Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  The slung mugs – and, we may guess, the prevalence of recorders – were the inspired suggestion of Imogen Holst, who remembered having once taught a Women’s Institute percussion group how ‘a row of china mugs hanging on a length of string could be hit with a large wooden spoon’ to produce the sound of raindrops; it was she who took Britten on a shopping expedition to buy ‘lots of mugs with “A Present from Aldeburgh” written on them’. The bells came from a chance conversation with some members of the local youth club, to whom Britten used to donate all the foreign stamps from his overseas mail, who told him they were off to practise handbell ringing: he, of course, had to hear this and invited them to perform for him at The Red House. He ‘was so enchanted by the sounds they made that he gave them a part to play at the supreme moment of the drama in Noye’s Fludde, when the rainbow appears in the sky and the Voice of God promises that all wrath and vengeance shall cease in the newly-washed world’.43

  Noye’s Fludde was first performed at St Bartholomew’s Church in Orford on 18 June as part of the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival. The producer was Colin Graham and the costumes, including the animals’ magnificent headdresses, were designed by Ceri Richards; Owen Brannigan was Noye, Gladys Parr Mrs Noye and Trevor Anthony the Voice of God. The conductor was Charles Mackerras, who caused deep offence by jokily (as he imagined) remarking that the composer must be in his element with so many boys about. The comment, not made in Britten’s presence, was nevertheless relayed to him; Mackerras was summoned to The Red House, ‘and when I got there Ben said to me, “Because I like to be with boys, and because I appreciate young people, am I therefore a lecher?”’44 Mackerras would repeat this story with some bemusement, apparently never quite understanding that in 1958 – when homosexual acts even between consenting adults were still illegal – Britten had every reason to be sensitive about his sexuality and especially to dislike any hint that he couldn’t control it in his dealings with the young. Both men had too much invested in the festival for their working relationship to be affected (Britten was also playing the piano in Poulenc’s Tirésias, which Mackerras was conducting) and the premiere was, as Philip Hope-Wallace wrote in the Manchester Guardian, ‘a very happy and often strangely touching occasion’. For Felix Aprahamian in the Sunday Times, the ‘sleepy village of Orford’ proved the perfect setting for ‘a curiously moving spiritual and musical experience’ which ‘claims a place in the national musical heritage’.45 Some of the sleepy village’s inhabitants apparently thought otherwise: they attempted to prevent the premiere from taking place in their church, to Britten’s considerable distress. But for Kenneth Clark, who grew up in Sudbourne Hall, just outside Orford, the occasion was a revelatory one: ‘To sit in Orford Church, where I had spent so many hours of my childhood dutifully awaiting some spark of divine fire, and then to receive it at last in the performance of Noye’s Fludde, was an overwhelming experience.’46 Happily, the production was revived in the same venue for the 1961 festival, with a necessarily different cast (apart from Brannigan and Anthony) and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a different conductor, Norman Del Mar; this was recorded by Decca for their Argo label, who issued it as NF1, thus giving it the equivalent of a personalised number plate.

  It deserves every honour. Of all Britten’s works, Noye’s Fludde is the one to hear – or, better still, to take part in – when feeling ungrateful towards the composer or indeed towards life in general: moments such as the procession of the animals onto the ark, the storm itself (so utterly unlike the North Sea storm in Peter Grimes), the brilliantly adapted congregational hymn ‘For those in peril on the sea’ which follows it, the return of the olive-branch-bearing dove and the unfolding of the rainbow are among the most affecting in Britten’s – or, for that matter, anyone else’s – music. It is, as Michael Kennedy says, ‘easily his most lovable work’. ‘Strong men have been known to weep unashamedly at the sound of the bugles which precede the animals’ march and at the appearance of the rainbow,’ Kennedy adds, worrying that our response may be ‘sentimental’;47 yet our emotion is, I think, not sentimentality but sheer wonder at a kind of transcendent rightness. Like two of Britten’s masterpieces from earlier in the decade – Billy Budd and Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac – it ends in redemption. Despite its modest running time of less than an hour, Noye’s Fludde is a completely satisfying dramatic and musical experience which, while it lacks the scale of the major operas or the War Requiem, is in every other respect their equal.

