Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  On 10 May, as planned, Berkeley’s The Judgement of Paris received its premiere at Sadler’s Wells as part of a fund-raising gala programme which also included Arthur Bliss’s Checkmate, Constant Lambert’s Horoscope and the Meyebeer/Lambert Les Patineurs: Britten thought it ‘very good’ and enjoyed the party afterwards ‘with Freddy Ashton – the dancers – & C. Lambert’.161 Berkeley’s former partner José Raffalli had come over from Paris for the occasion and subsequently went with him to the Old Mill; John Pounder was staying at Nevern Square; a few days later, another old schoolfriend of Britten’s, the ‘decidedly bearable’ Francis Barton, arrived for a visit. When Pears returned from Glyndebourne he observed, correctly and a shade suspiciously, that their flat ‘looked as though you might have been entertaining someone’.162 One way and another, it was obviously a time for rediscovering old friends. In June, the sixteenth ISCM Festival – at which the Boyd Neel String Orchestra performed Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge – was held in London, and there Britten bumped into another old friend, the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who enjoyed the Variations and wanted to programme the piece. From him Britten learned that Scherchen’s son Wulff, with whom he had so memorably shared a raincoat during an earlier ISCM Festival, was now living in Cambridge with his mother Gustel; he was studying at the Perse School and hoping to win a scholarship to Christ’s College. Perhaps Britten, with his East Anglian base, would care to get in touch with him?

  He wasted no time. On 25 June, the day after the festival ended, he wrote to Wulff. ‘I do not know whether you will remember me or not,’ he began, before reminding him of ‘one day in Siena’ and making it clear that he was writing at Wulff’s father’s suggestion. Although he now had a flat in London, he lived ‘mostly in a windmill in Suffolk’, a slightly misleading description of the saucepan-shaped building which the Old Mill had become, and hoped he might either ‘come & fetch you in a car’ from Cambridge; alternatively, they could meet in London.163 Windmill apart, it is a scrupulous letter, both proper and persuasive, and its author can hardly have anticipated Wulff’s return-of-post reply (which he was not, in fact, at home to receive, having gone to visit the Bridges in Sussex). Wulff began, winningly, ‘Dear?’, going on to explain that he was ‘quite at a loss whether to address you “Dear Sir”, “Benjamin”, “Britten”, or just “Hello, old chap…”’ He remembered their previous meeting very well:

  Wasn’t that day in Sienna a whole ‘family’ outing, with the whole orchestra and that wonderful saxophonist Rascher, who is by now professor in Sweden or somewhere? We two went tramping to the piazza something or other and explored the ‘guildahalla’. Nein? I was in shorts and sandals (as I am now) and it started to rain. I got thoroughly wet, but it was worth it! – pleasant reminiscences of a glorious past! (Excuse my poetic strain).

  At the moment, I am basking in the sun, only the sun doesn’t appear to be there somehow. Curious fact, but there it is. It is very nice of you to ask me to come and see you sometimes (rather apt quotation from Mae West don’t you think?) I should just love to come and have a look at your windmill. I have always wanted to do that, since reading Daudet’s ‘lettres de mon moulin’.

  I am usually free on Saturday afternoons and Sundays and I hope you will be able to manage a week-end.164

  As a postscript on forms of address, Wulff wondered about ‘Dearest’ or ‘Darling Benjamin’; Britten had his ‘full permission to make me eat my words – with a three course dinner preferably’. Altogether, it is an extraordinary letter, affectionate, mischievous, knowing and seductive: the references to wearing shorts and sandals (‘as I am now’) and to Mae West, the ingenious way in which a Saturday afternoon expands into a weekend and the postscript’s hint that a hungry young man likes to be fed are all exactly targeted. When shown the letter sixty-five years later by John Bridcut, who was making the television film Britten’s Children, the octogenarian Wulff laughingly exclaimed: ‘Full marks for that boy!’165

