by Neil Powell
‘It was a marvellous house,’ said Michael Mayer, in an interview with Mitchell and Reed, recalling a house-warming celebration on 22 November which doubled as Britten’s 27th birthday party. ‘We played children’s games most of the evening: charades, and “ghosts” and games like that … I always tell people, Gypsy Rose Lee once sat on my lap with a gin bottle in her hand!… I had to act out “You can’t take it with you” and I did it by trying to carry Carson McCullers across the threshold…’60 When Britten described the same occasion to Antonio and Peggy Brosa on 20 December, it was in a tone of tolerant if rather weary irony:
We gave a housewarming party two or three weeks ago, at which Gypsie Rose Lee was a feature and we played murder all over the house and you could not imagine a better setting for it. The evening or rather morning ended with Peter and George Davis, owner of the house, doing a ballet to Petrushka, up the curtains and the hot water pipes – an impressive if destructive sight. Living is quite pleasant here when it is not too exciting, but I find it almost impossible to work, and retire to Amityville at least once a week.61
There was another party for Chester Kallman’s twentieth birthday on 7 January: his stepmother, Dorothy J. Farnan, remembered that ‘Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder of the New York City Ballet, and Marc Blitzstein, the composer, dropped in … Peter Pears sang “Make Believe” from Show Boat, and Wystan wrote a poem for the occasion.’62
Britten had decided that he must be ‘where things go on’ and there he was; but he didn’t really fit in and nor, one imagines, did the Steinway he imported into the communal living room. He seems to have made himself almost invisible to some of his fellow residents: Bowles found him ‘not talkative’ and Golo Mann thought vaguely that he ‘soon left Brooklyn and returned to England’.63 Pears, though happier about joining in (it was he who climbed the curtains and sang Jerome Kern), didn’t care for the place either: it was ‘a bohemian household, too wild, too uncertain … I don’t mind a bit of grubbiness, but not downright dirt … it didn’t suit us.’64 There were contacts to be made in the city – especially for Pears who, as the performing half of the partnership, needed them most – but by the following spring, Britten was retreating more and more to Amityville. ‘A winter in New York is just about the limit for me,’ he wrote to Beth on 12 May. ‘However, I have very good friends & of course Amityville I can flee to, if it gets too much for me – such as this present moment.’65 The experience of the preceding six months had perhaps been more valuable than he knew, in finally establishing beyond all doubt that urban bohemian life wasn’t for him.
In the meantime, the story of the Sinfonia da Requiem’s commission had reached its inevitable conclusion. Prince Fuminaro Konoye, president of the Committee for the 2,600th Anniversary, wrote in November to declare Britten’s composition ‘unsuitable for performance on such an occasion as our national ceremony’: his committee was ‘puzzled’ because the piece failed to express ‘felicitations’, it was ‘religious music of a Christian nature’, and it had a ‘melancholy tone both in its melodic pattern and rhythm’.66 These are reasonable points, or at least they would have been if Britten had not already supplied details of the work, including title and dedication. But the dedication seems not to have been passed on to the Japanese Embassy by the British Council and a good deal of nuance may have been lost in translation on both sides. Britten, of course, was mightily relieved by the disappearance of his summons to Tokyo and wrote rather too jauntily, in a reply partly drafted by Auden, to the Japanese vice consul in New York, referring to the Prince as ‘Mr’; Ralph Hawkes sternly remarked that this letter ‘does not appear to have helped the situation with the British Council here and I must say that I think you might have addressed Prince Konoye with his correct title’. Otherwise, Hawkes was his usual acute and supportive self, observing that ‘it is the Festival itself which is the point and not the actual character of the work written for it. If they had wanted 20 minutes of trumpeting, they should have said so…’67 There was, he added, ‘no question of refunding the money’. This, said Britten, he had already spent, while ‘the publicity of having a work rejected by the Japanese Consulate for being Christian is a wow’.68
