Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  Beth was sufficiently recovered for him to escape for a few days at the Bridges’ in Sussex. Frank Bridge, who had also been seriously ill during the previous autumn, was now fit enough for long argumentative walks: he must have noticed a change in Britten, who had suddenly developed into a much more contentious and less reverential kind of disciple. Bridge, Britten now decided, ‘has a rather precious & escapist view of art – but that is typical of his generation – & eminently excusable’, while on the way back to London they argued ‘hotly about politics’. Afterwards, characterising himself as ‘horribly intolerant in a youthful hot-headed way’, he worried that he might have been ‘hurtful to people who have helped & are helping me in every way possible’.108 But everything one knows about Frank and Ethel Bridge suggests that they would have perfectly understood what was happening to Britten and why.

  Auden was back from Spain, alive and uncovered in glory, at the beginning of March, but Britten was in that state when cheerful events serve only to accentuate one’s own unhappiness. The following Saturday was a ‘miserable kind of day – as Beth gets better & her discomfort & my worry decrease, we both feel more & more sad’, a subtle perception of the way in which worry can actually mitigate sadness. Yet, despite his unhappiness, it turned out to be a day of some interest. In the morning, he attended a rehearsal of his part-songs ‘I Loved a Lass’ and ‘Lift-Boy’ by the BBC Singers and their conductor Trevor Harvey for a broadcast that evening, to which he went with Auden, Isherwood and William Coldstream (there was an unheard performance of his Simple Symphony on the BBC’s Midland Region that evening too); afterwards, the four men had supper together. Following the morning’s rehearsal, he had lunched with ‘T.H., Peter Piers, & [Basil] Douglas – at their flat – with interesting tho’ snobbish & superficial arguments’.109 Although they had almost certainly been in the same room before, this was his first proper meeting with Peter Pears; the misspelled surname is less significant than it looks, as Britten’s first attempts at spelling unfamiliar names were seldom correct. His reaction against the ‘snobbish’ and ‘superficial’ aspects of the lunchtime conversation in Charlotte Street came from an enduring habit of Lowestoft common sense which never quite deserted him, even when he became honoured and ennobled. His diary entry doesn’t say whether or not they spoke of Peter Burra, whom Britten had met in Barcelona and with whom Pears had been at school (and in love) at Lancing: if they did, Britten must surely have mentioned that he was to spend the very next weekend at Burra’s country cottage at Bucklebury Common, near Newbury in Berkshire.

  When he arrived there, his reaction was simple: it was ‘grand to be in the country after all this time in London’. So grand, indeed, that he was immediately off to view ‘a charming little cottage nearby – which I’m thinking of taking as it is such a heavnly part of the country’.110 As it happened, it was Finzi rather than Britten who would make his home at nearby Ashmansworth, but the fact that he was urgently thinking of a move to the country is further evidence of his newly acquired independence. Burra taught him to play squash at which he, of course, instantly excelled, despite spraining an ankle which, he thought, added to his ‘glamour’. On the Sunday, they had lunch with ‘rich friends of Peters, the Behrends nearby – charming & cultured people who have done a tremendous amount to help artists’ and who would in due course do a tremendous amount to help him: sprained ankle or not, Britten was landing on his feet. That evening, in Burra’s cottage, which was owned by the Behrends, they played piano and violin, ‘swapping parts & making the most extraordinary noise’, and then talked until midnight: ‘Peter is one of the world’s dears.’ He spent Monday morning finishing Reveille, a virtuoso violin study for Antonio Brosa, while Burra ‘plays with his new toy, the motor Bike which symbolises his craving for the normal or “Tough” at the moment’: Britten here seems obtuse about the possible forms of homosexual desire, but he hadn’t visited Berlin nor was there a figure such as the leather-jacketed gay poet Thom Gunn (then aged seven) to enlighten him. He was back in London in time to hear Guy Warrack conduct Soirées Musicales, his ‘Rossini suite’, then have tea with Poppy Vulliamy and Ronald Duncan, and dinner with Christopher Isherwood, ‘a grand person; unaffected, extremely amusing & devastatingly intelligent’.111 He began to springclean his life, tackling overdue correspondence and consigning the Lagonda to a scrapheap. After two dreadful months, all sorts of fresh starts seemed possible.