  In his reply of 30 June, Britten, while cheerfully insisting that ‘if you dared to call me anything more formal than “Benjamin” I should be very angry’,166 sounds slightly wrong-footed. Nevertheless, he suggested that Wulff should visit Snape on the weekend of 9 July and might perhaps take a train to Bury St Edmunds or Stowmarket (Bridcut suggests that he more resourcefully travelled all the way to Saxmundham) where Britten would meet him in the car: ‘it would save alot of time’, he said, but he probably wanted to exclude Wulff’s mother from this potentially fraught reunion. In fact, the moment passed off easily: they recognised each other at once and were immediately relaxed. Ben, said Wulff later, hadn’t changed at all; Wulff, on the other hand, had become a tall, self-asssured eighteen-year-old who had spent the past four years growing up fast, with his broken home – his father was based in Switzerland – spread across a troubled Europe. The age difference which had seemed slight when they met in Florence now dwindled into irrelevance; and Britten, more accustomed to befriending adolescent boys and to being befriended by somewhat older men, found himself on the brink of an altogether new kind of relationship.

  In Bridcut’s documentary, Wulff – by this time an elderly, handsome Australian who adopted his English wife’s surname and is called John Woolford – returns at last to the Old Mill and sits on the exact spot on the studio floor where, that July weekend in 1938, he listened to Britten playing Beethoven for him on the piano. ‘The music just overwhelmed me – the feeling that music arouses, the fact that Ben was playing for me, not for anyone else,’ he says. ‘This was a personal performance. I was taken out of myself, and I had an outpouring of emotions – the tears were streaming down my face, and I couldn’t stop. I was blissfully happy. Ben stopped, terribly concerned, and found a handkerchief for me to dry my tears with. He said, “Anything I can do? Are you all right?” and I said, “I’m perfectly all right, I’m so happy I can’t explain it to you.”’167 That, as Wulff young and old both knew, is a feeling people have when they have just fallen in love; and Ben was, if anything, the more astonished of the pair. It was he who, writing to Wulff the following week, struggled to find the right tone: ‘Well, old thing, I did enjoy having you for the weekend. It was grand to see that you hadn’t altered from that kid in Florence & Siena (I hope you take that as a compliment!).’168 Genies are, of course, notoriously averse to being put back into bottles. But Britten is being both artfully and transparently – for it is meant to be seen through – duplicitous: it’s seldom a compliment to tell a grown-up youth of eighteen that he resembles his thirteen-year-old self and, in any case, Wulff had changed. That was precisely the point. Theirs was now a powerfully different relationship, even though he wouldn’t visit the Old Mill again until the autumn, partly on account of his own complicated summer arrangements and partly because Britten had another urgent commitment: ‘The Concerto is not nearly done yet – quite desperate is the situation … Here I am – wasting my time writing rot to you & the world is champing for my masterpiece…’169

  It was, indeed, horribly behind schedule. At the end of May, he had assured the BBC’s Kenneth Wright that it was ‘going fine’: it would ‘be done soon after Whit & I’ll be along at once to show it you’.170 A month later, Whitsun having come and gone, he told Ralph Hawkes: ‘The Concerto is now forging ahead.’171 By 4 July, ‘The old Concerto is now finished, & I feel quite elated about it,’ but he had yet to score it and was about to be interrupted by, among other things, his first weekend with Wulff. He could, however, provide Hawkes and, through him, Boosey & Hawkes’s publicist Carl Rosen with information including title (‘Pianoforte Concerto no. 1 in D major’), duration (‘roughly 30 mins.’), instrumentation, titles of movements (‘1. Toccata 2. Waltz 3. Recitative & Aria leading to: 4, March’) and a wry postscript: ‘Re publicity, I can’t think of anything to say – except it’s damn difficult to play!’172 The manuscript full score is dated ‘Snape – July 26th 1938’ which, if not quite Beethovenian in its last-minuteness, was cutting things fine for a Proms premiere
on 18 August. When he wrote to Wulff on 1 August, he was in the middle of writing the programme note: ‘Mind you listen in hard – it is a thousand pities that you can’t be there – at least I think it is!’173 This extensive note, less off-putting than the one he supplied for Our Hunting Fathers but still rather humourless, is reproduced with the concert details in Pictures from a Life.174 As Wulff would be abroad during August, Britten invited Piers Dunkerley, now in the sixth form at Bloxham, to stay with him in London and ‘hold his hand’ as he prepared for the performance. Piers, entering into the spirit, replied that he wanted to ‘hold your paw – dirty or not’ but wondered, with irrefutable logic: ‘By the way, if I’m to hold your hand, how are you going to tickle the ivories?’175

