by Neil Powell
‘I am having rather a dreary winter,’62 he told William Glock in January; while at Easter he reported to Elizabeth Mayer that it had been a ‘horrid winter’ during which ‘everyone has been ill, or cross or mad’.63 He had now added gout to his other ailments, and in February Imogen Holst was rushed to hospital with suspected appendicitis; after an operation in March, she was ordered to take six weeks’ rest. Meanwhile, Britten had been made at least ‘cross’ if not actually ‘mad’ by the conduct of his old friend George Harewood, who had begun an affair with Patricia Tuckwell (sister of the horn player Barry Tuckwell), thus jeopardising his marriage to Britten’s even older friend Marion Stein. To the seventeen-year-old Roger Duncan, who had been staying with the Harewoods, he wrote in strongly moral terms:
I wish people just occasionally would think of the result of their actions. I am also rather worried about you, old boy, worried lest you think that this kind of sexual laxity is the way most of the world behaves, or should behave. But I do know (I really do know!) quite a lot of happily married couples, with plenty of imagination & sensitivity (& desires) who manage to live together happily, in spite of, I am sure, problems from time to time.64
This is the voice of the respectable middle-class dentist’s son from Lowestoft, but it is also genuinely and straightforwardly meant; above all, it is something which Britten could say because his careful definition of ‘happily married couples’ so precisely describes himself and Pears. His simple acknowledgement that they too had their ‘problems’ – not least the inescapable possibility that the singer, during his frequent absences, might be enjoying himself in unreported ways – is characteristically honest.
Against this troublesome background, the deadline for A Midsummer Night’s Dream approached. Britten now had the assistance of Rosamund Strode, while Violet Tunnard and Martin Penny stepped in to take over Imogen Holst’s tasks, but ‘the delays resulting from IH’s indisposition meant that George Malcolm, who was training the boy fairies, did not receive the vocal score for Act III until two weeks before the performance’.65 There were other last-minute panics, including John Cranko’s inadequate direction and Deller’s continuing worry that he lacked the stage experience necessary for his part: following the dress rehearsal, he told Britten to ‘delete me when you think fit’. Nevertheless, the opera was successfully premiered in the refurbished Jubilee Hall on 11 June 1960 with Jennifer Vyvyan as Tytania, George Maran as Lysander, Thomas Hemsley as Demetrius, Marjorie Thomas as Hermia, April Cantelo as Helena, Owen Brannigan as Bottom and Pears as Flute; the speaking role of Puck was taken by Leonide Massine II, the fifteen-year-old son of the dancer and choreographer. As Deller had feared, critics found fault with his stage presence (though not with his singing) and he was indeed ‘deleted’ from the cast when the production transferred to Covent Garden – though by the opera house management rather than by Britten, who reinstated him for the work’s 1966 recording.
Britten and Pears had been scrupulous about retaining, while cutting and rearranging, Shakespeare’s language, to which they added only half a dozen explanatory words. The music, too, faithfully reflects the play’s tripartite division: lovers, rustics and fairies have their distinctive sound-worlds. The lovers’ music is the most grandly conventional as their confusion resolves into eloquence; the rustics are funny and cumbersome, breaking into barbershop harmony and aptly accompanied (Bottom by a trombone, Flute obviously by a flute); while the fairies have celesta, harpsichord, vibraphone and gamelan-influenced percussive effects. The ascending and descending string glissandi which open the opera and signal its transitions cast an oblique glance at Mendelssohn, who began his Dream music enigmatically with spaced chords, yet their unsettling quality also suggests a dream bordering on nightmare, like the music which opens Act 2 of The Turn of the Screw. The rustics’ production of Pyramus and Thisbe is an exuberant pastiche of Donizetti, which Pears further improved by turning his Flute-as-Thisbe into a wicked imitation of Joan Sutherland, whose Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden was still fresh in musical memories. The happy ending is intensely moving, with Shakespeare’s ‘And all shall be well’ supplying a benign counterpart to Hardy’s ‘When all went well’ in Winter Words: even the ambiguity of Puck’s epilogue is softened by cutting the couplet in which he appears to question his own honesty. Nevertheless, a crucial element of the play has been lost in Britten and Pears’s removal of the original Act 1, apart from an anachronistic fragment which is transplanted to Act 3. Shakespeare’s play begins in the orderly ‘red’ world of the court, where the lovers are frustrated by their elders; it then moves to the chaotic and transformative ‘green’ world of the forest, from which come liberation and resolution; finally, it returns to a ‘red’ world made newly benevolent by love. In losing this dialectical progression, by plunging us straight into an enchanted wood, the opera diminishes the lovers’ coherence and motivation as characters and, conversely, increases the likelihood of their being upstaged by the rustics and the fairies. Peter Hall, who has directed both Shakespeare’s and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, once memorably remarked that the difference between them is that in Britten’s version there is no love.
