Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  The 1964 festival included several momentous events, one of which was wholly unexpected. Sviatoslav Richter, unheralded by the programme, provided a ‘truly unforgettable’ Schubert recital in the parish church. ‘Where else but in Aldeburgh,’ asked the Daily Telegraph, ‘is one likely to stumble inadvertently on the experience of a lifetime?’133 There was the first English performance of the Cello Symphony by Rostropovich and the ECO under Britten in Blythburgh Church, ‘the cathedral of the marshes’, while in an actual cathedral – Ely – there was the War Requiem. Julian Bream gave the first performance of the Nocturnal after John Dowland, Op. 70, which Britten had composed the previous autumn, in the weeks before his unwanted fiftieth birthday celebrations: though it self-evidently belongs to the sequence of sleep-and-dream pieces which includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Nocturne, the eight disturbed and fractured variations (culminating, of course, in a passacaglia) which precede the eventual statement of Dowland’s ‘Come, heavy sleep’ are mostly suggestive of anxious insomnia. Britten himself said of the Nocturnal that ‘it has some very, to me, disturbing images in it … inspired by … the Dowland song, which of course has some very strange undertones in it’.134 Although the comparison of sleep with death was much more commonplace in Elizabethan poetry than Britten seems to acknowledge here, this is certainly a powerfully haunting example of it:

  Come, heavy Sleep, the image of true Death,

  And close up these my weary weeping eyes,

  Whose spring of tears doth stop my vital breath,

  And tears my heart with Sorrow’s sigh-swoll’n cries.

  Come and possess my tired thought-worn soul,

  That living dies, till thou on me be stole.

  Come, shadow of my end, and shape of rest,

  Allied to Death, child to this black-faced Night;

  Come thou and charm these rebels in my breast,

  Whose waking fancies doth my mind affright.

  O come, sweet Sleep, come or I die for ever;

  Come ere my last sleep comes, or come never.135

  It was perhaps the duality of the second stanza, in which sleep is perceived first as like death and then as death’s only alternative, which struck Britten as ‘very strange.’

  The most eagerly and nervously anticipated premiere was undoubtedly that of Curlew River, given – like that of Noye’s Fludde – in the parish church at Orford. A violent thunderstorm on the evening of 13 June cut the power and delayed the start for half an hour. This intensified the occasion’s mystical significance for some in the audience, but it was almost too much for the already fraught performers; Britten, however, remained outwardly calm and in control, just as he would in a later and far more serious crisis. There was much to be fraught about in Curlew River. The casting of Pears in the role of the Madwoman had already aroused reactions varying from hilarity to rage, even among those who should have known better: Imogen Holst remembered how Stephen Reiss had spent an hour one morning, when she was trying to work on the score, telling her that they ‘must stop Ben writing this because of what people would think about Peter singing a woman’s part’.136 Given the work’s origin in all-male Noh drama, this was of course non-negotiable. Then there was the music itself: gamelan-inspired and conductorless, for a weird concoction of instruments quite unlike the small orchestras of the chamber operas. It was meant to be loose and unsynchronised – one reason why Britten so enjoyed writing for children was their ability to get things creatively wrong – with a new notation in the score, the ‘curlew mark’, to indicate where the performers must listen to the others and hold a note until everything was back in place. Though Curlew River is a short, one-act work, it is enormously ambitious in its superimposition of different worlds: Japanese drama and medieval Suffolk in the text, an asymmetrical chiming of East and West in the music. The anonymous Times reviewer found it ‘strange, unpretentious yet infinitely solemn’ and speculated that it might be ‘the start of a new, perhaps the most important stage in Britten’s creative life’.137

