by Neil Powell
Webster’s proposal, which Britten anyway knew to be absurd, stood no chance against the combined forces of Imogen Holst and the barn owl. Holst’s diary, which reveals her as Britten’s kindred spirit in her sensitivity to nature as well as to music, provides a unique record of those afternoon thinking-and-composing walks. On one memorable occasion (‘One of the best days I’ve ever had’), they drove to the hamlet of Eastbridge and walked by the dykes and flooded meadows to the ruined chapel at Minsmere: ‘Well, if I thought heaven was like this I wouldn’t mind dying,’ said Britten.88 On another, back on the river-wall path at Slaughden, ‘He talked about the flight of birds, how they all kept perfectly together, never touched each other, and all without a conductor! “And we talk about orchestral technique & ensemble but we haven’t begun to get near it!”’89
Plomer spent Christmas at Aldeburgh, before accompanying Britten to stay with the Harewoods, and by early January the libretto was complete. ‘What a heavenly time that was at Harewood,’ wrote Plomer on 13 January, ‘and how thankful I am to have been able to contribute to your progress with Gloriana during these last few days – and indeed all along.’90 Britten replied even more warmly, tactfully acknowledging that he mightn’t have been the easiest person to work with: ‘Writing Gloriana with you has been the greatest pleasure; more than I ever expected, & I was pretty greedy in anticipation too! I think, apart from your wonderful gifts, that you have shown the greatest possible good-temper and amenability, which can’t always have been easy considering the conditions and not over-precision of your colleague on the job!’ He hoped that Plomer would be able to join him in visiting John Piper for the first weekend in February, together with Basil Coleman, for ‘the urgently needed preliminary discussions on the settings & production’.91 This was followed by a play-through of the complete work at Covent Garden on 14 February; almost exactly a month later, on 13 March, the orchestration was finished.
Although Plomer had anticipated, and calmly accepted, that Britten would demand changes in his libretto, he had been unprepared for interference of another sort: he was required by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to substitute a basin for a chamber pot in Act 3, since according to ‘a rule of long standing … the Lord Chamberlain has had to set his face against chamber-pots’. Tickled by this phrase, he repeated it when on 18 May he and Britten spent an evening at the Harewoods’ London home, talking about Gloriana with the Queen and Prince Philip: ‘the joke’, says Alexander, ‘was much enjoyed’. A few days after the gala performance – which took place, exactly as originally planned, on 8 June, six days after the Coronation – Plomer told his sister-in-law that the royal couple had ‘seemed to enjoy themselves and said very nice things. He took great trouble to read the libretto & I think he now knows it better than I do.’92 They were no less appreciative of the composer himself: in the Coronation honours list published on 1 June, Britten was made a Companion of Honour. He regarded this ‘as a compliment to serious English music & what is more – opera’ and told Lennox Berkeley that it made him ‘feel fairly old, but not (thank God) too respectable’.93
Nevertheless, the first night of Gloriana was famously disastrous. This wasn’t the fault of the work or its performers but of the audience who on the whole were as unmusical a bunch of stuffed shirts as ever sat through a new opera. At the end, to applause which was muted not only because so many hands were elegantly gloved, Britten leaned forward in his box and hissed: ‘Clap, damn you.’ He might have been amused and even reassured if he could have known that a different sort of musician, John Lennon, would in 1964 urge the Royal Command Performance audience: ‘Will people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery…’94 Although to Plomer he put on a brave world-weary face – ‘I’m a bit more used to the jungle!’95 – Britten was devastated. ‘The Queen was delighted & flattered by the occasion,’ he wrote to Elizabeth Mayer. ‘But – there is no way of glossing this fact over – we all feel so kicked around, so bewildered by the venom, that it is difficult to maintain one’s balance.’96 Gloriana was in fact well received at Covent Garden during the remainder of its run, by audiences who, as a shrewd doorkeeper told the Daily Express, ‘are lovers of opera’ and ‘have paid for their seats’.97 But it had always been destined to make enemies on both sides: on the one hand, some serious critics regarded it as clinching evidence of a once radical composer’s capitulation to the establishment; on the other, some members of the establishment found a work about the ageing Elizabeth’s relationship with Essex in questionable taste as a Coronation piece (and Pears as Essex a questionable piece of casting). One happier response to the royal occasion might have been an opera based on an Elizabethan comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with its summeriness and its resolution of happy marriages, including a royal one – would have been ideal, but Britten hadn’t thought of that yet.