4
Despite the immediate and sustained success of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there’s a chill in Britten’s music at the turn of the decade; the improbable agent of its thaw was to be Nikita Khrushchev, prime minister of the USSR from 1958 to 1964. For it was thanks to Khrushchev’s encouragement of cultural exchanges with the West that on 21 September 1960 the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, appeared at the Royal Festival Hall in London; with them was the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, then in his early thirties, who was to be the soloist in the first British performance of the Cello Concerto by Dmitri Shostakovich. Since the opening item in the concert was The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Shostakovich invited Britten to join him in his box, together with the Master of the Queen’s Music, Arthur Bliss. Britten had already heard a radio broadcast by Rostropovich and been astonished by his playing; now, as he listened to the concerto, he became wildly excited, bobbing up and down and poking Shostakovich in the ribs whenever (which was often) he was especially delighted. Afterwards, backstage, the two men were introduced: Rostropovich, relieved to find Britten ‘just like his music – not spoiled by his status’, immediately ‘pleaded most sincerely and passionately with him to write something for the cello’.66 Britten, who needed no persuading, at once agreed to meet the next day, with Rozhdestvensky again present to assist communication, at Rostropovich’s modest hotel, the Prince of Wales in Kensington. There he proposed that he should write a sonata for cello which he would send to Rostropovich in Moscow, on the condition that it should receive from him its first public performance at the 1961 Aldeburgh Festival: it was a brilliant suggestion and, for both men, a life-changing one. Permission would have to be obtained from the authorities in the USSR but, even before Rostropovich left London, Britten had crafted for him a ‘letter to the Minister … written in a perfect way though my personal qualities are considerably exaggerated’. It did the trick. Three weeks later, the cellist wrote again from Moscow:
If you have no objections I intend to come ten days before our concert in Aldeburgh and to learn your sonata there putting in all my love and skill. Please don’t worry that I shall not have time to learn the sonata well, for I am rather quick to learn. For instance I learned Shostakovich’s concerto in four days.67
Britten, smiling at this, must have realised that, for sheer musical intelligence, he had at last met his equal.
Rostropovich, who was eagerly anticipating the arrival of each day’s post, endured some months of agony: ‘The wait was actually painful.’ Meanwhile, Britten had more pressing things in his diary, including a holiday with the Hesses in Greece, a recital tour with Pears of Germany and Switzerland, and recordings of his revised two-act version of Billy Budd for the BBC – it was broadcast on 13 November – and of the Spring Symph
ony for Decca. There was also a concert with Menuhin at the Festival Hall, in aid of Christian Action, and a Wigmore Hall recital in which Britten and Pears were joined by a boy alto, John Hahessy, for Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac. It wasn’t until after Christmas that he could work on Rostropovich’s sonata; by 17 January he had ‘got the cello piece in order’ and played it through to Imogen Holst, ‘who was quite impressed’. Then the phone rang: ‘there was “Slava” from Paris, & I had a wild & dotty conversation in broken German (very broken) with him’.68 This common idiom, hammered out of their different versions of German, they were to call ‘Aldeburgh Deutsch’. When the parcel of music reached Moscow, Rostropovich ‘made a dash for my cello, locked myself in and went at that Sonata. It was a case of love at first sight.’ On 11 February he sent a telegram to Britten: ‘ADMIRING AND IN LOVE WITH YOUR GREAT SONATA SHALL BE IN LONDON END OF FEBRUARY DETAILS BY CABLE LOVE ROSTROPOVICH’.69 In fact, it was 5 March when he spent a day in London – he was changing planes on the way to South America – and together they tried through the piece at 59 Marlborough Place, the current Britten–Pears London base in St John’s Wood:
