by Neil Powell
However, Britten’s major composition that spring was the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, Op. 74, written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Although he reassuringly told Pears that he found other singers ‘rather non-inspiring to write for’, he had already been sufficiently inspired by Fischer-Dieskau to create the baritone part in the War Requiem for him; now, batting aside the singer’s interesting suggestion of a cycle which would have set a number of Shakespeare sonnets together with their German translation by Paul Celan, he turned to fourteen items by Blake, selected by Pears, interleaving poems from the Songs of Experience and Anguries of Innocence with Proverbs of Hell. He told Fischer-Dieskau that it would be ‘big and serious’, and he was as good as his word: in its almost unremitting pessimism, the work feels as if it is fulfilling a promise made long ago by an earlier Blake setting, ‘The Sick Rose’, from the Serenade. Even the Chimney Sweeper’s transitory joy (‘Because I was happy upon the heath, / And smil’d among the winter’s snow…’) barely relieves the bleakness, while ‘A Poison Tree’, the third song, is devastatingly powerful: as in the Nocturne, Britten embeds the darkest material close to the cycle’s centre and, as in Winter Words, it takes a blameless creature of nature (here, ‘The Fly’) to coax him into comparatively benign mood; the final song, ‘Every Night and every Morn’, from Auguries of Innocence, is a distant cousin of the ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’ in the Serenade. In several respects, therefore, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, Britten’s last cycle of songs setting English poetry, clearly connects with its predecessors; yet its interwoven construction and uncompromising starkness mark it out as something quite new. Like much of Britten’s sparsely textured and (in a misleading sense) almost ‘simple’ late work, it is extremely difficult to get right: Fischer-Dieskau and Britten, giving the first performance in the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh, on 24 June 1965, evidently managed to do just that but, as The Times’s reviewer perceptively remarked, ‘Mediocre musicians will touch these songs at their peril.’ For Peter Heyworth in the Observer, it was ‘conceivably the finest cycle that Britten has yet given us’.14
William Plomer had been working on the libretto for a second ‘church parable’ based on the Old Testament story of the three Israelites condemned by Nebuchadnezzar to perish in the burning fiery furnace (and their miraculous survival); Britten liked to call it ‘the firy boys’ but Plomer, when he sent a draft version in July, gave it the novelistic working title Strangers in Babylon. Britten, meanwhile, had a rather tiresome commission to complete before his and Pears’s next foreign adventure: this was Voices for Today, Op. 75, a work for unaccompanied voices to mark the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations. He chose to cram into a short piece words from fifteen suitably peaceful authors, with the result that each text has the brevity, though not usually the wit, of an epigram. Among them are ‘Force is not a remedy’, ‘Burning stakes do not lighten the darkness’ and this impenetrably gnomic sentence from Camus: ‘The fruits of the spirit are slower to ripen than intercontinental missiles.’ Voices for Today received simultaneous first performances on 24 October in London, New York and Paris.
Since their return from India, the sabbatical travellers had already spent an enjoyable if damp fortnight in the Dordogne with Stephen Reiss and his wife Beth; then, early in August, following a performance by Rostropovich of the Cello Symphony at the Festival Hall, they left to spend a month in the USSR with ‘Slava’ and ‘Galya’. Apart from obvious indulgences – Ben’s cars, Peter’s paintings – they were cautious about money, carefully budgeting and itemising their travel expenses, but they were happy to accept, gratefully and politely, the hospitality of others: both the caution and the acceptance were typical legacies of their middle-class and public-school backgrounds. They may not have fully appreciated that an extended trip to Russia was very different from visiting well-off dignitaries (and travelling with royalty) in India. ‘How would I feed these gentlemen for a whole month?’ wondered Galina. ‘Where would I find edible steak for them, and fresh fish?’15 Britten had already sensed that things mightn’t be ‘wholly happy with those two tumultuous characters’16 and so he may not have been surprised by the eruption, on their second morning at the Rostropovich dacha, of a first-class row, ‘an occasional banged door from upstairs keeping us alert, forte soprano, piano calmando legato baritone’, as Pears put it.17 Galina was protesting at the impossibility of their planned visit to the composers’ colony near Dilizhan in the mountains of Armenia; however, as Pears wisely observed, ‘You can’t say no to Slava.’ So they duly went, staying in bungalows reserved for important visitors and being handsomely entertained by members of the Armenian Composers’ Union. Pears in his travel diary recorded both the magnificent landscapes and the splendid meals, although Vishnevskaya would later remark, without rancour, that neither he nor Britten ‘ever knew what heroic efforts it took to arrange all those wonderful picnics, those trips high up in the mountains’.18 But they were properly appreciative, all the same, as a postcard from Pears to Barbara Britten makes clear: ‘We are in the most heavenly high green valley with glorious oak woods and v. hot sun: the wild flowers are fantastic. Galya & Slava could not be kinder & we eat & drink far too much with predictable results.’19 Both men were astonished and impressed by the composers’ colony itself. Britten, in an article called ‘A Composer in Russia’, published in the Sunday Telegraph, described how an Armenian composer could spend weeks there, with his family, at little cost: in his bungalow he would have ‘a study with a piano, a living room, a bedroom and bathroom’ and would ‘eat in the big central building which also has a library, a room with gramophone and tape-machines’; Britten wished ‘something similar could happen in England’ but feared ‘that composers are still not taken as seriously here as over there’.20 Pears tried wryly to envisage a comparable institution, with comparable guests, in England: ‘Can one imagine Arthur Bliss, William Walton and Ben and lots more taking their holidays together on Windermere and entertaining Fischer-Dieskau and Henze for a month? Not quite.’21
As they were leaving England, Britten had bought at the airport a Penguin parallel text of Pushkin’s poems; while in Armenia, he set six of them as The Poet’s Echo, Op. 76. The cycle, dedicated ‘For Galya and Slava’, is precisely designed for Galina Vishnevskaya’s voice: ‘so much so’, says John Bridcut, perhaps a little unkindly, ‘that the shrill, often unforgiving tone that characterised her singing seems woven into Britten’s score’.22 Some of the piano writing too (for example, in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’) has the raw, self-punishing inwardness that is the least grateful characteristic of Britten’s later work, but the last song, ‘Lines Written during a Sleepless Night’, with its insomniac theme and ticking accompaniment, returns to an earlier, friendlier mode. When the Rostropoviches and their guests had flown back from Yerevan to Moscow, Slava insisted on driving them in his Mercedes to Pushkin’s birthplace in Mikhailovskoe, a distance of some thousand kilometres, where they arrived unannounced but were warmly welcomed by the curator and his wife. After dinner, they were persuaded to give an impromptu performance of The Poet’s Echo, part sung by Vishnevskaya and part hummed by Pears, accompanied by Britten on an upright piano. Pears noted in his diary that, when they reached the final song, ‘Hardly had the little old piano begun its dry tick tock tick tock, than clear and silvery outside the window, a yard from our heads, came ding ding ding, not loud but clear, Pushkin’s clock joining in his song.’ He added that it ‘seemed to strike far more than midnight’ and that afterwards they ‘sat spell-bound’.23
The day before Britten and Pears flew back to England, the quartet dined with Dmitri and Irina Shostakovich at their dacha outside Moscow. Delayed by extreme roadworks – at one point, the passengers had to walk through ankle-deep mud, while Rostropovich drove gingerly on, and at another a group of soldiers cleared the surface so they could pass – they arrived three hours late to find themselves presented with an enormous meal: ‘various caviars, cold meats, pâtés, yoghourts, cheese, chicken cas
serole, hot and cold fish, pastry, tarts, éclairs, vodka, brandy, wine, all at once’. After this, the ‘welcoming and amiable’ Shostakovich prevailed upon Britten and Pears to perform the Pushkin songs, to which he listened with admiration. Next morning, the company reassembled for breakfast, ‘at the same table covered with much the same food’: ‘Ben and I both found chicken casserole perfectly possible, preceded by cognac or vodka, an important prelude, I fancy,’24 wrote Pears blithely, although quite how Britten’s delicate stomach had survived the month’s culinary exertions remains a mystery. Thus fortified, they shopped and lunched in Moscow before going on to the airport and flying home just in time to rehearse for the next Long Melford Bach weekend. They sent a telegram to their Russian hosts:
DEAREST SLAVA & GALYA
WE CAN NEVER THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR OUR GLORIOUS HOLIDAY SO HAPPY SO FULL SO KIND STOP ALL ALDEBURGH IS PREPARING FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS
YOUR LOVING
PETER & BEN25
The Rostropoviches, after giving the first performance of The Poet’s Echo in Moscow on 2 December, were to spend Christmas at The Red House, where they fully entered into Britten’s eclectic mixture of sophisticated and childlike entertainments – proving to be virtuoso performers at Happy Families and enjoying the excellent conjuror who entertained a party of ninety in the recently constructed library on Boxing Day. The Suffolk–Russian connection, by no means the least of Britten’s achievements and one which would outlive him, was now firmly established.
Meanwhile, the second church parable, The Burning Fiery Furnace, Op. 77, was making only slow progress: he admitted to Plomer that ‘it can’t be really said to have caught fire yet’.26 The autumn had brought not only interruptions – such as a trip to Helsinki to accept a prize named after a composer he didn’t much admire, Sibelius – but a distracting and distressing family crisis: the long-anticipated break-up of his sister Beth’s marriage to Kit Welford. She was in the midst of divorce proceedings, drinking heavily, wandering ‘helplessly from friend to friend’ and proving ‘very difficult to help’.27 Then, after the jollities of a Rostropovian Christmas, Britten succumbed once again to illness. This time it was diverticulitis, which necessitated an operation and three weeks in hospital, followed by a lengthy recuperation at The Red House and a convalescent holiday in Marrakesh with Anthony Gishford. ‘I do hope you don’t mind too much about Morocco,’ he wrote to Pears on 3 April, adding that he was ‘determined to give you a lovely Easter here’.28 Pears minded less about Morocco than about his partner’s constant procession of ailments, which he found inconvenient and irritating as well as troubling. Now, once again, Britten was apologising for having been ‘such a drag on you these last years’ and resolving that ‘you’ll never have to give my health … another thought’, a resolution whose fulfilment was completely beyond his powers. At least while Britten was away Pears could get on with yet another London move, from their flat in Anne Wood’s house to 99 Offord Road, N1, next door to his niece Susan Phipps, who was now their agent: this proved to combine most of the known house-moving nightmares, including wet weather and wet paint, electricians and gas fitters getting in the way, and Pears’s piano being temporarily lost. ‘Thank God,’ he sighed, ‘that Ben was in Marrakesh!’29
Enforced convalescence enabled Britten to finish The Burning Fiery Furnace in April; it was to receive its first performance at the 1966 Aldeburgh Festival. It would, he said, use ‘the same instruments’ and ‘the same kinds of technique’ as Curlew River, but would be ‘much less sombre, an altogether gayer affair’.30 The instruments are in fact augmented by an alto trombone, representing the biblical sackbut, and some exotic percussion, but the form – including the monastic plainsong frame – closely paralleled that of the earlier work. Whether it is really ‘altogether gayer’ is debatable, although it certainly concludes more cheerfully: this is, of course, another of Britten’s redemptions, and it belongs, with Saint Nicolas and Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac, to that particular sub-category in which boys are miraculously saved from apparently certain death and the element of gaiety is withheld until the very end (the same principle of delayed gratification also applies to instrumental works as different in scale as the Dowland variations and the Cello Symphony). ‘If The Burning Fiery Furnace touches sensibilities on the raw less than Curlew River, its sounds are even more beautiful,’ says Michael Kennedy. ‘To hear the final Benedicte in the gathering darkness of a noble church or cathedral is to participate in a musical experience of rare spiritual force.’31
At the end of 1966, the Rostropoviches insisted on repaying the previous winter’s hospitality by inviting Britten and Pears to Moscow for Christmas: as was by now to be expected on such occasions, a certain amount of organisational chaos was more than offset by their hosts’ warmth and generosity. It wasn’t entirely a holiday: the visitors gave two recitals, one each in Moscow and Leningrad. The first of these was at four in the afternoon on Christmas Day (which of course wasn’t Christmas Day in the Russian Orthodox calendar) at the Moscow Conservatoire, where there was only half an hour available for rehearsal; so they arranged to rehearse at the Rostropoviches’ flat at noon. Pears takes up the story in his diary:
After breakfast we waited. No Slava. I practised, in despair, for an hour. At last, Slava, at 1 o’clock. I had particularly asked if we could eat early, no later than 1. We sat down at 1.45. The concert got nearer and nearer. We finished with strong coffee at 2.50. Drive to Hotel, through thick snow of course, quick change, drive to Conservatoire, five minutes on stage for practice, and lights. Fuss with nice intelligent woman who will announce Dichterliebe as first half, instead of Dowland–Purcell–Schubert. Last-minute crowd in artists’ room until I sing them all out fortissimo … It is a big lofty hall but beautiful, with a fine acoustic and a marvellous warm feeling. Heavenly audience, quiet as mice and immensely warm and enthusiastic.32
That evening they dined with the Rostropoviches – ‘a splendid spread, with an excellent goose’ – where Dmitri and Irina Shostakovich were the other guests (and Shostakovich the triumphant Happy Families winner); they talked ‘about Stravinsky and the drivelling muck written about Dmitri by [Nicholas] Nabokov’ and Britten told the assembled company of a recent dream in which Stravinsky had appeared ‘as a monumental hunchback pointing with quivering finger at a passage in the Cello Symphony “How dare you write that bar?”’33 The following day, Britten and Pears had a lengthy dinner with Sviatoslav and Nina Richter which stretched into planning Richter’s programme for the following year’s Aldeburgh Festival. They welcomed the new year in style at the Rostropovich dacha, with a peripatetic meal divided among three houses which ended at 3.30 in the morning.
They were hardly back in England before it was time to set off for a holiday in the Caribbean – a destination somewhat out of character, chosen because of the Venice floods, but one where ‘slow-moving relaxed days seemed to go on for ever’.34 Britten, however, returned with his traditional winter illness and in early February he was ‘feeling as near death as only ’flu can make me’.35 He had written a little folk-song-based fanfare piece for wind and percussion, ‘Hankin Booby’ – eventually to be incorporated into his Suite on English Folk Tunes: ‘A Time There Was’ – for the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall; he conducted the inaugural concert there on 1 March 1967. As he was doing so, he must have reflected with satisfaction that before long he would have a concert hall of his own.
2
When malting at Snape ended in 1965, the disused buildings across the river from the Old Mill were sold to Gooderham & Hayward, who proposed to produce and store animal feeds in some of them and to let out the rest. Stephen Reiss, in search of storage space for English Opera Group scenery, decided to have a look: some way behind the handsome frontage, with its arches and staircases and clock, he discovered a ‘great barn-like place’, the redundant Malt House. It was, however, only barn-like on the outside; within, it was divided by drying floors and internal walls, so it was difficult to get a se
nse of it as an empty space. Nevertheless, its external dimensions and its Brittenesque situation – with views across reed beds to the river and Iken Church on its promontory – irresistibly suggested a concert hall. Fidelity Cranbrook took the festival’s treasurer, Charles Gifford, to see it and they were both ‘aghast’: ‘We decided it was a madness.’36 Britten’s career had been punctuated by achieved madnesses: the wartime Atlantic crossing, the reopening of Sadler’s Wells with Peter Grimes, the unfeasibly all-male Billy Budd were among the many occasions on which Britten must have said, as Richard de la Mare had said of Faber Music: ‘I have no idea how this can be done, but clearly we have to do it.’ And that now was Britten’s attitude to the Maltings.
It had to be done. Stephen Reiss’s inspired hunch was swiftly to find the right man to do it. He approached Arup Associates, who had been working on musical spaces such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and ‘the agony of the Sydney Opera House’,37 and was soon in touch with Derek Sugden, a regular festival-goer and, as it happened, already an admirer of the nineteenth-century industrial buildings at Snape. Sugden coped calmly with the contradictions of Britten’s specification. The Maltings was to be a concert hall, not an opera house, but a hall in which opera could somehow work; and it was also to function as a recording venue for Decca and the BBC, thus further reducing the need for Britten to visit the capital, his dislike of which had by now intensified into a phobia. Consequently, its acoustics would have to be as good when the hall was empty as when it was full. Then there was the budget. Sugden knew that the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with roughly the same number of seats, was going to cost about three million pounds. Britten said they couldn’t spend a penny more than £50,000; Sugden replied that it would be at least £100,000; so they amiably agreed that they would worry about that later. By the end of 1965, Stephen Reiss had produced a concise and clear brief, while Sugden had responded with a full survey and report. At that point, says Sugden, ‘Stephen rang me up and just said, “Start!” I loved that.’38