The reviews of Gloriana, which mostly ranged from neutral to negative, prompted debate in the correspondence columns of The Times. Vaughan Williams, assuming with some dignity the role of musical elder statesman, refused to be drawn on the opera’s merits ‘after a single hearing’ but concentrated on the fact that ‘for the first time in history the Sovereign has commanded an opera by a composer from these islands for a great occasion’. Anthony Lewis asserted that ‘on this historic occasion English music has been splendidly represented by Mr Britten’s Gloriana’. On the other side of the argument, Marie Stopes, in an extraordinary letter, complained that ‘the opera was unworthy of this great occasion, uninspired, missing the main glories of the times, its music inharmonious and wearisome, and with at least two scenes profoundly affronting the glorious memory of Queen Elizabeth I, hence unsuitable for public performance before Queen Elizabeth II’. And from Aldeburgh, of all places, J. Thorburn Irvine, evidently one of Lady Cranbrook’s ‘antibodies’, lamented ‘the missed opportunity of creating something to inspire other than purely musical people’. With an irony undetectable by the public, Martin Cooper in the Spectator attributed the negative reaction to Britten’s supposedly privileged position with the establishment and ‘an almost sadistic relish or glee that has little to do with the musical merit or demerit’.98 Thanks to the TLS’s convention of anonymity, Cooper’s readers would have been unaware that he had himself been the author of a savage attack on Britten.
Even Pears, the more metropolitan-minded of the couple, felt that the reception of Gloriana confirmed ‘his worst fears’ and that they should ‘in future stick to the public that wanted them, the loyal Aldeburgh friends, and not get mixed up with something that was none of their concern’.99 The summer of 1953 was, as it turned out, a prudent moment for Britten to withdraw for a while from the limelight for, during the autumn, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Home Secretary, was said to have instigated a witch-hunt against homosexual men, possibly triggered by the defection of the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – the latter, by a ludicrous coincidence, a contemporary of Britten at Gresham’s. Neither cultural eminence nor aristocracy offered any guarantee of immunity from prosecution: among those convicted of sexual offences were John Gielgud in October 1953 and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in March 1954. Shortly before Christmas, Britten was interviewed by officers from Scotland Yard: he was, of course, a model of decency and respectability in his private life, and no further action was taken. But the extent of anti-homosexual feeling among the public – or, at least, a section of it, for neither the people of Aldeburgh nor royalty and aristocracy seemed greatly fussed – was such that Humphrey Maud’s civil servant father found it necessary to forbid his son from staying at Crabbe Street: it was, as John Maud explained to Britten during a difficult interview at his office in Curzon Street, not a matter of personal distrust but of what might be said by others. Although Britten was deeply hurt, he understood this sort of man-to-man frankness and he remained friendly with the Maud family.
Apart from Humphrey Maud, Britten’s other two significant friendships with boys during the early
1950s were with Jonny Gathorne-Hardy and Paul Rogerson, when both of them were in their later teens. Jonny – who, like other members of his family, had donated his name to a character in The Little Sweep – remembers a steadily evolving relationship, centred on ferocious games of tennis. ‘When you were beaten by him at squash or tennis, as I invariably was (though I was good at both), you did literally feel that he’d been beating you. If you were three down, and he could get you six down, he would.’ By the time Jonny was eighteen, in 1951, he would take his post-match bath at Crabbe Street and stay to dinner; the bathroom adjoined Britten’s bedroom. It was on one of these occasions, while they were wrapped in towels between bath and pre-meal Martini, that ‘Ben came up with an extremely soppy, sentimental look on his face, and put his arms round me, and kissed me on the top of the head’. Jonny already had a speech prepared for this moment (‘No, Ben, it is not to be!’), after which they went down to dinner in an amiable and civilised way. He was, however, sure ‘that, had I relaxed, we would have been in that double bed’.100 Today, it would be a perfectly legal place for them, but it wasn’t in 1951: the gesture was, as Jonny evidently recognised, a token of Britten’s trust in him. Another sort of eighteen-year-old boy would have gone off gabbling to police or press; yet another sort would have attempted blackmail.