Ben said, ‘Well, Slava, do you think we have time for a drink first?’ I said, ‘Yes, yes’, so we both drank a large whisky. Then Ben said: ‘Maybe we have time for another one?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. Another large whisky. After four or five very large whiskies we finally sat down and played through the sonata. We played like pigs, but we were so happy.70
In a letter to Rostropovich’s wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Britten told her how much he had enjoyed ‘working with Slava’, who had ‘understood the work perfectly, and of course played it like no one else in the world could’. He hoped that she would accompany him to Aldeburgh and ‘that there will be a chance of hearing you sing’.71
The Aldeburgh Festival of 1961 was both significant and magical. On the one hand, the Russian visitors were treated to some wonderful events: Pears and Britten gave their first public performance of Schubert’s Winterreise; The Turn of the Screw, conducted by Meredith Davies, was staged in the Jubilee Hall; and Noye’s Fludde, conducted by Norman Del Mar, was revived in Orford Church. On the other, there was Rostropovich with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Schumann Cello Concerto and in a chamber recital with Britten which included Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata and Five Pieces in Folk Style, the Debussy Cello Sonata and the promised premiere of Britten’s own Sonata in C, Op. 65, of which the last two movements were given again as an encore; after that, Rostropovich beckoned Pears onto the platform and the three of them performed a Bach aria with cello obbligato. The anonymous critic in The Times (William Mann) perceptively noted that Britten’s new five-movement work, ‘nearer to suite than sonata in character’, seemed to have been intended ‘to reflect his own impression of the character of the player to whom it is dedicated: gay, charming, an astonishingly brilliant executant, but behind all these qualities a searching musician with the mind of a philosopher’.72 He might have added that this was also an accurate self-portrait of the composer. In Galina Vishnevskaya’s recital, her husband was the piano accompanist: ‘I can’t believe such a programme was possible,’ she later wrote. ‘In addition to songs by Prokoviev, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss and Schumann, plus arias from Norma, Manon Lescaut, La Forza del Destino, and Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, for dessert I sang Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death.’73 But it was possible in Aldeburgh.
Rostropovich and his wife fell in love with the place. He had arrived first, for a rehearsal with Britten and the LSO in London, before being driven to Suffolk in the composer’s latest open-topped car, an Alvis; she joined him a few days later at the Wentworth Hotel, overlooking the sea on the northern edge of the ‘wonderfully cosy and enticing town’. Then they were off to a garden party at The Red House where Vishnevskaya was introduced to Britten ‘and my heart opened to him instantly’: ‘From the beginning I felt at ease with him; I’m sure that everyone who was lucky enough to know that charming man must have felt the same sense of simplicity and naturalness in his company.’74 In fact, not everyone did; but the Rostropoviches – with their combination of musicality, modesty and generosity – brought out the very best in him. ‘Dear, dear Ben and Peter,’ they wrote, a few days after their return home, ‘It is quite impossible to express in a letter our feelings of sorrow and loneliness’; they had never before met ‘people so cordial and warm-hearted, so genuinely gifted, so sincere and frank…’75 Aldeburgh, as Bernard Levin once put it, is a place to leave looking over your shoulder. They would be back.
