by Neil Powell
The composer had one young person especially in mind: eleven-year-old Humphrey Maud, son of his friends John Maud, at that time Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education, and his wife Jean (née Hamilton), a concert pianist. Britten had stayed with the Mauds in London in the peripatetic period following his return from America, and Humphrey remembered him ‘playing through the first drafts of Peter Grimes on their piano’.102 Later, the Maud family visited the Old Mill. Britten, Jean Maud recalled, ‘was absolutely delightful with children and happy with them and they were happy with him in the most unaffected way – I mean, when we went (before he moved to Aldeburgh) to Snape, to the Lighthouse, wasn’t it?’103 She was especially touched that the published score’s dedication – ‘This work is affectionately inscribed to the children of John and Jean Maud: Humphrey, Pamela, Caroline and Virginia, for their edification and entertainment’ – included their eldest daughter, who had died in 1941. Humphrey, who played the cello and at the age of thirteen went on to Eton, would in due course become a regular guest at Britten and Pears’s Aldeburgh home.
Their London home, meanwhile, had become unexpectedly crowded. Erwin Stein, whom Britten first met in Vienna in 1934, had four years later moved with his wife Sophie and daughter Marion to London, where he joined Boosey & Hawkes as an editor. When, in November 1944, their London flat was destroyed by fire, Britten’s first concern was for the manuscript of Peter Grimes: ‘Erwin’s flat has been drenched as the house caught fire, but luckily the P.G. score is safe,’104 he told Pears. They invited the Steins to share the maisonette in St John’s Wood, where they remained until August 1946, when Pears was able to buy a leasehold house in Bayswater: this quite substantial property (3 Oxford Square, W2) was large enough to provide – as well as living space for Britten and Pears – rooms for the Steins, a small self-contained flat for Pears’s parents and a third-floor attic for Eric Crozier.
By the end of January 1946, Britten had begun work on his next opera: ‘I’ve taken the plunge and old Lucretia is now on the way. I started last night and I’ve now written most of the first recitative before the drinking song. I think it’ll be all right but I always have cold feet at this point.’105 The idea for The Rape of Lucretia, Op. 37, had come from Crozier when, late in 1944, he gave Britten his copy of Le Viol de Lucrèce (1931) by André Obey, ‘as a possible subject for his next opera after Grimes’; Crozier had seen the play performed while still a schoolboy and liked it so much that he translated it into English. During the autumn of 1945, Ronald Duncan, for whose ‘poetic masque’ This Way to the Tomb Britten had just composed the music, worked at the libretto: on 19 December Britten could report to Ralph Hawkes, by then running the New York branch of Boosey & Hawkes, that ‘Ronnie Duncan is half-way thro’ the libretto which I think terrific’.106 The original plan was for a tentatively named ‘New Opera Company’ to present the opera at Dartington, where Imogen Holst was Director of Music, in April 1946; but, when this ran into financial and practical difficulties, it was agreed with Glyndebourne’s owner John Christie and general manager Rudolf Bing that The Rape of Lucretia should be staged at the post-war reopening of the opera house on 12 July 1946. Eric Crozier was to be the producer and John Piper the designer; and, because the opera would be performed for a run of consecutive nights before going on tour – it received a total of eighty-three performances between July and October – there would have to be two casts and two conductors. The first cast included Kathleen Ferrier (Lucretia) and Otakar Kraus (Tarquinius) with Pears and Joan Cross as the Male and Female Chorus; while among the second cast were Nancy Evans (Lucretia), Frank Rogier (Tarquinius) and Aksel Schiøtz and Flora Nielsen as the choruses. The conductors were Ernest Ansermet – who thought, in idiosyncratic but telling English, that Britten could do with ‘a little joke then and now. Yes, very, sometimes’107 – and Reginald Goodall. It was recorded in an abridged version by HMV the following year, with a cast including Pears, Cross and Evans conducted by Goodall.