  On 25 April, Peter Burra wrote to his twin sister Nell, a singer and actress who had worked with the Group Theatre, ‘that Benjamin Britten and Lennox Berkeley were coming during the following week to view a nearby farmhouse they might share’;112 he also mentioned that he would be at the BBC performance of Our Hunting Fathers on 30 April. But on 27 April, he was killed in a light aircraft accident near his home – ‘flying with one of his “tough” friends’, noted Britten, still not quite understanding this. He was ‘a darling of the 1st rank’ with a ‘first-rate brain, that was at the moment in great difficulties – tho’ this is far too terrible a solution for them’;113 the nineteen-year-old pilot, Allan Anderson, wasn’t seriously injured. Burra’s ‘great difficulties’ with his sexuality had been compounded by his friendship with a young German, ‘Willi’, who appeared to be a Nazi spy ‘sent to Britain to compile a list of prominent British homosexuals’.114 Of his ‘first-rate brain’ there is ample evidence: four years older than Britten, he had edited a quarterly journal, Farrago, at Oxford; published biographical studies of Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf and Wordsworth; and contributed to The Nineteenth Century and After an essay on E. M. Forster which delighted the novelist and was reprinted in the 1942 Everyman edition of A Passage to India. Britten, Lennox Berkeley and Peter Pears were among the mourners at the funeral at Bucklebury on 29 April; the following day, back in London (and after a rehearsal of Our Hunting Fathers with Boult, who ‘doesn’t really grasp the work’, for that evening’s BBC concert), Britten had dinner with Pears and Basil Douglas, partly ‘to discuss what is best about Peter Burra’s things’.115 Their decision was that his oldest friend, Pears, and his newest, Britten, should go to Berkshire to spend a day ‘sorting out letters, photos & other personalities preparatory to the big clean up’; the implication, of course, is that two close friends would have to sift his papers before they were seen by less sympathetic eyes. The following Thursday, they travelled on a late, dirty and packed train to Reading, arriving around midnight, and then set off for the Behrends’ house in torrential rain on the motorbike Pears and Burra had shared, getting lost and not arriving until nearly two o’clock. Their hosts, fortunately, were in London. After completing their task next day, Britten commented: ‘Peter Pears is a dear & a very sympathetic person. – tho’ I’ll admit I am not too keen on travelling on his motor bike!’116 Britten, as we have seen, loved cars and had in fact just found another one: a Lee Francis, which he bought the following week and crashed before the month was out. Then, on 12 May, it was Coronation Day, with the obligatory weather: a dull morning followed by a continuously wet afternoon. Ben, Beth and Kit Welford tried to escape with a country picnic, but there was no avoiding it in the end: ‘Listen to a coronation revue in the evening, after the coronation address by the King (the poor man masters his stutter well), & coronation news – In fact spend a coronation evening, writting coronation letters & retiring to a coronation if lonely bed.’117

  During the spring, Britten composed music for two BBC productions, King Arthur (broadcast in April) and Up the Garden Path (June), and began his series of Cabaret Songs to texts by Auden, but his most important work of 1937 was unquestionably the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10. At the beginning of June, Boyd Neel, with whom he had worked on the music for Love from a Stranger, was invited to bring his string orchestra to the Salzburg Festival in late August and to include in his programme the first performance of a new English work. It was an impossible demand, given the time available, and Neel knew of only one person who could possibly meet it: ‘I suddenly thought of B
ritten (till then hardly known outside inner musical circles) because I had noticed his extraordinary speed of composition during some film work in which we had been associated.’118 It took Britten ten days to sketch the complete work, and a month after that it was fully scored. Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge is what Wordsworth called a ‘timely utterance’: a composition for strings in a favourite form and a homage to the musician he most admired and loved, it satisfied an urgent inner need. He conceived the work as a series of character portraits – a method ironically similar to that of the Enigma Variations, except that they were all aspects of one character – which he noted on the composition sketch: thus, for instance, the first Adagio variation (after the ‘Introduction and Theme’) describes ‘His integrity’, the second March ‘Presto alla marcia’ ‘His energy’, and so on through to the ‘Fugue and Finale’, which represent ‘His skill and Our affection’. Britten wanted to include these descriptions in the published score but the Bridges, with typical self-effacing tact, dissuaded him. By 15 July, he was able to rehearse the piece with the Boyd Neel Orchestra: ‘I take them thro’ the Variations, which will be successful I think … the work is grateful to play, & the orch. themselves (a charming crowd) are very enthusiastic.’119

  The first broadcast performance of Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, by the Boyd Neel Orchestra, was from Radio Hilversum on 25 August; two days later, the work received its first public performance in Salzburg, where it was the centrepiece of an attractive concert of English string music (Purcell’s G minor Chaconne and Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro topped and tailed the programme, which also included Delius’s Two Aquarelles and works by Rutland Boughton and Arnold Bax for oboe and strings, with Leon Goossens as soloist). Britten was unable to be there in person, but a friend of his, on holiday in Europe, was present in the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum: ‘Well, Benjie,’ wrote Peter Pears, the only person in his adult life to address him thus, ‘I have dashed back to the hotel so that I can write down at once something about the concert.’ He was in no doubt that ‘the Variations were a great success, as indeed the orchestra was and Boyd Neel – and I got a very strong impression that the Variations were the most interesting work in the programme.’ He provided detailed comments on the individual movements and promised to collect press reviews as they appeared before signing off, ‘Much love to you – Peter.’120 It is entirely appropriate that the first known letter between the two men should have been packed with appreciative musical detail, for music would never cease to be the foundation on which their relationship was built.

  Peter Neville Luard Pears, born in Farnham on 22 June 1910, was over three years older than Britten, but his musical career had hardly begun. At his prep school, The Grange at Crowborough in Sussex, he was, according to his own recollection, ‘a bright little boy’; thereafter the brightness seemed to diminish. He was academically undistinguished at Lancing and he left Keble College, Oxford, without taking a degree. After that, like many other reasonably educated but unfocused young men of his background, he became a prep-school master and returned to The Grange: it was Nell Burra who eventually persuaded him to renounce ‘a life of Grey Flannel Prep School Mastering’.121 He thus shared with Britten – who, according to his brother Robert, sometimes regretted not having gone to Cambridge – a twinge of academic diappointment which sharpened his musical ambition. This had begun at Lancing, where he played the piano and the organ and ‘produced explosive noises on a bassoon’;122 he brought these useful talents to the Lancing College Chamber Music Society, formed by Pears, Burra and friends in April 1926, and its grander successor the Lancing College Orchestral Society. He also sang, first as the leading treble in the school choir and later as a tenor. Then, while at Keble, having tried unsuccessfully for an organ scholarship at Christ Church (where Burra was), he became assistant organist at Hertford College. But it wasn’t until 1933 that, with Nell Burra’s encouragement, he auditioned for the Webber–Douglas School of Singing (‘Your friend Peter,’ she was told, ‘has a marvellous mezza voce, but nothing much else which would earn him a living!’) and then successfully applied for a singing scholarship at the RCM. He stayed only two terms, leaving to join the Wireless Vocal Octet, which in 1935 became ‘BBC Singers B’ and performed both in religious services and with the BBC Chorus in concerts. He also joined the English Singers, a six-strong madrigal group, with whom he toured the United States in late 1936: it was on the voyage to New York that he met the German-born Elizabeth Mayer, whose subsequent friendship was to become so important to both Britten and Pears. Britten, of course, had yet to visit America, and there was one other aspect of their musical careers in which Pears outstripped his new friend. Although he treasured his privately made discs of A Boy Was Born, Britten had yet to make a commercial recording; whereas, earlier in 1936, Pears had recorded Peter Warlock’s Corpus Christi Carol as tenor soloist with the BBC Choir, conducted by Leslie Woodgate, for Decca. As his biographer Christopher Headington carefully puts it: ‘we at once notice a thoughtful word delivery and a sensitive moulding of quietly flowing phrases, but also a certain whiteness of tone’.123

  By the time Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge was performed in Salzburg, the two men had become close friends. They played tennis as well as music together and on the weekend of 17–18 July were guests of the Behrends at their Berkshire home, the Grey House. On the Saturday there was ‘lots of good tennis’ followed by dinner (‘& what a dinner’) after which Britten and Pears were able to ‘play & sing to a late hour’; on Sunday, however, Britten found himself having ‘to stand up to the whole company to defend my (& all our set) “left” opinions’, adding ‘I am not at all vanquished, but maintain my points’.124 The other weekend guests included Robert Bernays, an MP who was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, so Britten had some reason to feel pleased with himself; the Behrends themselves would have been more likely to share many of his views. His thank-you letter to Mary Behrend – listing ‘the lovely tennis, bathing, conversation, (tho’ I fear I overstepped the mark there!), company in general, exquisite hospitality in every direction, & last but not least, the really overwhelming kindness of the hosts’125– is full of a warmth which anticipates his later relationship with another sympathetic and civilised surrogate mother, Elizabeth Mayer.

  Britten’s notion of acquiring a cottage, or even a farmhouse, near Newbury had been supplanted, after Peter Burra’s death, by a much better idea. He loved Suffolk and by now must have begun to see that the absence of living parents there might be a reason to love it more rather than less; his share of his mother’s estate, following the sale of her house in Frinton, came to just under £2,000. The Welfords of Peasenhall Hall, his sister Beth’s future parents-in-law, were hospitable and Arthur Welford was, rather usefully, an architect; so Britten had not only a base for his house-hunting but a free, on-the-spot source of expert advice. In late June, after several disappointments, he came across ‘a Mill at Snape, which seems to have possibilities – but alot of alterations to be made’.126 By the time he went over the mill again on 11 July, with an advisory committee comprising both his sisters and his prospective brother-in-law, Kit’s father had drawn up plans for its conversion: ‘The place seems definitely good to-day, & I almost decide to make them an offer. The others seem impressed too.’127 He stayed at Peasenhall until the middle of the week, by which time he had made up his mind. ‘I think I have found a good spot to live in – it is an old Mill & house in a quaint old village called Snape near here,’ he told Nell Burra on 14 July. ‘It isn’t exactly isolated, but it has a grand view and alot of land to ensure its not being built round.’128 He would share it with Lennox Berkeley, although it would be ‘ages’ before they could move in. He completed the purchase in August and the Old Mill was ready for habitation by the following April.

  Not all his schemes were as sensible as that one. A year earlier, on 3 July 1936, he had given tea to Harry Morris, ‘the little boy Barbara found’, who was ‘getting o
n with his fiddle, & sings very nicely, & seems very intelligent’; he was also keen on gym and showed Britten ‘some of his especial tricks’.129 The combination of musicianship and sportsmanship was always a winning one, but Harry differed from Britten’s other young protégés in coming from a poor north London background; Barbara had ‘found’ him in the course of her work as matron and health visitor at a medical centre in Kilburn. The two met again in the spring of 1937 and on 26 June spent ‘a very enjoyable afternoon’ on Hampstead Heath, followed by tea and talk: ‘he is a splendid little boy & I hope I’ll be able to do something for him’, Britten wrote.130 This ‘something’ had by mid-July formed into the idea that Harry should accompany him on holiday to Cornwall, a suggestion Britten very properly discussed with Harry’s parents, who were ‘charming & terribly keen for him to come with me’.131 The holiday was to begin on 13 August. Harry spent the previous night at the flat in Finchley Road where he was already ‘very homesick’ (a possibility which, since the boy had never before left home, may not have occurred to anyone), but he cheered up next morning with the prospect of a train journey on the Cornish Riviera from Paddington: ‘it is exhilerating to see his face when he sees things for the first time’, wrote Britten, noting with extra pleasure that ‘the meal in the dining car is the most tremendous experience’. But this pleasure was somewhat dented by their reception on the station platform at Newquay, where they were met by his brother Robert and his wife Marjorie, already installed at Crantock, who ‘don’t seem too pleased to see us’.132