  3

  The troubles from which Noye’s Fludde provided a triumphant respite were not only to do with the Aldeburgh Festival and the English Opera Group. Britten’s erratic health was treating him to a variety of new afflictions: eye trouble, pleurisy and a form of tinnitus which – ironically, though not at all to his amusement – resonated on the note B. And there was disarray at his publishers, Boosey & Hawkes. His friend and mentor Ralph Hawkes had died in 1950 and his other longest-standing associate in the firm, Erwin Stein, died in July 1958; meanwhile, Anthony Gishford, with whom Britten had been working closely, was dismissed after a row involving B&H’s American operation (during which, with apparently uncharacteristic high-handedness, Gishford sacked one of Leslie Boosey’s sons and confirmed himself as president of Boosey & Hawkes Inc.). The relationship between Britten and his publishers had already become strained by disagreements over matters such as permission being given for cuts in foreign performances of his operas; now he sought urgent reassurances from them, which Boosey and Ernst Roth did their best to provide. His commitment to B&H, though weakened, held for the time being.

  While suffering from tinnitus, Britten worked on the Nocturne, Op. 60, for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and strings, which had been commissioned by the Earl of Harewood for the Leeds Centenary Festival: it was first performed there by Pears and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rudolf Schwarz, on 16 October 1958. This cycle of eight dream- and sleep-related texts is topped and tailed by a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (‘On a poet’s lips I slept / Dreaming like a love-adept…’) and Shakespeare’s 43rd sonnet (‘When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see…’). The intervening poems or extracts from poems – by Tennyson, Coleridge, Middleton, Wordsworth, Owen and Keats – are introduced by the obbligato instruments in the sequence bassoon, harp, horn, timpani, cor anglais and flute with clarinet: these are typically Brittenesque colours, but his avoidance of solo strings was also due to the fact that he disliked the playing of Paul Beard, then leader of the BBC SO. Often wary about his work-in-progress, Britten expressed two unusually specific worries about the Nocturne: ‘It won’t be madly popular because it is the strangest & remotest thing – but then dreams are strange and remote,’48 he told Marion Harewood; while to Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine he wrote, ‘I think it’s good so far, but it is a tremendous effort to write – each note being squeezed out like that last dollop of toothpaste out of an empty tube. This tube rather wants a holiday.’49 Both remarks are perceptive. It is strange and remote (and it hasn’t been madly popular) because the poems are at once too similar in theme and too disparate in style; the delicious thematic juxtapositions of the Serenade or the Spring Symphony are missing. And it does at times seem effortful in that squeezed-toothpaste way, perhaps above all in the dutifully mimetic effects Britten provides for the nocturnal creatures in the Middleton setting. The Nocturne is a mysteriously unhappy work in which the nightmarish ‘Sleep no more’ of the centrepiece – this is Wordsworth in revolutionary Paris from Book X of The Prelude – appears to express a quite different, wholly personal anguish. Elsewhere in the cycle, panicky breathing rhythms recur in the strings, slowing to a mournful heartbeat for Owen’s ‘The Kind Ghosts’: they create an unsettlingly vulnerable pulse (did Britten perhaps recall overhearing his dormitory neighbours’ unsynchronised snores at Gresham’s, a notable period of dreams and nightmares for him?).

  The final setting, of the Shakespeare sonnet, is the one which has ‘always mystified’ Ian Bostridge, ‘it
s lush Romanticism so at odds with the spareness of a cycle that is self-consciously constructed out of fragments and marginal texts’.50 Bostridge ingeniously discovers the ‘solution to the mystery’ in Britten’s borrowing of the ‘repeated descending motif’ from Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, but Peter Evans finds in the tonal merging of ‘two entities … into a higher unity’ a more persistent influence on the composer: ‘one can choose to hear either key, a Lydian D flat or a Neapolitan C minor, as predominant in the crucial opening phrase, and the ambivalence is sustained to give impressive profundity of meaning to the simple textures, beautifully scored to give a highly Mahlerian sound’.51 There are clear allusions to the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony during the sonnet’s third quatrain. Yet, for all its consolatory romanticism, this concluding sonnet, which supplies the expected reaffirmation of love between composer and singer, is qualified by the ambiguously reversed pronouns with which it ends: ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee, / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.’