It was an inelegant solution to the problem, but Britten had two reasons, apart from the money, to be satisfied with it: the Sinfonia da Requiem was far too important a work to have been squandered on a politically compromised occasion; and the first performance would now be given by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under John Barbirolli at Carnegie Hall, on 29 March 1941. This was a Saturday, which severely limited the press coverage, but the concert was repeated on the following Sunday afternoon and broadcast by CBS to an estimated audience of nine million listeners. Britten was quietly pleased: Barbirolli had taken a lot of trouble over it, the orchestra enjoyed playing it, the audience were friendly, ‘the show was a good one’. To Peggy Brosa he added this interesting if enigmatic comment: ‘Personally, I think it is the best so far, & since it’s the last opus, it’s as it should be – although to me it is so personal & intimate a piece, that it is rather like those awful dreams where one parades about the place naked – slightly embarrassing!’69 The thunderous drumbeats which open the Lacrymosa, and return at the end of the movement, seem bellicose for an avowedly pacifist work, until we recall (as Britten surely did) those processional drums in the music Purcell wrote for Queen Mary’s funeral in 1695. The Morse-code motif at the start of the Dies Irae has distant military overtones too; then there’s a sudden burst of proto-‘Sea Interlude’, some stuttering brass exchanges and a plangent viola melody before the whole thing builds to a climax which brilliantly fragments into its component parts (the effect is the aural equivalent, in reverse, of that early Channel 4 logo in which jagged multicoloured bits of the figure 4 converged from every direction). Out of this chaos, the majestically serene Requiem Aeternam emerges: here a sombre, stately flute tune gives way to one of Britten’s most rapturous reaching-for-eternity themes before the piece ends in a mood of resigned tranquillity. The Sinfonia da Requiem lasts only twenty minutes, but it encompasses a world as vast as that of a Mahler symphony; indeed, when it is sometimes programmed with one of the larger Mahler symphonies, one can have a strange sense of it being nowhere near as long yet somehow just as big a work.
Britten’s vulnerable sense of walking naked in the Sinfonia da Requiem may strike us as odd until we reflect that his exposure in the song cycles is shared with both poet and singer, whereas the orchestra expresses the composer’s unmediated self. Pears’s role as the sharer of Britten’s compositional life, whenever words were involved, had now become unassailable. During 1940 he had taken singing lessons in New York, first with Therese Behr-Schnabel and then with Clytie Mundy: ‘The improvement in his voice after only a month is quite staggering,’70 Britten had written in March, and by April he was ‘singing 100% better’.71 The composition of the Michelangelo sonnets, dedicated ‘to Peter’, was predicated on this improvement, but although they were finished in the autumn of 1940 they were not to be performed in public until 23 September 1942 at Wigmore Hall. This delay was mainly because Pears didn’t yet feel ready to do them justice, although Mitchell and Reed suggest that there may also have been, on Britten’s part, ‘a certain reluctance to bring these passionate avowals of love – for his singer, for his singer’s voice above all – into the public domain’.72 They performed the songs for friends at Amityville and made a private recording of them in New York, of which Christopher Headington provides a typically sympathetic, detailed analysis: he notes that the voice ‘is a young one, yet it has authority and purpose’; the intonation ‘is secure and the words clear both in diction and in the projection of their meaning’; but there are ‘some weaknesses’ such as a problematical high E and a mannered downward portamento at the end of the fifth song.73 However, Pears did sing – and Britten, after a tussle with the Musicians’ Union, did conduct – the first American performance of Les Illuminations on 18 May 1941 in a concert broadcast by CBS as part
of the eighteenth ISCM Festival. This work, which had only been lent to Sophie Wyss, now belonged to Pears.