Paul Rogerson was two years younger than Jonny Gathorne-Hardy, a cellist and a Catholic from a musical family: his father Haydn Rogerson was principal cello with the Hallé and his uncle, Thomas Matthews, leader of the LPO (he had been the soloist in the first English performance of Britten’s Violin Concerto in 1941). ‘Paul & I fell in love with each other, if that is how you can describe it, a whole year before we met,’ Britten told Imogen Holst.101 This was when they caught sight of each other during a Hallé concert early in 1951, where Pears was performing the Serenade, and it was rather less than a year before they met again at the premiere of Billy Budd. Britten wrote affectionate letters to ‘My dear old Paul’, who was away at school in Derbyshire: ‘Don’t forget to practice your tennis hard, & don’t forget your cricket, because there might be a chance of playing here this summer.’ Eternally schoolboyish himself, he enclosed some ‘apparently mouldy bits of chocolate’ which weren’t ‘really mouldy’ but had ‘arrived in a parcel from South Africa, & must have had a rough passage’.102 During school holidays, Paul became a frequent visitor to Aldeburgh. It was a relationship founded on non-sexual devotion: Britten, Paul recalled, ‘was like a godfather. He was a dear. It was an honour and a privilege, thinking back now.’ As with David Spenser, there was a pattern of shared pleasures: ‘We used to go out bird watching, brass rubbing, on the beach, go out with Billy Burrell, marvellous playing in front of the fire, Chenka, that sort of thing.’ Or Paul would play his cello, in the sitting room at Crabbe Street, with ‘one of the finest pianists in the world, certainly one of the greatest accompanists’.103 But, during his troubled summer of 1953, Britten learned that Paul had decided to become a Jesuit: ‘15 years away from everyone,’ noted Imogen Holst in disbelief (although in fact he would leave the order in 1959), adding that ‘Ben hated the very word “Jesuit”, and was appalled to think that Paul mustn’t take any possessions away to his novitiate’.104 Her diary entry for Tuesday 18 August, after Paul had spent a final weekend at Aldeburgh, describes his departure with Pears: ‘At 10 I waited outside the front door: Paul came out to fetch me in. All three were in tears, Ben being the calmest & most matter-of-fact. He hobbled to the front door to see them off and I waved from the middle of the road till the car had turned the corner.’105 She didn’t look back, as she couldn’t bear to see Britten’s distress. He was prevented by a sprained ankle and a painful shoulder from driving Paul to the station at Saxmundham although, given his emotional state, this was just as well.
The ankle mended, but the shoulder became steadily more troublesome. And the summer also contained, in the weeks immediately following Gloriana, one more perhaps clinchingly stressful element: Britten had persuaded Auden to speak at the Aldeburgh Festival. ‘Wystan came, & was provoking and brilliant,’106 he told Elizabeth Mayer, but she wasn’t taken in by this blandness: ‘don’t forget (I know you don’t)’, she replied, ‘that he is a truly great person and has, of course, great faults but also great qualities (not only as a poet but as a human being)’.107 The two men had fallen out over a decade earlier and their differences had more recently been exacerbated by Auden’s collaboration with Stravinsky on The Rake’s Progress (1951), which Britten refused to see, as he explained to Ronald Duncan: ‘I’ve seen the score, & not withstanding the excellence of Strav. & Auden as creators I’m not awfully interested in what they think about opera … Opera’s my life, & it’s obviously not theirs.’108 To the Harewoods he wrote that he was ‘miserably disappointed … that easily the greatest composer alive should have such an irresponsible & perverse view of opera’; and for this he blamed Auden, ‘the cleverer & more sophisticated of the two’.109 Auden, for his part, did go to Gloriana during his English visit, and although he tactfully praised Britten’s music to their mutual friend Elizabeth Mayer, he added: ‘Didn’t care for the libretto and neither Joan Cross nor Peter should sing anymore on stage.’ According to Stephen and Natasha Spender, Auden unwisely put his criticisms of Gloriana in writing to Britten and had his letter torn up and returned to him: ‘Just an envelope, and out came the pieces of the letter.’110 When calmer, Britten could usually manage distant civility to those who had affronted him, and that was how Auden found himself received at Aldeburgh: ‘Everyone was charming, but I was never allowed to see Ben alone – I feared as much, still, I was a bit sad.’111 Over a decade later, Christopher Isherwood, in his diary entry for 6 March 1967, recorded a remark made by Auden during a weekend visit: ‘He said that Benjamin Britten was the only friend he had ever lost.’112
