by Neil Powell
But one particular change threatens to skew the entire work: in the opening scene, the flogging takes on a troubling new significance. In Melville, the culprit is ‘a little fellow, young, a novice, an after-guardsman absent from his assigned post when the ship was being put about’, an insignificant character guilty of a ‘rather serious’ lapse; Billy is ‘horrified’ and resolves never to ‘make himself liable to such a visitation’.71 Britten, Forster and Crozier seize on the word ‘Novice’ and turn him into a recurring character: after the Bosun has him flogged, offstage, for two trivial onstage offences, he becomes Claggart’s chosen instrument for tempting Billy to mutiny. (Claggart, we might almost say, has found ‘A feeling being subject to his blow’, except that this line isn’t Melville’s about Claggart but Crabbe’s about Grimes.) Yet there is more to it than that. The Novice’s response when the punishment is ordered is ‘Sir, no! – not me!’ and ‘Don’t have me flogged – I can’t bear it! – not flogging!’; and, when Claggart threatens him later, ‘No! No! Don’t hurt me again!’ This is not the language of the man-of-war but of the prep school; we half expect the Novice to shout ‘Yarroo!’ or ‘Cripes!’ The traumatic memories lurking here are Britten’s of hearing a boy being beaten at South Lodge and Forster’s of his unhappy schooldays at Tonbridge. Moreover, the Bosun’s irascibility seems at odds with the happy ship presided over by its mild, civilised captain who, hearing a shanty sung below decks, insists: ‘Where there is happiness there cannot be harm.’ This is a view to which we are meant broadly to assent and from which Claggart represents a monstrous deviation.
During the autumn, while Britten worked on the full score, arrangements had to be made for Budd’s premiere at Covent Garden, designed by John Piper and produced by Basil Coleman. As usual, in solving some problems he had created others. For instance, it had been an entirely sensible decision to make the benign, introspective Captain Vere a tenor role for Pears: Billy, the object of desire, and the predatory Claggart would have been, in different ways, equally inappropriate for him. But Billy had thus become, rather surprisingly, a baritone who had also to be (despite the suspension of disbelief usually inherent in opera) young and attractive. Britten’s first choice was Geraint Evans, who withdrew after discovering that the role’s tessitura lay too high for him and instead sang the part of Mr Flint, the Sailing Master. Fortunately, during a visit to the States, Covent Garden’s David Webster discovered the Californian baritone Theodor Uppman who was, in his own words, ‘very blond and curly-haired … I had been working a good deal of the summer out of doors, rolling great barrels of oil, my shirt off, and I had a pretty good set of muscles and I was nice and tanned.’ And he could sing. Not only was Uppman the perfect Billy Budd; he also – being unconnected with the composer or Aldeburgh or even England – usefully rebutted any suggestion that Britten wrote only for members of his own clique. The opera was to have been conducted by Josef Krips but, not for the first or the last time, Britten’s completion of the full score ran perilously close to its deadline: the famously myopic Krips, presented with blurry greyish photocopies, found them unreadable and withdrew. So Britten himself stepped in. ‘We all know that Ben went through great turmoils,’ said Uppman, ‘but once he was there and doing it, there was nobody who could do it better – just the little looks and the coaxings that you could see from his hand as he was conducting; you knew what he wanted. He was a great conductor.’72
The first public performance of Billy Budd took place on Saturday, 1 December 1951. In its original version, the opera was in four acts and there were two intervals (when Britten revised Billy Budd into two acts in 1960, he deleted material which Ernest Newman, in an obtuse review for the Sunday Times, unkindly compared to HMS Pinafore and, with it, the initial appearance of Captain Vere). It made a long evening, and the critical reaction was both muted and confused. Britten’s old friend Lennox Berkeley, who wrote to congratulate him ‘on a splendid work that you alone could have written – full of beauty and in places deeply moving’, pointed out that according to the Sunday Times he had been ‘ill served by his librettists’ whereas in the Listener he had been ‘well served by his librettists’. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, in the New Statesman, wrote two pieces: one largely favourable, after reading the score, the other more cautious, when he had seen and heard it. Reviewers seemed even more than usually nervous about praising Britten, although Colin Mason in the Spectator was clear about his ‘masterly solution of the technical problems’ and justly concluded that the opera had ‘a consistency and concentration of musical language such as are not to be found in anything Britten has previously written’.73 John Ireland, while privately expressing reservations, wrote to tell his former student that Billy Budd was ‘a masterpiece’ in which ‘The clarity, the economy of means – the invariable certainty of touch – the spontaneity, the invention – all constituted a perfect joy to me’.74 But Michael Tippett, whose principled aversion to violence was less ambiguous and conflicted than Britten’s, ‘“wasn’t good” at enjoying the opera, especially the moment “when the Novice is brought on and he’s been flogged, like a Crucifixion. It wasn’t me.”’75
Yet Billy Budd is indeed a masterpiece, arguably the supreme achievement among Britten’s operas. Where Grimes suffers from a sense of irresolution and Lucretia from its tacked-on Christian morality, here the framing prologue and epilogue provide an entirely satisfying structure. The libretto, despite its quirks, is dramatically superb and faultlessly set. The music is Britten’s finest: there are shrewd characterisations – a yearning saxophone for the Novice, a panicky side drum for stammering Billy and (as Michael Kennedy neatly puts it) ‘the trombones which stalk around with Claggart’;76 there are audacities such as the sequence of thirty-four triadic chords, covering not only Vere’s interview with Billy but also Claggart’s burial, which then reappears beneath Billy’s final words; there is the brilliant use of the chorus – divided between Main Deck, Quarter Deck, Gunners, Afterguardsmen and Marines – whose shantyish interjections at times recall another anthem for doomed youth, Tippett’s A Child of Our Time; above all, there is incomparably rich orchestral colour. Is it possible that music of such intensity is better appreciated without the distraction of a staged production? This arguably heretical suggestion is made by Ian Bostridge, who sang (and recorded) the role of Vere at the Barbican in 2007: ‘Billy Budd benefits from a degree of musical concentration on the part of the audience which may be missing in the opera house. A certain metaphysical poetry, a symphonic level of abstraction, is released which the literal representation of details of maritime life can inhibit.’77 It’s a provocative and almost paradoxical idea – an opera whose music is too good for its own good? – but it goes some way towards explaining why Billy Budd, unusually among Britten’s or anyone else’s operas, retains and even gains power when heard on record in one’s study, which may be an appropriate enough setting for a work whose non-titular hero is the bookish Captain Vere.
For those who sought to perpetuate the anti-Britten myths, Billy Budd was a godsend: it was anonymously nicknamed ‘The Bugger’s Opera’ and, by the reliably idiotic Thomas Beecham, ‘Twilight of the Sods’. Three years later, and rather more amiably, the poet Henry Reed wrote a radio play for the Third Programme, The Private Life of Hilda Tablet, about the fictitious composer of an opera entitled Emily Butter (it was originally to have been called Milly Mudd), set in a department store and with an all-female cast including one Clara Taggart. The revue Airs on a Shoestring (1953–5) included ‘A Guide to Britten’ by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, a brisk and witty musical tour of the composer’s operas and several of his other works; interestingly, the show’s producer, Laurier Lister, worried that the item would prove too highbrow for audiences on a pre-London tour but, as its authors later recalled, ‘This actually didn’t happen, and the very first time when it was played, which wasn’t a sort of cultural centre, by any means, everybody loved it.’78 Deceptively gentle in tone, the piece nevertheless makes some neat points a
bout Britten’s debts to Purcell and ‘olde English’ folk songs, the ‘Doggy Doggy Few’ (such as the Harewoods), and Albert Herring, who is said to have ‘got pickled, and cured’. Britten, with that ‘extra sensitivity – a skin less, perhaps, than other people’, seldom found jokes against himself anything other than deeply hurtful, and it would have been small comfort to him to reflect that scurrilous witticisms and satirical parodies were among the surest indications of his extraordinary success.