  The Piano Concerto, Op. 13, as we now know it, differs from the work heard in the Queen’s Hall and on BBC London Regional that August evening: in 1945, Britten replaced the original third movement with an Impromptu – incorporating material from some of his incidental music of the late 1930s – which, for an eerie moment, sounds like a cousin of Finzi’s Eclogue. In either version, the most striking movement is the astonishingly dextrous opening Toccata, with its étude-like cadenza leading to an unexpectedly gentle slow section of orchestral writing; the Waltz which follows is haunted by slightly sinister voicings, though without the parodic overtones of the Wiener Walzer in the Bridge Variations; the concluding March is unsettling too, though surely with comic overtones (it feels almost like a cartoon march, which might have accompanied the mock-military antics of those Disney characters so enjoyed by Britten). If all this suggests a work of mood swings, unsure of its own seriousness, that wouldn’t have disconcerted anyone who had heard the Prokofiev concertos or Shostakovich’s first piano concerto of 1933. And indeed the audience in the hall seemed to enjoy it, although critical opinion was mixed: an otherwise intelligent piece in The Times failed to see the funny side of the finale, while William McNaught in the Musical Times returned to the familiar complaint about ‘Mr Britten’s cleverness’ which had ‘got the better of him and let him into all sorts of errors’.176 This must have been especially frustrating since exactly the same objection which had been made against his ‘difficult’ works (such as Our Hunting Fathers) was now being lobbed at a ‘popular’ one: a clear case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Most worrying of all, however, may have been the reaction of the Bridges and of Marjorie Fass, who heartily detested the piece (and thought ‘he was overworked & tired & played much worse at the show than at the rehearsal’); when he played them the off-air records made of it, ‘we all sat with shut faces’.177 Auden, in Brussels, failed to find a radio which would pick up London Regional but saw the ‘rather snooty’ notice in The Times and gathered that the work ‘had an enthusiastic reception’: he wondered ‘about its effect on a certain person of importance’.178 This important person was in Strasbourg, where he did manage to hear the broadcast and bravely wrote that he thought the finale ‘pompous’. Britten, never good at receiving even light-hearted criticism, did his best: ‘I was pleased to hear that you listened-in to the Concerto, & sorry that it came over badly – as it must have done if the Finale sounded “pompous” – which I can assure you it is not, whatever else it may be!’ Yet Wulff wasn’t so far wrong: if he had written ‘mock-pompous’, he would have been precisely right. ‘I had a tremendous amount of press, which is the best thing of all,’ Britten continued. ‘What annoyed one or two critics was that it went down so well with the obviously “lay” audience!’179 Although audiences have continued to enjoy it, the concerto hasn’t become a popular repertoire piece – probably, as Michael Kennedy suggested, because the first movement so outshines the others: ‘After the Toccata the temperature drops; the musical interest, stimulated by an unusually compelling concerto first-movement, is dissipated by the suite-like sequence.’180 Though billed as the composer’s piano concerto ‘No. 1’, it was to have no successors.

  When Britten played his concerto records to the stony-faced Bridges and their friends, he was also able to bring with him the records of Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge which the Boyd Neel String Orchestra had made on 15 July for Decca. As Marjorie Fass put it, ‘when we had the variations at last we cld smile’. These were the first commercially issued records of Britten’s music – a surprising fact, in view of the amount which had been broadcast by the BBC – and although he had some contact with Walter Yeomans at Decca, events intervened before any further recordings could be made; Britten’s long association with the label, which lasted until his death, would resume in May 1943. However, on 14 July he had accompanied Hedli Anderson in recording four of his Cabaret Songs for Columbia: ‘Johnny’, ‘Funeral Blues’ and two subsequently lost pieces, ‘Give up love’ and ‘Jam Tart’ (the latter a parody of Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’). These must have been deemed in some way unsatisfactory, because on 18 January 1939 Anderson and Britten re-recorded ‘Johnny’, together with ‘Tell me the truth about love’; the producer was Walter Legge. All the poems were, of course, by Auden who, in an undated letter early in 1939, demanded: ‘Where are the records?’181 That question remains unanswerable, for they were never issued; the masters were subsequently destroyed and with them the only commercially made pre-war recordings by Benjamin Britten.