  In July, Britten travelled to Aspen, Colorado, to receive the first Aspen Award for Humanistic Studies. Selected ‘from among more than a hundred artists, scholars, writers, poets, philosophers, and statesmen who had been nominated by leaders in intellectual and cultural fields throughout the world’, he repaid the honour with the finest and fullest of his acceptance speeches – ‘our speech’, as he described it to Pears, who had played a substantial part in drafting it. The theme which underpins it is the occasional nature of music and its corollary, the sense of music as an occasion. He cites the aptness and oddness of the slung mugs in Noye’s Fludde as one instance of a composition crafted for its occasion – and for ‘the pleasure the young performers will have in playing it’ – and the suitability of the War Requiem for the vast space of Coventry Cathedral as another: ‘Music does not exist in a vacuum, it does not exist until it is performed, and a performance imposes conditions.’ Yet this doesn’t mean that the composer should write either for ‘pressure groups which demand true proletarian music’ or for ‘snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks’. Nor, he adds, is the composer’s task made any easier by society’s attitude towards him: ‘semi-Socialist Britain, and Conservative Britain before it, has for years treated the musician as a curiosity to be barely tolerated’. Music should be not only an occasion but a special occasion: Britten takes a sustained swipe at broadcast and recorded music – doubtless to the puzzlement of anyone unaware of his father’s formative views on the matter – and insists that a live musical performance ‘demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts’. It’s important to note here that he is not claiming music as the preserve of the privileged or the wealthy, for whom ‘saving up for a ticket’ would hardly be necessary.

  In the most famous part of his address – the section in which, as we’ve already seen, he thanks the USA for being the place in which he discovered Crabbe and Peter Grimes and ‘realised where I belonged and what I lacked’ – he returns to the subject of the ‘small corner of East Anglia’ where he has lived ever since then. Although, he says, he enjoys travelling, making new friends and giving concerts ‘with a congenial partner’, he belongs in Aldeburgh: ‘I have tried to bring music to it in the shape of our local Festival; and all the music I write comes from it.’138 The whole speech amounts to a wonderfully coherent summary of Britten’s credo, yet it’s significant that he no longer attempts to evoke the physical presence of Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast, which might have been especially beguiling for his American audience. That was already beginning to seem like a place of the memory and the mind: he had stepped back from the shore.

  The day after his return from America, Britten conducted, with Meredith Davies, a televised Prom performance of the War Requiem at the Albert Hall. By now, both he and Pears were exhausted by their extraordinary schedule of engagements, and they promised themselves a complete break from performing. ‘It has been a hectic Summer – now turning into an equally hectic Autumn,’ Britten told Plomer in September; ‘the only way Peter & I feel we can cope is to cling like mad to our sabbatical 1965 – only 4 months to go!’139 Inevitably, it would turn out to be more of a sabbatical for Pears than for Britten, who could no more stop thinking about music (and therefore, sooner or later, composing) than he could stop breathing. What, asked John Warrack in an interview for Musical America, were his plans for his year off?

  To write a lot of music! But first a holiday. We’re going to India for six weeks in January and February, and in the late autumn there’s a very exciting plan to drive through Russia with the Rostropoviches. Then, apart from the Aldeburgh and Long Melford festivals, composing. I’m going to do a solo cello sonata for Rostropovich – nothing down yet, though. And there is to be a song-cycle for Fischer-Dieskau, in memory of his wife, for baritone and chamber group – English poetry, but it’s not chos
en yet. That’ll be for Aldeburgh.140

  He added that there would also be ‘another church parable kind of work’ on an Old Testament subject (The Burning Fiery Furnace) and tantalisingly mentioned what would have surely been the most bizarre of all his unrealised projects: an opera on a modern subject which was to include ‘a scene in an airport’ and a tennis party.

  The First Suite for Cello, Op. 72, written in December 1964, had been ‘commissioned’ by Rostropovich under somewhat eccentric circumstances during his summer visit to England. He and Britten, travelling north with Marion Harewood for a recital at Miki Sekers’s Rosehill Theatre in Whitehaven, were to stop at Harewood House, where the Earl of Harewood’s mother, Princess Mary, was in residence. In a restaurant in Lincoln, it became clear that Rostropovich had practised an elaborate curtsy which he was determined to perform in front of the elderly and easily offended Princess, whom he obstinately envisaged in fairy-tale terms. Britten, horrified by this, was obliged to sign, on the back of a menu, a ‘contract’ to write ‘six major works for cello in recompense for which Slava Rostropovich will agree not to perform his pirouette in front of Princess Mary’.141 In the event, he would only complete half of Bach’s total. Despite the austerity of its opening Canto, the first suite is a work of charming contrasts, from its eloquently touching Lamento to its richly comic Marcia, and with a disconcerting surprise when a ghostly reminiscence of the Elgar concerto appears in the penultimate Bordone. Rostropovich was to give the first performance during the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival.