‘I am keen to develop a new art form (the chamber-opera, or what you will) which will stand beside the grand opera as the quartet stands beside the orchestra,’ Britten told Hawkes on 30 June, an ambition which exactly anticipates his preference for Aldeburgh-sized projects over London-sized ones. He continued: ‘I hope to write many works for it, & to be interested in this company for many years.’108 He was anxious to insist that, despite Christie’s financial support and Bing’s management, this was ‘our’ company, not Glyndebourne’s; however, a few weeks later, he had to write to The Times, clarifying a contrary misapprehension, that Glyndebourne was somehow ‘“lending” or “letting” its opera house for the production of The Rape of Lucretia’.109 His apparently finnicky line drawing here was firmly based on a practical consideration: CEMA’s successor, the recently formed Arts Council of Great Britain, had offered Glyndebourne a guarantee against loss for Lucretia’s tour (but their original figure of £5,000 had been reduced to £3,000) and Britten shrewdly guessed that they might need every penny. Although Glyndebourne must have seemed an ideal, if temporary, safe haven for what was to become the English Opera Group, the relationship between Christie and Britten was a predictably difficult one. Not only did Christie dislike Lucretia, remarking that there was ‘no music in it’; he also ‘took against Britten and his budding entourage, who understandably felt a mutual loyalty to each other’ and he ‘found homosexuality in general distasteful’.110 On a more practical level, he was ‘startled’ to discover the extent of the losses incurred by Glyndebourne, beyond the Arts Council’s guarantee, when the opera went on tour.
Lucretia is a mass of paradoxes. It is a piece in which Britten’s scoring is more subtly nuanced than ever before – the woodwind colours are especially beguiling – and one which does indeed reinvent the form of the chamber opera. Yet it tends to win admirers rather than friends. It has flaws, for which Duncan usually takes most of the blame: it is too literary and too static, a point emphasised rather than diminished by the decision to incorporate Obey’s two narrative chorus figures, and it is encumbered by an anachronistic Christian epilogue, which Britten seems to have thought would mitigate its excessive bleakness (a consideration which hadn’t seemed to bother him with Grimes). The Male Chorus neatly solves the problem of providing a role for Pears which doesn’t cast him as a heterosexual Roman; the danger is that we may sense this neatness and, with it, the extent to which Britten too has stepped to one side of the action. His heart, we may feel, isn’t in Lucretia as it was in Grimes and yet – one last paradox – that detachment might in part account for the inventive fluency of his music.
Ernest Newman, in a Sunday Times review the composer thought ‘simply puerile’, felt that ‘Mr Britten’s second opera does not fulfil all the expectations set up by his first, and most of the blame for this I would lay on the libretto’; he went on to wonder ‘what had become of Mr Britten’s sense of the theatre and his feeling for his tragic subject’.111 Cecil Gray in the Observer found in the libretto ‘a feeling of pastiche, in which moreover, the elements do not coalesce’,112 and for Philip Hope-Wallace in the Manchester Guardian it ‘tries but fails to make the best of many styles’.113 However, Desmond Shawe-Taylor in the New Statesman and Nation, while noting the libretto’s shortcomings, saw beyond them: for him, the first act was an ‘unquestionable masterpiece’ and the second contained ‘musical and dramatic beauties of the highest order’. He had special praise for Ansermet’s conducting, as well as for Crozier’s production and Piper’s scenery which ‘raise the dramatic tension as surely as they delight the eye; how strange that we should have had to wait all this time to see a stage decorated by so evidently dramatic a painter!’114 It was the beginning of an association between composer and artist which was to endure beyond Britten’s death, in the form of Piper’s magnificent memorial window in Aldeburgh Church.