  The Nocturne was swiftly followed by the Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente, Op. 61, for tenor and piano: this short cycle, a fiftieth birthday present for Prince Ludwig, was first performed – twice, in a recital which juxtaposed it with songs from Winter Words as well as songs by Purcell, Schubert and Schumann – by Pears and Britten at Wolfsgarten on 20 November 1958; they also gave the first concert performance in England as part of the 1959 Aldeburgh Festival. There are moments of extraordinarily eloquent simplicity in Britten’s settings of these six mostly brief extracts from poems by Hölderlin: the invocation of home and lost childhood in ‘Die Heimat’ and of life’s changing seasons in ‘Hälfte des Lebens’ (both Hardyesque themes); or the epigrammatic final song, ‘Die Linien des Lebens’, with its doubly minimalist accompaniment – not only sparse but entirely constructed of minims. Yet it’s hard to avoid completely the suspicion that this work and its predecessor were bread-and-butter gestures for the Harewoods and the Hesses as well as urgently needed material for Pears, who had been neglected by both The Prince of the Pagodas and Noye’s Fludde. A more obviously bread-and-butter affair was the commission in September 1958 from the University of Basel for a work to celebrate its 500th anniversary: the Cantata Academica, Carmen Basiliense, Op. 62. Then there was the Missa Brevis, Op. 63 – or, as Donald Mitchell memorably called it, ‘Mass in short trousers’ – for boys’ voices and organ, composed for George Malcolm and the choristers of Westminster Cathedral. And, beyond all this, Britten had something larger and more enticing on his mind. Ever since his visit to Japan, he had wanted to do something based on the Noh play Sumidagawa (The Sumida River), for which William Plomer, who had lived in the country, would be the ideal collaborator; so, during the autumn of 1958, Plomer began to work on a draft libretto. At this stage, Britten was ‘very keen on as many nice evocative Japanese words as possible’,52 although by the time the project eventually reached fruition, almost six years later, the setting would have shifted to East Anglia and the work’s title become Curlew River.

  On their return from Wolfsgarten, Britten and Pears immediately embarked on rehearsals for the recording by Decca of Peter Grimes, which took place in Walthamstow Town Hall during the first week of December. This project had been mooted over a year earlier, but it had significantly benefited from the delay: for, although Decca had been making stereo recordings for some time, Grimes was the first complete opera to be recorded by them in England specifically for stereo release. The executive producer was John Culshaw, who had recently worked on Solti’s celebrated stereo recording of Das Rheingold in Vienna and who was to be closely associated with Britten’s future projects with Decca and, later, the BBC; arrangements for the audio staging (by Culshaw, producer Erik Smith and sound engineer Kenneth Wilkinson) included fifteen pages of blocking diagrams. For Britten himself, who had not previously conducted the opera, the sessions ‘ended in (temporary) physical disaster’ when he ‘managed to put a bone in my back out, which made breathing impossible’;53 further illness and his hectic schedule prevented him from hearing a complete playback until February; and, as late as November 1959, he was still ‘rather anxiously awaiting news about our proposed stereophonic machine’ at The Red House, having apparently inherited his father’s suspicion of all such gadgets – ‘We propose to have built a little cabinet to take the turntable, and are just waiting for dimensions from you,’ he told a surely bemused Culshaw.54 It would have been worth the wait; Peter Grimes may be described without exaggeration as a landmark in the history of the gramophone, a recording which remains artistically and technically unsurpassed over half a century later and has never been out of the catalogue. It was released in time for the 1959 Aldeburgh Festival: the stereo version, said Decca’s advertisement in the programme book, had ‘all the life and realism of a stage performance’. Reviewing it, Alec Robertson could ‘declare with certainty that every lover of great music and great theatre will be thrilled with this magnificent achievement’.55