  When Rostropovich reluctantly failed to curtsy to Princess Mary (whom he discovered knitting), Lord Harewood was away at the Holland Festival; his marriage to Marion had broken down completely, following the birth of his son with Patricia Tuckwell on 4 July, and Britten had consequently ended their friendship. Just before he and Pears left for India the following January, Britten wrote to Harewood suggesting that, as it would no longer be possible for him to visit the Aldeburgh Festival, he should resign as its president: this he did in due course by writing to Fidelity Cranbrook, who thought Britten had been silly and priggish. A certain priggishness was an inalienable part of his nature, yet there were nobler motives at work: his old friend George had hurt his older and deeper friend Marion; the code of loyalty, to which he steadfastly adhered in his own private life, had been affronted. No one who knew him would have expected him to behave differently. Harewood himself was saddened but not shocked and, when his mother Princess Mary died at the end of March, there was a civilised exchange of letters between the two men: in a postscript to his, Harewood congratulated Britten on having just been admitted to the Order of Merit, succeeding T. S. Eliot (who had died on 4 January) as one of the twenty-four holders of the honour and following in the footsteps of two previous composers, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. His favour with the royal family evidently remained undiminished.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BUILDING OF THE HOUSE

  1965–71

  1

  Britten and Pears set off for Wolfsgarten on 16 January 1965 to join their other royal friends, the Hesses, who were to accompany them to India: together, they flew over Yugoslavia and Greece (‘with Olympus and its inhabitants over far to the right’), stopped in Beirut and Karachi, and were met by their friend Narayana Menon in Delhi, where they were to give a recital. Pears began, but failed to sustain, a detailed travel diary and wrote descriptive letters to friends; for his part, Britten sent regular dispatches to the thirteen-year-old John Newton, who had sung in the second cast of Curlew River and toured with the English Opera Group as Miles in The Turn of the Screw and Harry in Albert Herring. He had stayed at Aldeburgh during November, ‘a sweet affectionate child – makes one rather feel what one has missed in not having a child’;1 Britten was providing some assistance with the fees at Cawston College, where he had just begun to board. ‘Things will seem rather strange, but soon they will all straighten out, and you won’t remember that you were ever a “new boy”,’ Britten reassured him in his first letter. His sympathetic understanding of the schoolboy’s world was as acute as ever, although by the mid-1960s the tone may have begun to sound a bit dated, and it seemed that his magnetism for the young was international: at the Red Fort in Delhi, ‘a serious young boy’ had already tried to attach himself to the party, subsequently following their car through the crowded streets. When they were stopped ‘by the jumble of cars, bicycles, people and cows … he came right up to the car window, looking appealing’; he appeared happy and well dressed, Britten noted, ‘so it wasn’t money he wanted’.2 Pears thought that the boy ‘seemed to regard us as some vehicles to a wider world’ and added: ‘Ben’s heart was touched, so was the boy’s.’3

  They dined with the ‘charming and intelligent’ Mrs Indira Gandhi, who took them to a folk-dance rehearsal for the imminent National Day; they performed their recital (‘I wasn’t too hopeless on the old piano,’ said Britten); they drove to Agra and revisited the Taj Mahal; then they flew to Udaipur, to stay at the Lake Palace Hotel – ‘the most exquisite hotel you can imagine’ or, in Pears’s words, ‘a white meringue in a lake’.4 The place brought out the ornithologist in both men. Britten, in his second ‘batch of diary’ for John Newton, listed ‘pelicans, lots of them, storks, cranes, stilts (tall white birds with red legs), cormorants (like Aldeburgh) and their bigger cousins the Indian Darters, Ibis (white and black), herons of all kinds, terns (like Aldeburgh again, but an Indian variety), kingfishers, spoonbills, green bee-eaters, flycatcher (but not the Red House kind), and on one particular island at sunset, millions of green Parakeets…’5 Pears, not to be outdone, wrote to his friend Hélène Rohlfs about ‘all sorts of strange birds … brilliant green paraqueets with long tails which fan out quickly as they land … storks and cranes, bright blue big kingfishers, curlews, ibis, paddy-birds, little waders, pelicans (huge yawns!), vultures, many kinds of long legged grey birds, standing up on their nests on the tops of trees’.6 There were also crocodiles in the lake: Pears merely noted their presence, but Britten, perhaps improving on the occasion for his young reader in Norfolk, reported that the largest of the crocodiles grinned at them as ‘the engine of the motor boat refused to start and we drifted helplessly on – I wondered if I’d ever see Aldeburgh, or you, or Cawston College again!’7 He ate too much curry and endured ‘the worst tummy-ache of my life’; yet, despite this and the crocodiles, both he and Pears described the place as ‘paradise’.

  A few days later, the slums of Bombay provided a sharp contrast, but Britten noted with admiration how clean the inhabitants were, despite their squalid surroundings. In Madras, they dined with William Paterson, the British deputy high commissioner, whose schoolboy son had been ‘dotty about pop music, and suddenly developed a craze for my music (quite a compliment, or not, do you think??!!)’.8 Britten’s approval-seeking insecurity here is as characteristic and touching as his bemusement about pop culture: the Beatles, he would tell an interviewer in October that year, were ‘charming creatures; I don’t happen to like their music, but that’s just me’.9 They visited a children’s home, where he met the boy whom he and Princess Margaret had sponsored on their previous visit, and the Kalakshetra School of Music and Dancing. Then they took to the hills, travelling to Ootacamund, or ‘Ooty’, which Britten described, with the slightest hint of disapproval, as ‘a relic of the English occupation’ but which was ‘delightfully cool’. Cochin was different again, eight thousand feet lower and terrifically hot. Next came ‘the most exciting part of our whole trip’, a visit to Thekkaday in Kerala, ‘a Game Reserve, round a large artificial lake, made by damming a river, the Periya’.10 They stayed at a bungalow in the middle of the lake, and once again Britten provided an idyllic description of the place and its wildlife for John Newton. Pears also enthused, in letters to his friends Oliver Holt and Hélène Rohlfs, about ‘the song of the red whiskered bul-bul, very melodious, and the sweet warble of the gold-fronted charopsis or leaf-bird’, ‘the hoop-hoop-hoop-hoop of the brown faced blank monke
ys’ and the bison, which resembled ‘huge muscle-bound leather dreadnoughts’;11 although there was also an unnamed bird ‘whose song is deadly monotonous and disturbs Ben, who is working on a piece for the Hungarian twin boys who are coming to the Festival with Kodály’.12 Then it was back to Bombay – via another bird sanctuary and another magnetised twelve-year-old boy – from where they flew to London on 1 March. Jeremy Cullum met them at the airport in Pears’s new Rover and drove them through snow-covered Essex home to Aldeburgh.

  Colin Graham had suggested Anna Karenina as the basis for an opera and Britten read the novel while in India, although he rather understandably wondered how he might fit it into one evening or perhaps even two; nothing was to come of the idea. But he did finish the Gemini Variations, which he described to Elizabeth Mayer as ‘a romp for 2 little boys’: he sent it off to the Jeney twins on 13 March. Subtitled ‘Quartet for Two Players’ in the published score, it is a typically ingenious set of twelve variations and a fugue on a theme from the fourth of Kodály’s Epigrams, designed for the Jeneys’ multi-instrumental talents and including such instructions as ‘Gábor takes Violin’ and ‘Zoltán first turns to page 12, then takes Flute’. Before they gave the first performance at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival, there was to be a charming exchange of letters concerning their piano stool, which had to be specially made to their customary height of fifty centimetres: ‘We hope that it will be the right size for you,’ Rosamund Strode wrote to them, ‘and very slippery so that you can move about quickly on it when you have to.’13