While Lucretia was proving critically contentious and financially disastrous, Grimes was becoming an international success. Closely following the Sadler�
�s Wells revival and the BBC broadcast early in 1946, it received its first performance outside England on 21 March in Stockholm. In May, there were productions in Antwerp and in Basel and Zurich: Britten and Pears, who had actually managed a week’s holiday before a fortnight’s recital tour of Switzerland, attended a performance in Basel on 23 May. ‘Everyone is amazed at what that theatre has achieved,’ Britten wrote to Erwin Stein, although the Grimes was for his taste ‘far too dotty, & not sympathetic enough’. He went on to note that ‘the opera came off even with quite another (& wrong) kind of Peter’, a point still insufficiently acknowledged by those who continue to expect all his interpreters to sound exactly like Pears. The reception was ‘terrific’: ‘after being given laurels (!), and bowing from the box, I was literally hauled onto the stage … & carried around in quite an embarrassing manner – but very touching’.115 Then on 6 August it received its delayed American premiere at Koussevitzky’s Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, where it was conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Britten rushed there from Manchester, where Lucretia was by then on tour, having been urged by Eric Crozier not to come because the production was going so badly. Crozier told Humphrey Burton, in a conversation at the Aldeburgh Cinema during the 1991 Festival, that the last night of Grimes at Tanglewood was ‘the only time I saw Ben so upset’. Although he seldom smoked, he begged a cigarette; after which, he ‘took a cap from a hatstand, pulled it down as if to disguise his full appearance and had the cigarette in his mouth. Then he went on and took our call.’ Crozier thought the performance ‘not of a high standard’, but Olin Downes in the New York Times wrote: ‘The performance of a modern and very difficult score was astonishingly brilliant on the part of the orchestra, the chorus and, in the sum of it, the gifted and intelligent solo interpreters…’116 Britten, together with Crozier and Clare and Ralph Hawkes, sent a joint telegram from Tanglewood to Joan Cross in England: ‘PETER [Grimes] VERY NEARLY SUFFERED AWFUL FATE LUCRETIA. MURDER MOST FOUL IT WAS BUT VERDICT UNANIMOUS ACQUITTAL.’117
5
Since John Christie disliked Britten personally and Lucretia musically (and had lost a great deal of money on the latter), it seems hardly likely that the two men would have looked forward to collaborating again. But the pragmatic truth was that the English Opera Group, as the company would be known by the end of 1946, needed a stage while Glyndebourne, for its part, needed a new opera to be produced at its 1947 festival. What it got was Albert Herring. As with Our Hunting Fathers and the Sinfonia da Requiem, one can’t quite eliminate the lurking suspicion that Britten, intentionally or not, designed a work to be conspicuously at odds with its occasion.
Work on Albert Herring began in the autumn of 1946, immediately after the end of Lucretia’s tour. The idea for the opera came from Eric Crozier, who thought that Maupassant’s story Le Rosier de Madam Husson – translated by Marjorie Laurie in the 1940 Penguin edition he lent to Britten as Madame Husson’s Rose-King – would make ‘an excellent companion-piece to The Rape of Lucretia and also provide splendid parts for Joan Cross and Peter Pears’. Tragic grandeur would be balanced by rustic comedy, with Maupassant’s tale transposed to a Suffolk village and peppered with private jokes: Loxford was a version of Yoxford, Herring was the shopkeeper at Tunstall, and Lady Billows borrowed her surname from Britten’s friend Lionel Billows, who worked for the British Council in Switzerland and who later suggested, with modest bemusement, that Britten had ‘wanted some other name than Jones or Smith, and my rather unusual name came to his notice’.118 Mr Gedge was the South London vicar who had discovered Leonard Thompson, the apprentice in Grimes; while, among those described in the cast list as ‘tiresome village children’, Cissie Woodger was a girl from Snape and Harold Wood a railway station on the line to Liverpool Street. Even before a word or note had been written, the notion of presenting such a farcical affair at a pompous stately home in Sussex must have tickled both men. The plot concerns the hunt for a May King – there being no girl in the village sufficiently virtuous to be May Queen – and the choice of Albert, the boy from the greengrocer’s, who on the night following his coronation goes missing and magnificently discovers the grown-up delights of alcohol and sex. The comical conceit of a young man, rather than a young woman, being ‘virtuous’ has a long pedigree – the obvious example in English is Fielding’s Joseph Andrews – but it also had a particular edge for Britten, whose own sexuality gave an additionally absurd twist to Albert’s predicament and to Pears’s portrayal of it.