Auden had never really understood his old friend’s demons: his lurches into depression and his terrifying lack of self-confidence. Walter Hussey, who preached at the festival service that year, saw both when, after the service, he went to lunch at Crabbe Street. Britten, the company was told, wouldn’t be in to lunch; as the meal continued without him, there was a discussion about the parable of the talents, which Harewood, who was present, had just read as a lesson in the church. Then Britten entered, silently and ‘looking like death’, according to Hussey, who described what happened next:
And we went on busily discussing the talents and almost forgot him. Then suddenly we were interrupted by a hysterical voice from the other end of the table. ‘It’s those who have no talents at all – they’re the real problem!’ And of course we were absolutely silenced … I said, ‘Meaning yourself, Ben?’ And he said in the same hysterical tone: ‘There are times when I feel I have no talents – no talents at all!’ And so again, a great silence. Then I leant forward and said, ‘You know, Ben, when you’re in this mood we love you best of all.’ And he simply gave a great shout. ‘I hate you, Walter!’ From that moment, he was entirely all right!113
We can’t be sure what, if anything, specifically prompted this, but Auden’s presence in Aldeburgh so soon after the reception of Gloriana seems the likeliest cause. For Auden and Stravinsky had come to represent everything that Britten most detested and feared in the arts. Auden was clever and brilliant, but heartless and deracinated. Stravinsky wrote music of incomparable quality, yet it seemed to say nothing. Britten was a composer of music with content, rooted in a particular place and in his own troubled humanity. He was about to begin work on the song cycle which would, above all, embody these qualities.
5
‘Wonderful, touching poems’ was how Britten described the texts he was setting, a series of ‘Thomas Hardy songs which we do at Harewood House, as part of the Leeds Festival, next month’.114 One of them, ‘Wagtail and Baby’, had in fact been composed earlier in the year; the other seven were written during August and September; and the untitled group of ‘Hardy Songs’ – subsequently to be known, at Pears’s suggestion, as Winter Words,
Op. 52 – received its first performance at Harewood on 8 October. Isherwood had given Britten a copy of Hardy’s Collected Poems, a nicely judged present, in 1949, and Britten characteristically made a list of twenty-one possibilities on the back flyleaf before deciding on ten to be set, two of which were excluded from the cycle. It is difficult to imagine a writer who could have spoken more powerfully to Britten at this time than Hardy, with his English rootedness, his intense humanity and his deep understanding of melancholia. We know from Imogen Holst’s diary that Britten’s reading went beyond the poems: she gave him her father’s copy of The Return of the Native – presumably the one which had inspired his symphonic poem Egdon Heath in 1927 – while he told her that Jude the Obscure ‘wasn’t unbearable – that he minded the first bit more than the last’.115 What moved him most powerfully in Jude, then, was the boy who has much in common with his own young self; who loves creatures and is beaten by the farmer for failing to scare the birds from his crops; who sets his heart on a life of learning and culture and whose ‘dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small’.116 It is surely no coincidence that the poems set by Britten include two solitary travelling boys, Jude Fawley’s spiritual cousins.
The songs resonate with echoes from Britten’s own childhood. The first, ‘At Day-Close in November’, describes the month of his birth and introduces the idea of a timescale beyond human conception: ‘A time when no tall trees grew here, / A time when none will be seen.’ The second, ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, introduces the ‘journeying boy’, ‘Bewrapt past knowing to where he was going, / Or whence he came’, and his ambiguous relationship with the ‘region of sin’. Next come two apparently lighter pieces, each a miniature morality: ‘Wagtail and Baby’, with its depiction of a humanity which is so much more terrifying than anything in nature, and ‘The Little Old Table’ whose ‘creak’ contains the ‘history’ of a long-forgotten love. ‘The Choirmaster’s Burial’ is also a moral fable, directed against the mean-spirited vicar who refuses to allow his late choirmaster a funeral with music. The sixth song, ‘Proud Songsters’, rather surprisingly owes something to Britten’s competitive streak: when Pears ‘told him that Finzi had set it, “that seemed to spur him on a bit”’, according to Imogen Holst.117 The contrast between the two settings is fascinating: Finzi’s is illustrative, Britten’s transformative; both composers respond to the two stanzas’ delicate balance, but where Finzi respectfully observes the deliberate cadence of the final line, ‘And earth, and air, and rain’ – and names his Hardy cycle Earth, Air and Rain after it – Britten finds something more intense and unsettling in it. There is no winner in this contest, but much pleasure to be had in comparing two of the finest twentieth-century setters of English verse at work on the same text.