4
Billy Budd ends in redemption. ‘I’d die for you,’ Billy tells Captain Vere halfway through Act 2; and, as he goes to his death, he cries, ‘Starry Vere, God bless you!’ Vere himself, in his epilogue, reflects: ‘I could have saved him … But he has saved me, and the love that passes understanding has come to me.’ We have to accept that in the terms of the opera Billy is a Christlike sacrificial victim, even if, in a more sceptical mood, we might question Vere’s transformation of his guilt into blessing: in failing to save Billy, he has enabled Billy to save him from being ‘lost on the infinite sea’. It seems logical, and in retrospect almost inevitable, that Britten’s thoughts should have turned from this conundrum to the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac and that he should have composed, as a pendant to the opera, his Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac, Op. 51. He wrote the work – using a text taken, edited and slightly rearranged, from the fourth of the Chester Miracle Plays, Histories of Lot and Abraham – at the very start of 1952, telling Basil Coleman on 8 January that he had a ‘piece of music for Kath & Peter to write’.79 The ink hardly dry, it received its first public performance from Kathleen Ferrier, Pears and Britten in Nottingham on 21 January, as part of a recital tour which also included Birmingham (broadcast on the Midland Region Home Service), Liverpool and Manchester. There were further concert performances during 1952, including a Third Programme broadcast, but a planned recording for Decca the following year was abandoned because of Ferrier’s deteriorating condition; she died of cancer on 8 October 1953.
Abraham and Isaac has become the best known and most performed of Britten’s five Canticles – usually with a countertenor in the role of Isaac, originally sung by Ferrier – and it is easy to see why. Although it runs for little more than a quarter of an hour, it shares the mysteriously coiled-up emotional force of Billy Budd; and, like the opera, it demands of the secular listener (who will be appalled by this whimsically vindictive God) an imaginative acceptance of its own terms. The crucial difference, of course, is that Isaac’s life, unlike Billy’s, will be spared; yet, since neither Abraham nor Isaac knows this until the text’s closing passages, the tension is undiminished. For once, the work received some intelligent critical responses: John W. Waterhouse in the Birmingham Post noted how the ‘entire setting, from its Schütz-like opening device of giving God to two singers, builds and completes a wholly satisfying musical entity’, while the anonymous critic of The Times found the ‘spirit of Purcell … in the flowing interchange of recitative, arioso, and duet; most effective is the dovetailing of solo passages, when one voice takes over from another’.80
Britten and Pears’s recital tour was followed by concerts in Salzburg and Vienna; after these, they took a well-deserved skiing holiday with their friends the Harewoods at Gargellen. Here the conversation turned to English opera or, more precisely, to opera about England: it was Harewood who proposed the subject of Elizabeth I and her relationship with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, from whom he was distantly descended. The proposal had acquired a special significance following the death of George VI on 6 February: a new Elizabethan age was beginning, so it was said, and what could be more fitting than an opera on the new Queen’s great predecessor by England’s finest living composer, given at a royal gala performance to celebrate the Coronation? It was a terrible idea but also an inescapable one. The imaginary headline ‘BRITTEN REFUSES CORONATION OPERA’ was unthinkable even though, given the discretion of all concerned, it would never actually have appeared. Britten, moreover, found the project musically attractive: his interest in Elizabethan composers such as Dowland was well known and recently attested by his Lachrymae, and the celebratory opera would allude to the madrigalist John Wilbye as well as to the chronologically anachronistic Purcell. It would be a ‘number opera’, almost a sort of pageant, which fitted well with his instinct that it must be quite unlike Billy Budd, and it would be called Gloriana. Britten assigned to it the opus number 53, to match the year of the Coronation, even though he had yet to compose his Op. 52.