Although Britten was to write another four works for cello dedicated to his friend Slava Rostropovich, it was Galina Vishnevskaya’s recital which had the more immediate effect on his composing life. In October 1958, he had been approached with an invitation to write a substantial work for chorus and orchestra to mark the consecration of the new cathedral in Coventry, designed by Basil Spence, which was to take place in 1962. ‘I should very much like to undertake this,’ he told John Lowe, the artistic director of the Coventry Cathedral Festival, ‘one of the reasons, I must confess, being the, for once, reasonable date attached.’76 However, it wasn’t until almost two years later, in the summer of 1960, that he began work in earnest on a composition which would interleave the traditional movements of the Requiem Mass with texts taken from the First World War poems of Wilfred Owen; he had already included Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ in his contribution to the BBC radio series Personal Choice and ‘The Kind Ghosts’ in his Nocturne. This idea of juxtaposing two very different textual sources may well have been suggested by Tippett’s interleaving of his own words with songs from The Book of American Negro Spirituals in A Child of Our Time. By the following February, he had decided that the poems would be ‘set for tenor and baritone, with an accompaniment of chamber orchestra, placed in the middle of the other forces’ and, in a careful and respectful letter, he invited Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to sing alongside Pears; the two had recently worked together on a recording of the St Matthew Passion under Otto Klemperer. Although the choice of Fischer-Dieskau was essentially a musical one, Britten also had in mind what he called ‘the circumstances for this particular occasion’, by which he meant that the appearance of an English and a German soloist would be an appropriate symbol of reconciliation and peace. He also vaguely thought that he would need ‘a strong soprano for the Mass section’; when he heard Vishnevskaya sing at Aldeburgh, he immediately told her that ‘he had begun to write his War Requiem and now wanted to write in a part for me’.77 A project designed to unite performers from the opposing sides of two world wars might do the same for the Cold War as well.
It was at this point that another timely and prescient gift arrived from Christopher Isherwood. Britten had been using the Edmund Blunden edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems; but now Isherwood, who was in England, sent him a copy of the first edition, edited by Siegfried Sassoon and published in 1920, which contained a photograph of Owen. Britten was ‘delighted to have it – I am so involved with him at the moment, & I wanted to see what he looked like: I might have guessed, it’s just what I expected really’.78 What he expected or what he hoped? He would have guessed or known about Owen’s sexuality (and, if he hadn’t, Isherwood was just the friend to enlighten him); but, above all, he must have noticed the resemblance between Owen in his military uniform and a wartime photograph of Captain Piers Dunkerley, Royal Marines. His War Requiem, Op. 66, would carry this dedication: ‘In loving memory of Roger Burney, Sub-Lieutenant, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; Piers Dunkerley, Captain, Royal Marines; David Gill, Ordinary Seaman, Royal Navy; Michael Halliday, Lieutenant, Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Force.’ Burney (a friend of Pears), Gill and Halliday (Lowestoft friends of Britten) had all died in the war; Dunkerley, Britten implies, was also a casualty of the war, in the sense that it left him unable to cope with life in peacetime. Yet he knew this wasn’t the whole truth, which explains his otherwise elliptical remark to the painter Sidney Nolan: ‘Really what the
whole thing is, it’s a kind of reparation. That’s what the War Requiem is about; it is reparation.’79 Thus a work which had originated as a very public commission was increasingly concerned with a very private subtext.
Britten and Rostropovich next met a month later in London, where they spent two days recording three of the four items from their Aldeburgh programme for Decca; Britten noted with satisfaction that they had apparently used up six miles of tape. Two days after that, he and Pears were introduced by the Rostropoviches to the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who was to become a regular participant in Aldeburgh Festivals, and his wife, the singer Nina Dorliak. Then they flew to Yugoslavia, to perform at the Dubrovnik Festival, where there was also a production of The Rape of Lucretia. At the end of August, they were off to the Edinburgh Festival – somehow contriving to fit in a concert at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford before dashing back to Scotland – before immediately embarking on a ten-day tour of West Germany and Poland. It was, incidentally, on a fleeting back-to-base stop between Scotland and Germany that Britten scribbled his thanks to Isherwood for the Owen book, adding: ‘We are only back for 24 hours to pick up clothes & music & there are 1,000,000 things to do.’ He should have been working on the War Requiem, but at times such as this one wonders how he managed to compose anything at all. In early October he was at the Leeds Triennial Festival, where his new arrangement of the National Anthem received its first public performance and Pears was one of the soloists in the Cantata Academica. A fortnight later, he and Pears gave a recital at Whitehaven in Cumbria, where The Turn of the Screw was also produced as part of a week-long Britten Festival sponsored by the textile entrepreneur Nicholas Sekers. Then, at last, it was back to Aldeburgh and the War Requiem. ‘I go on working at the Coventry piece,’ he told Basil Coleman. ‘Sometimes it seems the best ever, more often the worst – but it is always so with me.’80