  But that year’s festival was overshadowed for Britten by a personal sadness so intense and so deeply rooted that he barely spoke of it: on 7 June, Piers Dunkerley killed himself at the home of his fiancée’s parents in Dorset. Britten had known him since his schooldays at South Lodge; during the war, while serving in the Royal Marines, Dunkerley was wounded and captured in the 1944 Normandy Landings; after the war, he served on HMS Vanguard and then became ADC to the Governor of Gibraltar. His return to civilian life proved difficult: he failed to keep a job with the fuel merchants Charrington’s, but he did become engaged to Jill Home, a young doctor from Bournemouth, and they planned to marry in August 1959. Dunkerley, who had kept in touch and visited Aldeburgh whenever possible, asked Britten to be his best man; to his dismay, the invitation was turned down. Although Britten pleaded pressure of work, he found his former young friends’ weddings emotionally stressful and avoided all of them. Dunkerley pressed him to attend, even if not as best man: ‘I only intend to get married once, and you must be there – I insist – and bring Peter.’56 But he wouldn’t be pressed. After an argument with Jill, Piers died of seconal poisoning, ‘self-administered while his mind was befogged owing to taking seconal and spirits’,57 according to the coroner. Britten inevitably blamed himself: he would in due course find a way to memorialise his friend.

  By the summer of 1959, the proposal for an Aldeburgh Theatre had been finally abandoned in favour of a scheme to renovate and extend the Jubilee Hall: the adjacent house was to be purchased and the building extended as far as Crag Path to provide a new stage with orchestra pit, acoustic panelling and dressing rooms. It would be reopened for the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival and Britten would supply a new opera for the occasion. As this typically audacious and tightly deadlined plan took shape, he made two momentous decisions. Firstly, he would dispense with the services of a librettist (although he consulted Myfanwy Piper); instead, he and Pears were to make their own adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 64. Secondly, he would construct the opera around a particular singer’s voice, but that singer would not be Pears. On 18 August, he wrote to the countertenor Alfred Deller: ‘I wonder how you would react to the idea of playing Oberon … I see you and hear your voice very clearly in this part…’58 It was a bold and risky idea; Deller himself was initially uncertain and had to be gently persuaded by Pears. Moreover, the countertenor voice was less familiar to audiences in the late 1950s than it is today and still likely to prompt strange misapprehensions: there is the story of a German woman who asked Deller, a large bearded family man, ‘You are eunuch, Mr Deller?’ (to which he nobly replied, ‘I think you mean unique, madam,’ as just possibly she did). It was also a risk, although one which Britten had already taken in The Turn of the Screw, to sacrifice what might otherwise have been a useful contrast of registers between Oberon and Tytania.

  At first, all went well. In September, the libretto was ‘shaping nicely’, Britten told Harewood, adding: ‘What a play it is!’59 Compositionally, he had cleare
d the decks (as he put it) to work on the project, though that didn’t mean he could give it an autumn of uninterrupted concentration: there were, as ever, recitals with Pears, as well as their appearance at a Festival Hall concert called Stars in Our Eyes, in aid of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; there was next year’s festival to plan and an ambitious appeal in aid of the Jubilee Hall conversion (including an auction at Christie’s to which Henry Moore donated a bronze which sold for 1,400 guineas – or approximately £20,000 in contemporary terms); there was a television production of The Turn of the Screw, to be broadcast on the ITV network over Christmas, for which Britten attended a rehearsal and the press screening – it was, he told Pears, who was singing in Switzerland, ‘awfully good, scenically rather than musically, actually’.60 He had been scheduled to accompany Pears, but had now developed tendonitis in his left arm as well as the periodically recurring bursitis in his right.

  He was also suffering from depression, triggered by Dunkerley’s suicide and intensified by Pears’s absence. Almost at once, he was writing desolately lonely letters to his partner; a few days later they spoke on the telephone. ‘I was so saddened by your poor old voice this morning and everything gloomy and dismal that I have been thinking of you all the time and wondering what I can do,’ Pears wrote afterwards. ‘What can I say except that I love you very very much with all my heart. Take courage my bee – you are so unbelievably loved by everybody.’61 He did his best, yet he was less complicated and more easily outgoing than his partner, and he may never have fully comprehended Britten’s plunges into depression and the paralysing lack of self-confidence which went with them. A fellow sufferer, the gardening writer Monty Don, once explained on the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions – presented by Britten’s godson Michael Berkeley – how a depressive crash can be set off by an event as tiny as a leaf blowing by; how, too, some music becomes dangerous during periods of depression. It’s equally true that something apparently trivial can quite unexpectedly lift the spirits: the friendly wave of a fisherman outside the window on Aldeburgh beach, for example. But the beach was no longer outside Britten’s window: at such times, the isolated and protected environment of The Red House was probably the worst place for him to be.