For his librettist, Britten turned to William Plomer, an accomplished writer of fiction and a witty poet, with whom he had hoped to collaborate on two abortive works for children: The Tale of Mr Tod, which would have been based on Beatrix Potter’s rabbit-roasting badger, and a science-fiction piece which was to have been called Tyco the Vegan. Plomer lived quietly with his partner Charles Erdmann in Bayswater, and they were shortly to move to a modest bungalow on the Sussex coast at Rustington: this kind of respectably unobtrusive homosexual life was far more to Britten’s taste than bohemian flamboyance, and the two men got on well. However, when Britten returned from Austria, his schedule became characteristically hectic (it included conducting Billy Budd in Birmingham) and it wasn’t until 27 April that he could put the proposal for his royal opera to Plomer. He did so with evident excitement and mysterious urgency: ‘it is imperative that I see you’, he wrote; ‘about what I can only explain when I see you’.81 When they met, Plomer was hesitant, suspecting that this was just the sort of publicity-engendering enterprise he most disliked, but a week or so later Britten pressed him: ‘The Queen has graciously given her OK to the scheme I told you about … Everything seems set, therefore; only with the librettist, there is a doubt still…?’82 The following day, Plomer wrote to accept the commission, enclosing a copy of J. E. Neale’s Queen Elizabeth as ‘a sort of corrective’ to Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, which had prompted Harewood’s original suggestion. Before the end of May, an official announcement had named the date of ‘the gala performance of the Coronation opera as (probably) 8 June of the following year’.83 Britten, at this stage, had only the vaguest sense of the work: ‘I want the opera to be crystal clear, with lovely pageantry (however you spell it) but linked by a strong story about the Queen & Essex – strong & simple.’84 Plomer already knew from their mutual friend Forster that Britten’s demands, though strong, were unlikely to remain simple.
The collaborative evolution of Gloriana is traced in entertaining detail by Peter F. Alexander in his biography of Plomer.85 Despite the tight and self-evidently non-negotiable deadline, it was an intermittent business, complicated not only by Britten’s summer concert schedule – which involved festival appearances in Aix-en-Provence, Menton and Salzburg as well as Aldeburgh – but by Plomer’s dislike of the telephone and lack of a car. Like almost everyone who collaborated with him, Plomer was astonished and occasionally terrified by the speed at which the composer worked. So was Britten’s newly appointed music assistant, Imogen Holst. Having left Dartington with the intention of pursuing a freelance career, she moved to Aldeburgh in September 1952 to work as Britten’s amanuensis and to share some of the festival’s administrative work with Elizabeth Sweeting: the latter role was to prove a turbulent one since, quite apart from disagreeing over policy and being unable to share decision-making, the two women simply didn’t get on. Her first task was to make fair copies of Britten’s sketches as he produced them: ‘He was able to say in the middle of October, when he was just beginning Act I, that he would have finished the second act before the end of January,’ she wrote. ‘When he began work on the full score of the opera, he wrote at such tremendous speed that I thought I should never keep pace with him. He managed to get through at least twenty vast pages a day, and it seemed as if he never had to stop and think.’86 He kept to his demanding schedule, despite Plomer’s spell in a London nursing home during November, after a minor operation, and also despite the east coast floods of 31 January 1953, when the sea invaded
the ground floor of 4 Crabbe Street.
While Plomer was recuperating, George Harewood and David Webster visited Aldeburgh, partly to see how Gloriana was getting on but also, more urgently and surprisingly, so that Webster could offer Britten the post of musical director at Covent Garden. The following day, Britten invited his new assistant and confidante Imogen Holst – who, fortunately, kept a lively, candid diary for her first two years in Aldeburgh – to join him on an afternoon walk across the marshes to the river wall:
As soon as he got out of the thick of High St he began to tell me about the Covent Garden crisis – David Webster wanted him to decide then & there whether he’d accept the post of musical director or not. Ben had told him that he wanted not to have to think of it while his mind was on Gloriana, but Webster insisted on having an answer. He had also said the most frightful things about Ben’s ‘duty’ to music in England etc! Ben had said that the only thing that would make him do it would be if Covent Garden would take on all of them, ie the [English Opera] Group, with George as manager. Webster said he wouldn’t do that because people would say it was turning into a clique. Ben was furious, and said that everything that ever got done in music was done by a clique – that that was the word that was used when people disapproved, and that when they approved they called it a ‘group’ or something else. What amazed Ben was that Webster had objected even before Ben had asked for the group as a whole: – he’d only asked for George when the word ‘clique’ was thrown at him. So he immediately felt he wanted to say No straight away. And he asked me what I thought. I said it would be wrong for him to do anything that got in the way of composing, and although he did lots of things that appeared to interfere, they didn’t really: – whereas being an administrator would be fatal. He agreed. He said it would mean 6 months of the year, working in an office from Monday to Friday, which was of course impossible. At this moment he caught sight of his favourite barn owl flying over the water just beyond the ruined boat, so he stopped thinking about Covent Garden while he looked at it.87