during which he was hoodwinked into visiting a brothel before going to a scarcely more enjoyable performance at the Folies Bergères. They returned to a ‘dank & dark’ London to find Kathleen, the lodger, ill with flu and Beth about to go down with it; Britten himself had ‘a filthy cold & I must prevent it developing into this plague’. Mrs Britten arrived from Frinton to nurse her daughter and ordered her reluctant son to stay in bed. Kathleen was soon better and Ben seemed to be escaping with nothing much more than a severe cold, but Beth showed no sign of improvement and, within a few days, Mrs Britten herself had succumbed to flu: she moved into her son’s bedroom, while Ben temporarily lodged with a friend of his sister Barbara. Beth developed pneumonia and on 25 January it was confirmed that Mrs Britten too was suffering from bronchial pneumonia; in the early morning of 31 January – while her son, still dislodged from the flat by the patients and their nurses, was staying overnight in Hampstead – she died of a heart attack. Beth, in the next room, was too ill to be told at first, although next day Dr Moberly decided ‘that sooner or later it must dawn on her’ and ‘does it very beautifully & Barbara & nurse stand by’.102 The funeral took place in Lowestoft on 3 February: Britten could say little more than tha
t ‘It was a fitting service for darling Mum … & Mr Coleman plays suitable music’. When he returned to London, he was told that ‘that Beth appears to be forming an Empyena – & operation is considered necessary’103 – in fact, a minor procedure carried out successfully under a local anaesthetic by Dr Moberly two days later. It was late February before she fully recovered.

  Britten’s ailment was different, and so was his recovery: he had lost the most important person in his life, who had not only given birth to him and nurtured him but had invented the very idea of him as a composer. His grief in his diary entries is sincere and prolonged, yet coloured by that odd rhetoric of piety which we glimpsed in his far less fulsome response to his father’s death: ‘So I lose the grandest mother a person could possibly have – & I only hope she realised that I felt like it. Nothing one can do eases the terrible ache that one feels – O God Almighty –.’104 But writing to his old friend John Pounder he sounds more like his authentic self: ‘It is a terrible feeling, this loneliness, and the very happy & beautiful memories I have of Mum don’t make it any easier…’105 It was that loneliness which nagged at him over the next few months: he described himself as ‘a person who has lost a beloved mother & who is going to loose a very dear sister into marriage in the near future’106 and he increasingly lamented, as he returned to it at night, the singleness of his uncompanioned bed. Wrapped up in this was the inescapable fact that he was too scrupulous to acknowledge and too intelligent to ignore: his mother had prevented him from leading the life he must now begin to lead.

  His work naturally suffered from illness and bereavement, and from a bit of bad luck: Malcolm Sargent cancelled a performance of the Sinfonietta, pleading time pressures, although Britten suspected dirty work (his own inability to attend a Sargent rehearsal at the height of the flu outbreak can’t have helped). On the same day, Wednesday 24 February, he learned that the Mercury Theatre wanted to cut the final scene of The Ascent of F6, ‘including a lot of my best music – including the Blues’, his setting of Auden’s ‘Stop all the clocks’. He ended up ‘scoring piddling bits of music-hall stuff’ for Montagu Slater’s Left Theatre production, Pageant of Empire, the following Sunday. But in between, after Friday’s first-night performance of F6, there was a brief respite: ‘a good party at the Theatre & then feeling very cheerful we all sing (all cast & about 20 audience) my blues two or three times as well as going thro most of the music of the play!’ Though unforeseen and gratifying, this wasn’t the end of the evening’s surprises: ‘Then I play & play & play, while the whole cast dances & sings & fools, & gets generally wild. In fact have a good & merry time (& me not far from being the centre of attraction strange as it may seem!).’107 But it wasn’t strange at all; on the contrary, it seems a perfect emblem of his new-found independence.