Paul Bunyan, the Britten–Auden collaboration which its creators had once dreamed of seeing staged on Broadway, received its rather more modest first production, billed as ‘A New Operetta in 2 Acts’, at the Brander Matthews Hall of Columbia University during the week beginning 5 May. The audience liked it well enough, but the critical reaction was largely unfavourable: Olin Downes, in the New York Times, felt that both Britten (‘a very clever young man’ who ‘scores with astonishing expertness and fluency’) and Auden had failed to do themselves justice, while Virgil Thomson, in the New York Herald Tribune, thought that Britten’s contribution was ‘sort of witty at its best’ and agreed that ‘Mr Britten can do better’.74 The work was problematical in two particular respects. Firstly, the notion of a work whose titular hero, a legendary giant, never appears onstage belonged much more obviously to the surreal-fantastical world of the earlier Auden–Isherwood dramas than to the New York of 1941. Secondly, the spectacle of two young Englishmen in exile tackling so specifically American a theme could hardly fail to seem impertinent: Paul Bunyan, according to Time, was an ‘anemic operetta put up by two British expatriates’.75 For Britten, the production of Paul Bunyan and his departure from Middagh Street signalled the beginning of a gradual estrangement from Auden in both life and work: their collaborations had provided invaluable experience for him, but they had represented an uncomfortable kind of fancy dress for a composer who was always more at ease in his ordinary clothes, even when these were somewhat formal.
To earn a little money, and to maintain his hands-on involvement in music-making, Britten accepted the position of Conductor for the 1941 season of the Suffolk Friends of Music Symphony Orchestra: this was Suffolk County on Long Island, a coincidence which prompted both amusement and homesickness. His appointment had been encouraged by the Mayers’ friend David Rothman, a member of the orchestra’s committee who kept the hardware store at Southold, an almost-Suffolk name which had shed a consonant in crossing the Atlantic. The orchestra’s membership consisted of ‘professional musicians, adult amateurs, and advanced students of high school age’ – a step up from the ‘Benj. Britten Bungay Band’, though not a huge one – and the job of conducting them required ‘a great deal of energy, a certain amount of skill and an infinite amount of tact’.76 Britten clearly possessed the first two qualities; the third he found trickier, sometimes resorting to a mode of schoolmasterly English irony. ‘Gentlemen,’ he remarked on one occasion, ‘what I hear sounds vaguely familiar, but I find nothing like it in my score!’77 Perfectionism, not vanity, made it a dispiriting experience for him, and there was worse to come. In Tony Palmer’s film A Time There Was, David Rothman recalled Britten’s inconsolable misery after a concert at which there were more people on the stage than in the audience: he wondered whether he should give up music altogether and take a job at the hardware store instead. It may sound like a theatrical gesture, but it was a reflection both of his genuine loss of confidence and of the creative artist’s frequent desire to do something more obviously useful. His delight in simple things had been reawakened by the Rothmans’ fourteen-year-old son Bobby who, to the dismay of his father (who thought such common pleasures would be beneath the composer’s dignity), took Britten bowling; nothing, of course, could have been better calculated to please the competitive schoolboy in him. As so often in England, Britten found he could talk more easily to an intelligent teenager than to most adults. Walking along the shore of Long Island Sound, David Rothman once suggested to Britten that the sound of the gulls might inspire him, a mildly tactless remark though, given the subject of his next opera, an almost prophetic one. Britten waited until Rothman was out of earshot and then said to Bobby: ‘You know, those seagulls don’t give me any inspiration. It all just comes to me up here – I really don’t need the seagulls for it!’78 There was a family picnic at Orient Point on Long Island, filmed for posterity by David Rothman, during which Britten’s unaffected boyishness is splendidly evident – ‘You are such a delightful family,’ he told his host, ‘I have scarcely ever felt so easy and at home with people, as I do with you all’79 – and on one occasion he and Bobby shared a twin-bedded room at the Rothmans’ house. Britten, Bobby remembered, gave him a hug before they went to sleep: ‘It was just a certain fondness, a certain kindness. Nothing took place that I would have been upset about if anyone else was watching. There was at one time a tender hug, and that was about it.’80