Just as Montagu Slater had been surprised to find himself replaced as Britten’s librettist after Peter Grimes by Ronald Duncan, so Duncan – who had been thinking about an opera based on Mansfield Park, to be called Letters to William – was surprised to discover that Crozier was writing the libretto for Albert Herring. Much has been made of Britten’s cavalier approach to the dismissal and replacement of close colleagues, which often resulted from his horror of confrontational arguments, but in this case practical convenience was a major factor: Crozier, having suggested the story, was living at 3 Oxford Square, available to work with Britten in Snape and planning to marry Nancy Evans, who was a member of the company. This was simply the most efficient way of getting on with the opera, which Crozier also intended to produce. But here the project ran into further difficulties. John Christie was adamant that Glyndebourne’s new artistic director, Carl Ebert, should be in charge of the production, which – as Britten pointed out – was scarcely possible since Ebert was not due to be in England until April, by which time ‘the production of the new opera will be largely settled’. And Glyndebourne was constitutionally inhospitable towards visiting companies, especially when they were as spikily independent as this one. In a joint letter to Christie on 10 November 1946, Britten and Crozier set out a five-point plan for their still nameless company:
1) We shall appoint a General Manager to form a new non-profit-making company for us. This will have a board of five trustees and an assessor from the Arts Council, if they will collaborate with us. Our manager will organise the collection of capital to launch our 1947 season.
2) The management of the new company will be in the hands of –
Music Director – Benjamin Britten
Artistic Director – Eric Crozier
Scenic Director – John Piper
3) Next summer, we shall stage Albert, a new comic opera, and Lucretia – the latter certainly on the Continent, and in England either before or after October 1st, according to Glyndebourne’s decision about the exclusive rights which they hold till that date.
4) We should like to negotiate with you for the loan or purchase of the Lucretia production. Alternatively, we may build the production afresh for our company. There will be extensive alterations to the music and text of the opera before its next production.
5) Our work in 1947 will include a Continental tour, a London season and a short provincial tour. It could also perhaps include an opening season at Glyndebourne if you wished to preserve an association with us, and if an arrangement could be made that would satisfy the artistic and financial demands of both Glyndebourne and of our new company.119
Christie was unpersuaded by Britten and Crozier’s proposals, and on 23 November Britten wrote to him to say that the new company’s programme would have to go ahead without Glyndebourne. If this was brinkmanship, it worked: Christie came back with an offer of ten days’ performances after Glyndebourne’s own Orfeo ed Euridice, though with plainly insufficient rehearsal time.
In December, the English Opera Group was formally constituted, with a board of directors chaired by Oliver Lyttelton; the other board members were Sir Kenneth Clark, Tyrone Guthrie, Ralph Hawkes, Mervyn Horder, Denis Rickett, James F. A. Smith and Erwin Stein; the artistic directors were Britten, Crozier and John Piper. A public announcement, in the form of a fund-raising brochure, followed early in the new year: ‘We believe the time has come when England, which has never had a tradition of native opera, but has always depended on a repertory of foreign works, can create
its own operas,’120 it began. The Group intended to present a revival of Lucretia and Britten’s new opera, Albert Herring, at Glyndebourne and hoped ‘to give a short season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in early October’, as well as provincial and Continental tours. By mid-January, writing from Zermatt (he and Pears were again combining concerts and holiday in Switzerland), Britten was still cautiously telling Ernest Ansermet that ‘a season at Glyndebourne may after all take place – but you may imagine with considerable concessions of either side’.121 Among these concessions was the appointment of Ebert and Crozier as joint – although, it seems, mutually uncomprehending – producers, an arrangement which came to an abrupt end when Ebert withdrew and Crozier found he was ‘too tired to take the job on lightly at the present time’.122 In the event, Albert Herring was produced at Glyndebourne by Frederick Ashton.