Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  By then, he added, he was busy with ‘horribly-boring “incidentals”’, by which he meant the music – some eighty cues lasting almost seventy-five minutes – for Edward Sackville-West’s The Rescue. It was his most substantial work for radio, broadcast on 25 and 26 November and on several later occasions; the BBC Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Clarence Raybould. Meanwhile Britten, who had been scheduled to conduct, was in Devon, pretending to be ill and staying with Christopher Martin, the Arts Department Administrator at Dartington Hall, and his wife Cicely: his absence from Broadcasting House was the result of a furious row with Arthur Bliss, the BBC’s Director of Music, over his status as a conscientious objector. The programme was well received, although Britten, in one of his frank updates to his transatlantic friend, confided that while Sackville-West was ‘a friend of mine, sensitive & with good taste’, he was ‘not a great poet, and, after all this does need a great poet to stand up to one’s memories of Homer’.60 After that, he had to write The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, for male voices and piano, dedicated to ‘Richard Wood and the musicians of Oflag VIIB – Germany – 1943’: the dedicatee, a prisoner of war at Eichstätt, was the brother of the contralto Anne Wood, who had been a friend of Britten and Pears since the late 1930s. Britten finished the piece on 13 December.

  The most critically important occasion of the autumn was unquestionably the first performance of the Serenade, given by Pears and Brain with strings conducted by Walter Goehr, at Wigmore Hall on 15 October: ‘a lovely show, with wonderful enthusiasm and lovely notices’. Probably the loveliest was in the Observer by William Glock who, after recalling how his predecessor, A. H. Fox Strangways, had been able to hear new works by the mature Brahms, wrote: ‘in Benjamin Britten we have at last a composer who offers us visions as great as those’. He described three of the songs – the Cotton, Tennyson and Keats – in some detail and concluded with the wish that ‘HMV or Columbia or Decca should record this Serenade as soon as possible and the BBC should see that the country is made aware of its new masterpiece’.61 The work received a second performance at Friends House, Euston Road, on 11 January 1944 and (in partial fulfilment of Glock’s hopes) was recorded by Decca with Pears, Brain and the Boyd Neel Orchestra on 25 May and 8 October: Britten urged Pears to ‘do a superb Serenade’, and he did. This was one of a clutch of Britten recordings made by the company after their unsatisfactory effort with the Hymn to St Cecilia. The others included A Ceremony of Carols, with the Morriston Boys Choir, after the first performance of the revised version at Wigmore Hall on 4 December; three folk-song arrangements, performed by Pears and Britten, in January; and, also in January, the two-piano pieces, Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca and Mazurka Elegiaca, with Clifford Curzon. Although Pears and Britten made some further recordings for HMV, such as the Holy Sonnets of John Donne in 1947, this marked the real beginning of Britten’s lifelong relationship with Decca, which would grow into an unprecedented collection of recordings performed, conducted or supervised by a major composer, rivalled only by Stravinsky’s association with Columbia.

  In a letter to Elizabeth Mayer on 8 December 1943, Britten listed several aspects of his busy summer and autumn – at that point, he was ‘quickly scribbling a short choral work’ – before concluding triumphantly: ‘And THEN I start the OPERA … Isn’t that exciting?’62

  3

  When Britten first envisaged Peter Grimes as an opera, he thought of Christopher Isherwood as librettist. Isherwood gracefully declined the invitation on 18 February 1942: although he saw (or thought he saw) how it could be done, ‘the real point is that I am quite sure I shan’t have the time for such work for months or maybe years ahead; and frankly the subject doesn’t excite me so much that I want to make time for it…’63 Then Pears thought he might have a go but decided ‘I hadn’t the skill or the time, really’.64 What neither man quite said was that, given the strangely charged relationship between Grimes and his apprentices, it was something of a hot potato: it’s surely significant that, on arriving in England, Britten immediately passed it to the heterosexual, happily married Montagu Slater. No less significant is the fact that Slater was at best a second-rate literary talent, for Britten didn’t want to be dominated again by a more powerful creative personality, as he had been by Auden. It was during his measles confinement at Grove Hospital that he began to experience doubts about Slater’s ability – ‘I’m beginning to feel that Montagu may not be the ideal librettist’ – but he immediately rejected Auden as an alternative: ‘Wystan, well – there are the old objections, & besides, he’s not to hand.’65 Chief among his ‘old objections’, we may suspect, was that he found Auden an intellectual bully.

  Yet there were two further reasons why the Grimes libretto was bound to be problematical: no one concerned had fully appreciated either the human range or the tragic ambition of Crabbe’s poem, and Britten hadn’t quite decided what he wanted to do with it. Isherwood, to return to him for a moment, thought the poem ‘good melodramatic material’; as late as 1963, Britten himself insisted that their Grimes was ‘a character of vision and conflict’ and a ‘tortured idealist, rather than the villain he was in Crabbe’,66 while, according to Pears in 1965, ‘In the original poem by George Crabbe (from The Borough) Grimes is quite simply an unattractive and brutal ruffian’;67 and Philip Brett, in 1996, still thought Crabbe’s Grimes ‘an unmitigated ruffian’.68 By embracing two common misconceptions – that the poem is ‘melodramatic’ and its tragic hero a ‘villain’ or a ‘ruffian’ – Britten, Pears and Slater created, and then proceeded to solve, imaginary problems. Of course, changes had to be made: as it stands, Crabbe’s narrative might have translated, rather interestingly, into a different sort of musical work, something for a solo voice (Grimes) and an answering, commenting chorus, as in a Greek tragedy. Slater was right to see that, as an opera, it must be opened up: several villagers are given names and identities, while the schoolmistress Ellen Orford is imported from a quite separate poem in The Borough. Yet the problem with Ellen is that, although her love for Grimes is just about plausible, there’s little reason to suppose that Grimes is in love with her: his attachment to her looks too much like a pacifying strategy and his repeated ‘I’ll marry Ellen’ carries undertones of ‘if I must’ and (to the villagers) ‘if that’ll shut you up’. Consequently, we might begin to suspect Grimes of an emotional insincerity which seems at odds with the character in Crabbe’s poem. More troubling, and less necessary, is Slater’s altered ending: Crabbe clearly thinks of Grimes, who dies surrounded by villagers and tormented by demons, as a properly tragic figure, a point which he underlines with several allusions to Macbeth; Slater turns him into a suicide who goes out in his boat and drowns himself. Although this has the positive effect of reasserting the sea’s role as almost a character in itself, it diminishes Grimes’s tragic stature and gives the opera its disconcertingly muted conclusion.

  Crabbe had the same advantage over Britten and Slater that Henry James had over Alan Hollinghurst: the very fact that there were things he couldn’t say in brutal modern terms enabled him to write about them in other, more subtly nuanced ways. Crabbe seems to have understood that Grimes’s sadism is an expression of unhappiness, disappointment, sexual rage and frustrated love: Grimes is the most inwardly realised of all the characters in The Borough – not least because, as I’ve suggested in ‘In Search of Peter Grimes’,69 he is substantially based on the poet’s own father. Moreover, he engages our sympathy in descriptive passages which find no direct equivalent in the opera, such as the unforgettable one beginning ‘When tides were neap…’ which conveys both Grimes’s melancholic solitude and his consolatory identification with nature. Pears was initially tempted to make Crabbe’s understated ‘some, on hearing cries, / Said calmly, “Grimes is at his exercise”’ more explicit: Slater had access to the material he had produced during the voyage home and, says Philip Brett, ‘appears rather to have relished the hints of loose-living and sadism in Pears’s drafts, even
those of homoeroticism’, but his own attempt at depicting Grimes’s sexually charged violence towards his apprentice (of which a vestige remains in the hut scene) was disastrous.70 It was Pears himself who then most clearly realised that their Grimes mustn’t, after all, be seen as a sexual outsider: ‘The more I hear of it,’ he wrote, after Britten had played through to him as much as he’d written in March 1944, ‘the more I feel that the queerness is unimportant & doesn’t really exist in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn’t do so in the words. P.G. is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem is expression, self-expression.’71 Ironically, this at last brings Grimes back closer to the character Pears had earlier misunderstood. Both he and Britten would later take the slightly disingenuous line that they sympathised with Grimes-the-outsider because they too were outsiders, but as pacifists rather than as homosexuals. In Tony Palmer’s film A Time There Was, Pears says that Britten wrote the opera ‘as a confrontation between an individual and society, which in fact was part of our own predicament at the time. We had obviously felt very much that we were in a very small minority of pacifists in a world of war.’72 By 1980, this evasion wasn’t really necessary; it was, however, too ingrained a habit for Pears to break.

  At first Britten thought that Peter Grimes, commissioned by Koussevitzky, would receive its first production at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1944, and he envisaged the title role as an operatic villain sung by a baritone; in any case, it was by no means certain that Pears would or could travel back to America in wartime. When the festival was suspended for the duration of the war, Koussevitzky generously allowed the premiere to take place in England; but long before then, as Pears continued to gain operatic experience while touring with Sadler’s Wells, Britten had begun to think of Grimes being sung by a tenor. Thus the task of writing an opera for Koussevitzky steadily metamorphosed into the rather different task of writing an opera for Peter. Already weighted with sexual and geographical subtexts, it now acquired the special collaborative intensity of the Michelangelo Sonnets and the Serenade, in which the composer was writing specifically for a performer who was also his lover: we may sense this at moments of emotional vulnerability as different as the spellbinding aria ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ and the terrifying later ‘mad scene’. But a creative relationship which could be natural and enriching for a single-voiced song cycle was likely to prove more problematical for a three-act opera. Pears, whose hectic touring schedule continued through 1944, took to viewing Grimes as his destiny: having just sung the ‘dirty music’ of La Bohème ‘to the Queen & the Princesses (their first opera – most unsuitable I should have thought)’, he consoled himself with the reflection that ‘it’s all good training for Peter Grimes, which is after all what I was born for, nicht-whar?’73 Yet Britten’s self-confidence was as fragile as ever. In January 1944, having ‘broken the spell and got down to work’ on Grimes, he was reaching for the safety of modest expectations: ‘I don’t know whether I shall ever be a good opera composer, but it’s wonderful fun to try once in a way!’ In April, he told Pears that ‘Grimes is being such a brute at the moment’, and in June: ‘My bloody opera stinks, & that’s all there is to it.’74 To which Pears splendidly replied: ‘I don’t believe your opera stinks. I just don’t believe it; anyway if it does, by all means be-Jeyes it, and have it as sweet as its writer for me when I see it.’75

  But, if not at Tanglewood, where was it to be performed? Boosey & Hawkes had taken a lease on the Royal Opera House and would have liked it to be staged there; Pears’s connections, on the other hand, were with Sadler’s Wells, who hoped to reopen their closed London theatre the following spring. On 12 July, Britten spent ‘a hectic day in London – those things around all day, with bumps & sirens galore – had lots to arrange, saw Ralph & fixed about P.G. at the Wells (I’ve written to Joan [Cross])’.76 Although this sounds reassuringly definite, by the autumn it looked as if Sadler’s Wells wouldn’t be ready in time: its governing body had decided to extend their lease on the Prince’s Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue and proposed to stage Grimes there, an idea strongly opposed both by Britten and his producer, Eric Crozier. There was also still the outside possibility of the Royal Opera House: ‘I gather things are moving towards Covent Garden abit,’ wrote Britten in late November, ‘but the betting’s on P.G. at Sadler’s Wells, I think now.’77 Meanwhile, working for the first time with an amanuensis, the nineteen-year-old Arthur Oldham, he had begun the scoring, which he completed on 10 February 1945: ‘I have actually just written “End” to the opera score,’ he told Mary Behrend,78 although what he had actually written at the end of the score was, more usefully, the date. Oldham, who stayed with Britten at the Old Mill, happily settled into the composer’s routine: ‘He would score all the morning, and then we’d go for long walks in the afternoon, talking about music, and then in the evening he’d do some more scoring and then after dinner we’d relax and listen to music.’ Britten, he told Humphrey Carpenter, believed in a Michelangelo-like apprenticeship, ‘learning (and he quoted this) to “mix the paint” first, working together with a master, and from that something would rub off’. His first task was ruling bar lines, but he moved on to ‘more constructive jobs’ such as making a two-piano arrangement of the Simple Symphony. When Carpenter asked him whether the ‘master’ wasn’t getting the better of this deal, Oldham replied: ‘I would say it was beneficial five per cent to him and ninety-five per cent to me!’ Britten, he added, was ‘an immensely good man’.79 After the scoring was finished, Britten and Pears developed further reservations about aspects of Slater’s libretto – especially the ‘mad scene’ in Act 3 – and enlisted the surreptitious help of Ronald Duncan in revising it; as Duncan himself later pointed out, this ‘wasn’t easy’ as it ‘entailed finding lines to fit the precise run and stress of the music’.80 Although Slater grudgingly accepted the revisions, he nevertheless published ‘his’ version in Peter Grimes and other poems the following year.

  That Peter Grimes was, in the end, the opera with which Sadler’s Wells reopened on 7 June 1945 was largely due to the determination of the company’s director, the soprano Joan Cross, who also sang the role of Ellen Orford. Yet, as her successor as director, Tyrone Guthrie, pointed out to her in a letter of 23 December 1944, Cross’s combination of administrator and performer created two difficulties. ‘If you are – & while you are – Director you must not sing if there is any one else reasonably adequate available,’ he wrote, partly because she wouldn’t have the time and energy to do both but also because ‘it gives the impression that so long as you are director, no leading soprano [he mentioned Joan Hammond] need apply’.81 Guthrie was right to foresee trouble ahead. When rehearsals with the conductor, Reginald Goodall, got under way in March, it became clear that not everyone shared Joan Cross’s enthusiasm for the work; the Welsh baritone who was to have taken the part of Balstrode actually withdrew. According to Pears, there was hostility from ‘the older generation’ both of governors and of singers, who would have preferred Il Trovatore or even Merrie England: a feeling, misguided though not incomprehensible, that the house’s reopening at the end of a long war should be marked by something conservative or patriotic. Moreover, it could hardly escape the attention of the opera’s enemies that its composer, star performer and producer, Eric Crozier, had all been conscientious objectors. Pears, as the opera’s most public face, found himself attacked and derided, almost as if he were indeed Peter Grimes.

  Because the company was touring, they had to rehearse wherever they happened to be: on 9 May, VE Day, they were in Wolverhampton and had no time to celebrate. Then, at Wigmore Hall on 31 May, there was a ‘Concert-Introduction’ to Peter Grimes, as part of the Boosey & Hawkes season: an introduction by Guthrie and an ‘Outline of the Opera’ by Crozier, with the musical illustrations provided by members of the cast and ‘At the piano … Benjamin Britten’. In its more modest way, it must have been as extraordinary an evening as the
opening night at Sadler’s Wells a week later: the musical public’s first inkling of the experience that awaited them. When that experience arrived, despite some imperfections in the performance, it was rapturously received, although the ovations were preceded by some moments of stunned silence, as was so often the case with Britten premieres. That reception was vividly described to Humphrey Carpenter by Leonard Thompson, who took the almost-silent part of the apprentice but, because his voice was breaking, couldn’t manage the scream:

  When the curtain came down, for I imagine something like – well, it seemed like minutes, but it must have been about thirty seconds – there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And then it broke out. And it went on and on. I think there were something like fourteen curtain calls. And Ben, of course, came on immaculate, in white tie and tails, looking like a matinee idol. And he just folded in the middle. That’s the only way I can describe it – the deepest bow I’ve ever seen from anybody!82