At the end of May, Britten and Pears set off in their neurotic Ford for Escondido, California: ‘I have lots of work to do & have a nice long invitation to stay in a grand house near the sea & in an orange grove!’81 The invitation, for the whole summer, was from the married pianists Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, for whom Britten had composed the Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca, Op. 23, No. 1, the previous autumn (Bartlett and Robertson gave the first performance on 5 January 1941). The ‘lots of work’ was to include a companion piece for two pianos – Mazurka Elegiaca, Op. 23, No. 2 (In Memoriam I. J. Paderewski) – as well as a second set of Rossini arrangements, Matinées Musicales, Op. 24, and, most importantly, the first String Quartet, Op. 25, commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. At Escondido, the two men established a working routine which, as usual, accommodated Britten’s need for silence and Pears’s need to make a noise: the latter would spend each morning practising in the nearby house of a sympathetic Englishwoman. The Robertsons, said Pears, were ‘very, very sweet people’,82 although Britten had to put up with some unwanted attention from Ethel Bartlett which her husband irritatingly failed to discourage: ‘the personal relationships got in such a deplorable mess that any normal life was impossible’, he later told Beth, after spending ‘3 months living on an emotional volcano’.83
The summer’s most momentous event came wrapped in an insignificant disguise. Someone, in mid-July, thought Britten might be interested in an article in the Listener of 29 May by E. M. Forster, based on a talk he had given for the BBC Overseas Service on ‘George Crabbe: The Poet and the Man’, since Crabbe had come from and written about the Suffolk coast. Forster’s essay – which opens with the memorable sentence ‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England’ – might have been designed to be read by a homesick exaptriate East Anglian. It contains both an evocative description of Crabbe’s birthplace, Aldeburgh (‘… a bleak little place: not beautiful. It huddles round a flint-towered church and sprawls down to the North Sea – and what a wallop the sea makes as it pounds the shingle!’) and a brilliant summary of the poet’s peculiar attractiveness: ‘I like him and read him again and again: and his tartness, his acid humour, his honesty, his feeling for certain English types and certain English scenery, do appeal to me very much.’84 Forster then goes on to quote from the most haunting of all Crabbe’s narrative poems, ‘Peter Grimes’ from The Borough. Britten wrote with understandable delight to Elizabeth Mayer on 29 July: ‘We’ve just re-discovered the poetry of George Crabbe (all about Suffolk!) & are very excited – maybe an opera one day…!’85 They had moved on from Forster’s piece to the poems themselves, thanks to Pears’s habit of browsing in ‘a marvellous Rare Book shop’ which he thought the ‘only good thing’ in Los Angeles;86 it was there that he and Britten found an 1851 copy of The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe. In his speech on receiving the first Aspen Award in 1964, Britten recalled that life-changing moment:
But the thing I am most grateful to your country for is this: it was in California, in the unhappy summer of 1941, that, coming across a copy of the Poetical Works of George Crabbe in a Los Angeles bookshop, I first read his poem, Peter Grimes; and, at the same time, reading a most perceptive and revealing article about it by E. M. Forster, I suddenly realised where I belonged and what I lacked. I had become without roots, and when I got back to England six months later I was ready to put them down.87
4
During the previous two years, Britten and Pears
had often sought advice, from the British Embassy and from friends, about whether or not they should return home, and the reply was always the same: stay where you are. The authorities in England, they were told, were happy for them to remain ‘artistic ambassadors’, and in this admittedly ill-defined role they had some success. Britten’s work was now much more widely performed and broadcast in the United States than in his own country: this was partly due to the fact that an ambassador is by definition absent and unable to look after his interests at home, but there were other and trickier reasons for his reputation to have taken a tumble in London.
His article ‘An English Composer Sees America’ in the April 1940 issue of the American music magazine Tempo had, as he remarked to Ralph Hawkes, ‘caused a rumpus in London’88 when it appeared there later in the year. It’s an odd mixture of part-truths flattering to his host nation and sound common sense. His attack on the BBC for its policy of broadcasting monthly concerts of music by ‘contemporary composers (generally of the most formidable and unattractive kind)’ comes strangely from one who had so notably benefited from the BBC’s support of young composers at a time when even his own college seemed to find his work unperformable; while his opposing vision of America as a land in which ‘the composer has a chance of obtaining commissions from radio and phonograph companies’ errs on the side of rose-tinted optimism. On the other hand, his argument that contemporary music is best served when placed ‘in concert programs side by side with the well-tried masterpieces’ so that it may be ‘judged solely on its merits as music’ is sensible (and would become standard post-war BBC practice). Most interesting of all is his definition of two contrasting responses to ‘the preponderating German influence which had been stifling English music for 150 years’: