by Neil Powell
Britten had at first imagined the project in simple terms of gutting the building and putting in the stage, seating and lighting of a concert hall, but it was far more complex than that. Years of heat had turned the original roof timbers to charcoal; and the roof would in any case have to be raised by about two feet, if only to prevent users of the bar and restaurant from continually bumping into beams. So a new roof had to be designed, brilliantly incorporating ventilators which resembled the smoke hoods of the old Malt House. Some parts of the building had heavy foundations which had to be removed and replaced; others had footings which were poor or non-existent. Excavations filled up with water and had to be pumped out, while ‘Any attempt to use a mechanical digger in these conditions turned any clay present into a soup-like slurry which was nearly impossible to remove’.39 Rather than put the project out to tender, Arup Associates wisely agreed a price with the builders William C. Reade of Aldeburgh, realising that local knowledge and loyalty might turn out to be priceless: their foreman, Bill Muttit, ‘didn’t have to have any project managers telling him what to do next’, Sugden noted. ‘It was all in his head.’40 Meanwhile, the Arts Council, Decca, the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Pilgrim Trust had contributed to an appeal fund which was still well short of its target.
In a spirit entirely appropriate to the sparseness and bleakness of coastal Suffolk, Britten, Reiss and Sugden made a virtue of their enforced frugality. As Sugden wrote, with quiet pride, soon after the hall’s completion:
There are no finishing materials, as such, at Snape; the fabric of the building forms the finish both inside and out. The roof and the pine joists in the foyer are exposed and left natural. The brick walls in the auditorium have been patched and raised with old red facing bricks saved from the demolition, and the new piers and arches in the foyer have been built in new red facing bricks. All the old walls have been grit-blasted and finished with a sealer to restore the original soft red colour of the bricks.41
But what to do about the seating? The BBC producer Richard Butt suggested the cane chairs at Bayreuth as a possible model: when approached, Wolfgang Wagner helpfully sent photographs, drawings and the welcome assurance that most of their chairs made in 1876 were still in use. The modest Aldeburgh budget allowed only £4 per chair, but a firm in Ipswich agreed to make them to Sugden’s specification for a little over £6 each, which was still an astonishing bargain. Despite being delayed by winter storms and by practical snags with timber sourcing, the roof with its ventilators was finished in February 1967: the building was at last properly weatherproof. It would be ready ahead of schedule and in good time for that year’s festival.
Britten had little faith in the ‘pseudo-science’ of acoustics, though both he and John Culshaw had a clear sense of how they wanted the hall to sound. He had heard it empty (on one occasion testing it with the assistance of Len Edwards, a violin-playing carpenter) but no one knew quite how it would react to an audience. So, on a Sunday afternoon in May, eight hundred local people were persuaded to come and test it, among them the London bookseller Heywood Hill (married to Anne Gathorne-Hardy and with a house at Snape), who left a splendid account of the occasion:
There was a very good commander-in-chief (I think from Decca) who said that what he wanted first of all was utter silence for three minutes (huge exit of babies in arms). That we achieved amazingly well … Then he told us that the next test would be very dreadful and he gave us an example of the piercing edgy screech which he said would have to go on at various intensities for a quarter of an hour (some of the cultured folk, who had come expecting to hear some exquisite Mozart, were seen to have tied scarves around their ears). He then said he was very sorry but now he was going to have to make three explosions and that they were going to be appallingly loud and that he advised us to block our ears as tight as possible … When, after that, he asked us to all stand up and to shout HELP in unison, we all responded feelingly and vociferously. He asked us to do that twice. There was then a breather, after which we were allowed some pretty music … We agreed that we did not think we would have behaved so well if Ben Britten and Peter Pears had not been standing near to us. I have heard they were delighted by the result and that the hall has been proved acoustically the finest in Europe.42
This was an opinion which in various forms – ‘the best concert hall we have’, ‘the finest hall of its kind anywhere in the country’ – was to be frequently repeated in the musical press during the following weeks, and the evidence of ears was confirmed by measurement: when full, the hall had precisely the two-second reverberation time its designers had intended.
The Snape Maltings Concert Hall was officially opened by Her Majesty the Queen on 2 June 1967, the first day of that year’s festival. She and Prince Philip had flown by helicopter to the nearby RAF base at Bentwaters (which wasn’t always Britten’s favourite neighbour), before lunching at The Red House where, not quite coincidentally, a new entrance porch had recently been added; the other lunch guests included the Hesses, the Cranbrooks and Marion Harewood. Then the party travelled on to Snape for the opening ceremony: there the Queen used a gold-plated key to open the main door of the Maltings, inspected the auditorium and met members of the festival staff in the restaurant. A ‘member of the Royal Party’, presumably Prince Philip, uttered an overheard wish – ‘Well, I hope the old man has written something we can understand this time’43 – which offended Britten only because he disliked being called ‘old’. Meanwhile, the hall’s first audience were taking their seats for a concert which opened with Britten’s arrangement of the National Anthem, with its extraordinary progression from pianissimo prayer to pealing, overlapping choral fortissimo; afterwards, the Queen was to remark that she had never been so affected by the piece, adding wryly that she had heard it once or twice before. Next came The Building of the House, Op. 79, a five-minute work for orchestra and massed choirs which perfectly illustrates Britten’s knack for getting the ‘occasional’ exactly right. ‘It was inspired,’ he said, ‘by the excitement of the planning and building – and the haste!’44 Imogen Holst had suggested and adapted a text from Psalm 127 (‘Except the Lord build the house: their labour is but lost that build it…’) and Britten had based his composition on ‘the old chorale tune which Bach loved to use’: so the work is, like the building itself, both new and firmly grounded in the past. Britten conducted the English Chamber Orchestra together with ‘A chorus of East Anglian choirs’ – seven of them – who between them tested the hall’s roof, which remained in place, as well as its acoustics. The concert also included Delius’s Summer Night on the River, chosen for its aptness to the hall’s location, and Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, in which the soloists were Heather Harper, Pears and the trumpeter Philip Jones; between these, in a very proper acknowledgement of her role as the festival’s long-serving third artistic director, Imogen Holst took the rostrum to conduct her father’s St Paul’s Suite.
The next day, the Vienna Boys’ Choir – ‘all sailor-suited and kissable’,45 according to Tony Palmer – gave the first performance of Britten’s The Golden Vanity, Op. 78, a ‘vaudeville for boys and pianos after the old English ballad’ which tells of a sea battle and a drowned cabin boy, a sort of miniature Billy Budd without scenery but with costumes and mime. Although there was of course no new opera by Britten for the 1967 festival – the year’s premieres were a pair of fairly unmemorable one-act operas, Lennox Berkeley’s Castaway and William Walton’s The Bear – Colin Graham’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was staged at the Maltings and there was a concert performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen in Britten and Imogen Holst’s edition. Britten had the additional pleasure of testing his new hall both with his Spring Symphony and with his Piano Concerto, performed by Sviatoslav Richter, with whom three years later he would record the work at Snape for Decca. Praise for the new venue from musicians, audiences and critics was unanimous: at the end of the festival, Britten with knowing understatement told Yehudi Menuhin that t
he Maltings was ‘quite a success’.
‘It’s the house a composer built: it’s like Bayreuth without the poison,’ says Simon Rattle.46 Not everyone would quite agree. There was poison at Aldeburgh in the last decade of Britten’s life and some of it was connected, for all the place’s incomparable virtues, with Snape Maltings. The hall would detach and alter the festival audience, and no one was more conscious of this than Britten himself. Asked that very summer by Harold Rosenthal whether there wasn’t a ‘danger that Aldeburgh might become too fashionable, like Glyndebourne’, a question guaranteed to set his teeth on edge, Britten replied with irritated and unguarded frankness: ‘There is indeed this danger; and it’s not only snob audiences from London we have to worry about; there is also the “county”.’47 His hostility to snobs, whether they were Londoners or the local gentry, may mark a brisk and refreshing return to the founding principles of his ‘modest festival’, yet his irritation hints that he knew it was a battle he couldn’t win. A visitor arriving for a concert at Snape would notice only the benefits: it was much the same journey, with a slightly different conclusion and an immensely better venue. But for the Aldeburgh resident, it wasn’t the same at all: it meant travelling by car or by coach to a place with a fancy bar and a restaurant full of unfamiliar people, instead of walking to the Jubilee Hall and enjoying an interval drink in the Cross Keys. Some local people, who had originally been won over to the festival by the delicious way in which it had improvised itself in their midst, began once again to say: ‘It’s not for the likes of us.’ Of course, there would continue to be events in the town – Britten was adamant that this should be so and it remains so to this day – but everyone who had been associated with the festival’s first twenty years knew that its centre of gravity had shifted and that, from now on, most of the big operas and concerts would no longer be on their doorstep.
3
Neither Britten nor Pears was much good at dealing with the illnesses of others. Pears’s characteristic response, perhaps inherited from the military side of his family, would be a simple snap-out-of-it impatience. With Britten, however, it was a matter of sensitivity and shyness, the vulnerability of having one skin too few, which made him avoid a variety of stressful occasions, from his protégés’ weddings to his colleagues’ sackings, where his rawness might be exposed. Those who accused him of callousness entirely failed to understand the paralysing consequences of his own deep sense of inadequacy: his appalling pre-concert nerves, when he couldn’t take solid food and had to fortify himself with brandy, were another aspect of this, even though once onstage the nerves would vanish in a brilliant performance. So when in September 1967 he and Pears, visiting New York during an American tour for a concert at the Town Hall, learned that their old friend Elizabeth Mayer was in hospital after a stroke, Britten’s shockingly offhand reaction – ‘Well, it probably makes no sense to see Elizabeth, you know, she’s in hospital’48 – would have been prompted by nervousness rather than by heartlessness. Moreover, he had his own troubles: Pears had lost his voice, the recital was postponed and, when it had been rearranged, his own pre-concert nausea was even worse than usual. In the end, urged by her daughter Beata, they did visit Elizabeth Mayer, while Donald Mitchell ‘had a hand in arranging, at Ben’s request, a modest but regular contribution to the costs of Elizabeth’s hospitalisation’.49
Then they continued with a tour which stretched from Expo ’67 in Montreal – where, besides their own recitals, the English Opera Group was presenting Curlew River and The Burning Fiery Furnace – through New York to Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In Guadalajara, Schumann’s Dichterliebe was almost drowned out by brass bands and fireworks, while in Santiago an excitable lady singer tried to join them onstage, but these were minor hazards: their reception throughout Latin America was ‘absolutely wonderful everywhere’. The tour ended with the premiere on the continent of Peter Grimes in Rio de Janeiro, but the high point was the recital at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires where, according to Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine, the ‘magnificent’ audience was ‘thrilled, clapping, yelling and delighted’.50 Britten attributed their South American audiences’ enthusiasm to the fact that, while his music was well known there, his and Pears’s records were difficult to obtain (although this sounds suspiciously like another reformulation of his ancient prejudice against the gramophone). They returned home, contented but exhausted, at the end of October, and on 22 November, his fifty-fourth birthday, Britten reported to William Plomer that he was ‘launched on the Prodigal’.
Britten’s third and final church parable, The Prodigal Son, Op. 81, was to receive its first performance in Orford Church like its two predecessors, as part of the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival. The idea for it had come to him during the Russian Christmas of 1966 when, the day after their Leningrad concert, Britten and Pears had wanted to revisit the Hermitage and found it closed; however, ‘magic words were spoken’ and they were given a private conducted tour. For Pears, the highlight was the ‘big dark room with some of the greatest Rembrandts in the world in it … and surely the greatest of all, the Prodigal Son (with his broken back, shaven head, worn sole to his one foot out of his shoe, the father all loving-understanding, the three diverse characters looking on, judging, grudging, and surprised)’.51 On returning home, Britten had written to Plomer: ‘Does the idea of the prodigal Son attract you for a new Ch. Par. – inspired by a fabulous Rembrandt in the Hermitage?’52 But at last being ‘launched on the Prodigal’ didn’t, as Britten might by now have guessed, guarantee a smooth compositional journey. The first major interruption was in December, when he conducted Decca’s recording of Billy Budd at Kingsway Hall, an experience which left him shattered and with a familiar exhortation from his doctor to do less. After Christmas, he retreated once again to the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice. ‘To be in a place where man can still dominate (even over the pigeons!) somehow gives one confidence again in his own capacity,’ he told Plomer. He had ‘worked as almost never before, with the result that I’m about 3/4 done, & have a pretty clear idea of what’s to follow.’53 What was to follow next was another illness which he first took be be a severe bout of flu; once he had been admitted to hospital in Ipswich, however, it was diagnosed as endocarditis, possibly a legacy of the heart trouble which had threatened him as a small child. He spent a month in hospital before returning to The Red House, where a nurse made daily visits to administer penicillin injections. On 29 April, he could finally reassure his librettist that ‘By breaking all doctors’, orders, & really thrashing my poor old self’, he had ‘finished Prodigal Son – score & all’.54
‘Of all the parables in the New Testament,’ wrote Plomer in his programme note, ‘none has had quite such a universal and ever-renewed appeal as that of the Prodigal Son.’ It is also, as he implied, yet another of Britten’s redemptions: ‘With its unforgettable climax of reward and rejoicing lavished not upon virtuous correctness but upon a sinner, this parable celebrates the triumph of forgiveness.’55 Plomer’s invented character of the Tempter – the role originally taken by Pears – makes it absolutely clear that in The Prodigal Son we are once again in a world of manipulative evil familiar from Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw: ‘See how I break it up!’ he repeats, in a chilling mixture of grown-up villainy and childish tantrum, of the concord he aims to destroy. ‘You have gambled and lost,’ he tells the Younger Son, who thus seems to join Britten’s procession of fated young men; but this is a Christian parable whose movement is inexorably towards redemption of the brother who ‘was dead, and is alive again, was lost, and is found’. While The Prodigal Son is tamer and less groundbreaking than its two predecessors – and its first reviewers praised rather faintly, with William Mann in The Times finding it ‘sufficiently distinctive’ – it nevertheless has some claim to be regarded as the most satisfyingly coherent of the three church parables.
Another notable first performance at the 1968 festival was by Rostropovich, of the Second Cello Suite, Op.
80. This opens with a questing, introspective Largo, and indeed the whole work has an unsettled quality which makes it hugely challenging for any lesser performer; on Britten’s familiar principle of delayed gratification, any hints of sweetness are reserved for the concluding Allegro. Sadler’s Wells brought their revival of Gloriana, now fondly regarded by its composer as his ‘slighted child’, to the Maltings, but the opera which caused the festival’s biggest stir was Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the Jubilee Hall. Britten was generous in his encouragement of younger composers, from his then twenty-year-old godson Michael Berkeley and the still-teenaged Robert Saxton (who had first approached him in 1963, at the age of nine) to Birtwistle, who was in his mid-thirties. He had supported Birtwistle’s successful application for a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton, where much of Punch and Judy was composed, and at that point had been ‘exceedingly interested to hear about your projected new opera’,56 which had been commissioned by John Tooley at Covent Garden for the English Opera Group. But ‘hearing about’ wasn’t the same as hearing, and Britten, as Tooley told Humphrey Carpenter, ‘was quite appalled by what he heard’ that evening in Aldeburgh: ‘He hated the subject matter, he disliked the writing – I have to say in defence of Harry [Birtwistle] that it was performed in the Jubilee Hall, and the noise in there was indescribable.’57 Accounts differ about how long Britten and Pears stayed in their directors’ box – one reliable source says five minutes – before quietly slipping away for a stiff drink in the anteroom beyond. Perhaps the size of the hall was the problem (when Punch and Judy was revived at the Maltings for the 1991 festival, it seemed more manageable), yet the opera illustrated a central aesthetic dilemma for Britten, who wanted to support new music but found much of the 1960s avant-garde unendurable.