  After his stressful August, Britten promised himself a music-free month in September. He went sailing with Ralph Hawkes on his Stravinskian yacht Firebird; he spent time ‘wandering the country in a small Morris 8’; and he attempted to write letters on an old typewriter he’d been given, with results which might have impressed Don Marquis: ‘i hope you have had a good hphliday … widl horses arnr’nt going to make me xxx do any work … best wishes (signed) Benjimih Brittedn.!’182 The lucky recipient of that one was Edwina Jackson at Boosey & Hawkes. Wulff came for a weekend at Snape, just before the start of his new term, and Berkeley was there too: the atmosphere was polite but tense. By early October, Britten was back at work. There was the incidental music for the new Auden–Isherwood play, On the Frontier, first produced by the Group Theatre at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 14 November; some organ music for They Walk Alone by Max Catto, first produced by Bertold Viertel (the Friedrich Bergmann of Isherwood’s Prater Violet) at the Q Theatre, London, on 21 November; and a much more substantial score for J. B. Priestley’s Johnson Over Jordan, which had its premiere at the New Theatre, London, on 22 February 1939. Then there was ‘the Co-op part song’,183 Advance Democracy, a setting of words by Randall Swingler for unaccompanied chorus. And by late November he had started work on a violin concerto.

  Peter Pears took the part of the Ostnian Announcer and Britten himself played the piano during the short Cambridge run of On the Frontier. This latter task, a modest one for someone who had recently been the soloist in his taxing new concerto at the Queen’s Hall, was clearly made more congenial by the proximity of Wulff; Britten, indeed, stayed with the Scherchens both during the play’s run from 14 to 19 November and for several weekends during the autumn. Gustel evidently approved of him sufficiently to allow her son to accept an invitation to stay at the Old Mill for Christmas and New Year.

  7

  Wulff was musical but not a musician, and he wasn’t much good at either tennis or swimming: these deficiencies made him an unlikely recipient of Britten’s friendship. But he was literary, with a particular enthusiasm for European romanticism and – in poets such as Keats and Shelley – its English equivalent. So why didn’t he try writing poetry of his own? ‘There seems to be something at the back of that silly old head of yours – & it might help in getting it out – nicht wahr?’184 It need never be shown to anyone, Britten added, except him. This sounds like a pardonable ruse designed to tempt Wulff into baring his soul, but Britten can’t have anticipated an immediate response of four or five pieces, two of which were unmistakably love poems addressed to himself (one was called ‘Sturm & Drang’). He wrote a wonderfully sensible and judicious reply, with helpfully detailed comments on the poems w
hich were not about him and the advice to ‘Write lots more. Read lots more.’ Auden’s Look, Stranger!, he continued, was ‘the finest book of poetry published these twenty years’:185 a piece of cronyism and perhaps, given the dedications in the book, teasing self-advertisement, but also a perfectly sound judgement about what an intelligent young man should be reading. All this advice-giving was making him feel ‘very depressed’ about his own great age: ‘The strain of becoming a quarter of a century is bearing hard upon me,’ he wrote on his twenty-fifth birthday, 22 November. ‘It’s a horrible thing to feel one’s youth slipping o – so surely away from one & I had such a damn good youth too. I wish you were here to comfort me!’186 Although he wasn’t being entirely serious, this is a long way from the childishly celebrated birthdays of his quite recent past. He didn’t mention that Lennox had given him a rather lovely birthday present: a set of miniature scores of the complete Haydn String Quartets, bound in marbled boards with white leather spines.

  At the beginning of December, Wulff was sitting his scholarship exams at Christ’s, where he hoped to read Modern Languages. As these approached, he may have realised that he wouldn’t be successful, and this may partly explain the tone of his letter dated 6 December which begins ‘Darling Ben’ and ends ‘Wish me luck darling, all the best, Wulff’. In a postscript he looked forward to his Christmas visit to Snape: ‘I shall need a rest. My nerves are getting frayed … Till Xmas dearest. All my love.’ And then: