Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  For a while, during the summer of 1973, there remained a vague hope that Britten’s condition would improve, even though, as Ian Tait told Humphrey Carpenter, ‘Ben’s chances of regaining his capacity for full work and musical creation were very doubtful’.28 There was, Tait added, ‘a very strong wish to think otherwise, and also a great wish to encourage him’, which naturally inhibited Britten’s medical advisers and friends from saying what they thought: that the operation had been ‘a great disappointment’ (Tait) or ‘a failure’ (Pears). Britten would never again be able to conduct nor, much more distressingly, to play the piano either in public or to his own private satisfaction: when he tried, he couldn’t bear to be overheard, even by a nurse outside the door, and his attempts to play duets with an Aldeburgh neighbour, Pat Nicholson, left him even more depressed. Still, he practised, in the belief or at any rate the hope that things would improve. ‘When’s it all going to get better?’ he would ask his friends.

  And then, just as that summer was turning to autumn, came the deaths of two old friends and collaborators. In the early hours of 20 September, William Plomer suffered a heart attack at his Sussex home and died in the arms of his partner Charles Erdmann. Just over a week later, on 29 September and also in the early hours, W. H. Auden died of heart failure in a Vienna hotel room. Donald Mitchell, who was with Britten when he received the news of Auden’s death, says that it was the only time he ever saw the composer cry.

  3

  When Britten chose Auden’s ‘As it is, plenty’ to conclude On This Island in 1937, he set it, with the callousness of youth, as a jauntily comical cabaret song. Yet even then the piece was bitter-sweet. The invocation ‘Give thanks, give thanks’ can’t be merely flippant, nor can the lines which open the poem’s final stanza:

  Let him not cease to praise

  Then his spacious days;

  Yes, and the success

  Let him bless, let him bless …29

  This was the spirit Britten now tried more sombrely to embrace when he returned to composition in 1974. If he had looked back on his lifetime’s music and declared, in a rather different tone, ‘As it is, plenty’, no one could have blamed him; instead, he brought his customary resourcefulness to bear on his new limitations and produced a series of important if small-scale late works.

  The first of these was Canticle V: The Death of St Narcissus, Op. 89, for tenor and harp, written for Pears and Ossian Ellis in memory of Plomer. A little later, Britten would encourage the new performing partnership of Pears and Murray Perahia, then a young pianist whom he greatly admired and tactfully advised (once hiding behind a screen to avoid distracting him or inhibiting his playing), but he was understandably reluctant to compose material for an instrument on which he could no longer perform. The text is surprising and disconcerting: an early, posthumously published poem by T. S. Eliot, unknown to readers of the long-serving standard Collected Poems, yet at first startlingly familiar since it opens with lines which Eliot adapted and reused in The Waste Land. Less surprising is the way in which the piece seems, once again, to be a pendant to Britten’s most recent opera: Narcissus, after various transmogrifications, becomes ‘a dancer to God’, and his music shares with Death in Venice a sense of resignation beneath its angst. The images of man as nature – Narcissus as a tree ‘Twisting its branches among each other’ and finally as ‘green, dry and stained’ – would also have resonated with the composer at this time, even though he said of the poem: ‘I haven’t got the remotest idea what it’s about.’30 Pears and Ellis gave the first performance at Schloss Elmau, Upper Bavaria, on 15 January 1975.

  Pears – whose own health problems at this time included high blood pressure and a number of throat infections – found Britten’s invalid state almost impossible to cope with: his characteristic response was to throw himself into work and during the autumn of 1974 he was away from Aldeburgh for three months. He began to dread returning: writing from America to Peg Hesse on 1 November, he noted with relief that Britten hadn’t ‘mentioned lately my coming back for a visit’, adding: ‘I must say that the thought of such a visit appals me.’31 This was shortly after his Met debut, at the age of sixty-four, in the triumphant New York premiere of Death in Venice, which took place on 18 October 1974; once again, John Shirley-Quirk sang the multiple baritone roles and Steuart Bedford conducted. For Pears, as he wrote to Britten on 12 October, the major disappointment was Bryan Pitts’s Tadzio: although ‘a much better dancer’ than Robert Huguenin, ‘he has not got IT at all!! Oh dear! I wouldn’t dream of looking at him for more than 5 seconds.’32 Nevertheless, the first performance was received ‘with tremendous cheering and applause. I would call it a big success.’33 There was a large ‘English contingent’ in support – including Donald and Kathleen Mitchell, Isador and Joan Caplan, Charles and Lettie Gifford, William and Pat Servaes – and a party afterwards given by the music publishers Schirmer’s. So many of Britten’s closest friends had travelled to New York that he might have felt abandoned in Aldeburgh, had he been there.

  But, by way of a compensatory treat, Britten and Rita Thomson, now firmly installed as his nurse and indispensable companion, had flown by private plane to stay with Peg Hesse at Wolfsgarten. While conceding it was ‘lovely here’, Britten reported to his sister Beth that he’d ‘had a ’fluey cold and felt lousy’ and was ‘very jealous of all of them in New York for D in V’.34 Nevertheless he was trying to do ‘a bit of work’ on his Suite on English Folk Tunes: ‘A Time There Was’, Op. 90, which he would finish exactly a month later. Although the ostensible logic behind this work was Britten’s wish to find a home for ‘Hankin Booby’, the little folk-song-based piece for wind and percussion he had composed for the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967, as well as to memorialise Percy Grainger, another enthusiastic arranger of folk songs, the emotional impulse signalled by the subtitle was deeper and stronger. He had, of course, set the Hardy poem from which it derives in Winter Words:

  A time there was – as one may guess

  And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell –

  Before the birth of consciousness,

  When all went well.

  Hardy’s anguished concluding question – ‘How long, how long?’ – was precisely the one Britten continued to ask about his own increasingly improbable recovery. Then, just as he was about to put the finishing touches to the suite (whose last movement, ‘Lord Melbourne’, has a deeply moving and appropriately English-pastoral part for cor anglais), a serendipitous piece of broadcasting confirmed his subtitle. On 17 November, he wrote to Pears:

  I’ve just listened to a re-broadcast of Winter Words (something like Sept. ’72) and honestly you are the greatest artist that ever was – every nuance, subtle & never over-done – those great words, so sad & wise, painted for one, that heavenly sound you make, full but always coloured for words & music. What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for? I had to switch off before the folk songs because I couldn’t [take] anything after ‘how long, how long’. How long? – only till Dec. 20th – I think I can just bear it.

  But I love you,

  I love you

  I love you – –

  B.35

  Pears replied from New York:

  No one has ever ever had a lovelier letter than the one which came from you today – You say things which turn my heart over with love and pride, and I love you for every single word you write. But you know, Love is blind – and what your dear eyes do not see is that it is you who have given me everything, right from the beginning, from yourself in Grand Rapids! through Grimes & Serenade & Michelangelo and Canticles – one thing after another, right up to this great Aschenbach – I am here as your mouthpiece and I live in your music – And I can never be thankful enough to you and to Fate for all the heavenly joy we have had together for 35 years.

  My darling, I love you –

  P.36

  These are both wonderful letters, but there’s a crucial difference between them: Britten f
ocuses on the present and anticipates the future, while Pears looks back gratefully to the past. Despite his ailments, Pears carried his years well: many would have thought him more handsome in his urbane sixties than in his prep-school-masterish youth. He had made younger gay friends on his travels – Donald Mitchell remembers one particular New Yorker, in leather jacket and jeans, who even turned up at an Aldeburgh Festival – and he was inevitably beginning to envisage a future without Ben.

  Pears was back in Aldeburgh for Christmas and the new year. During January, Britten composed Sacred and Profane, Op. 91, for the unaccompanied voices of the madrigal group, named after the East Anglian madrigalist John Wilbye (1574–1638), which Pears directed: these settings of eight medieval lyrics are dedicated ‘For P.P. and the Wilbye Consort’ and were first performed by them at the Maltings on 14 September 1975. While Britten was working on Sacred and Profane, he received a handwritten letter from the Queen, whose warm personal regard for Britten and Pears stretched back through the opening (and reopening) of the Maltings to Gloriana and the Coronation. Would he, she wondered, consider writing something for her mother’s seventy-fifth birthday in August? It was an appropriate suggestion – Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had accepted an invitation to become Patron of the Aldeburgh Festival a year earlier – as well as a tactful one: not an official commission nor a request for something grand, but a graceful attempt to cheer a composer in poor health. He responded at once: bearing in mind both the Queen Mother’s Scottish upbringing and her titular role as the Scottish Regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief, Britten proposed a cycle for tenor and harp, to be performed by Pears and Ellis, using poems by Robert Burns. Without waiting for the formality of royal approval, he set to work on A Birthday Hansel, Op. 92. But he could be tactful, too, and he made some textual changes: ‘Health to the Maxwell’s veteran Chief’ became ‘Health to our well-loved Hielan Chief’ and ‘Farewell, auld birkie’ ‘All hail, auld birkie’, a term which gave no offence to the Queen Mother’s Scottish ear. She was at the Castle of Mey for her birthday on 4 August where, among her presents, was Britten’s manuscript of A Birthday Hansel; Ruth Fermoy, her lady-in-waiting, played the harp part for her on the piano, though it’s not known if either of them sang. She was, she wrote to Britten, ‘absolutely thrilled and delighted by this glorious birthday gift’, and she commented in some detail on the poems he had chosen. ‘I honestly do not think anything in my life has given me greater pleasure than your birthday gift,’ she told him. ‘It is very precious to me, and will I am sure give joy to your countless grateful admirers.’37

  During May, Britten and Pears, together with Rita Thomson and Sue Phipps’s stepdaughter Polly, had taken a holiday in Oxfordshire on a narrow boat, the Amelia di Liverpool, owned by John Shirley-Quirk. Britten now had padded swivelling chairs for working at The Red House and at Horham: one of these was installed at the boat’s prow and there’s a touching photograph of him seated in it, wearing a woolly tea-cosy hat and his characteristically resilient smile. Soon after his return to Aldeburgh, he received another personal letter from the Queen: Sir Arthur Bliss, the Master of the Queen’s Music, had died on 27 March and she needed to appoint a successor. She was approaching him informally, in view of his illness, to see whether he might be persuaded to take it on; the only real compositional necessity would be something for the forthcoming Silver Jubilee. Britten declined, with real regret, on the grounds that he could no longer manage social occasions and seldom went to London: he felt the position should be held by someone lively and public-spirited who could ‘write appropriate music, attend and preside over public occasions, and generally lead the musical profession’.38 Now feeling older than his years, he seems to have decided, perhaps not quite reasonably, that the appropriate candidate should be younger than him – thus excluding Michael Tippett – and to have suggested Malcolm Williamson, whose appointment was not an unqualified success.

  The Queen Mother was present at the 1975 Aldeburgh Festival to hear the first performance of the Suite on English Folk Tunes: ‘A Time There Was’; afterwards she told Britten that she had been ‘deeply moved by your glorious new piece’, adding that ‘Ruth & I came home all aglow!’39 Among the other highlights at the Maltings that June was Janet Baker’s incomparable performance of Les Nuits d’été by Berlioz, and as soon as the festival was over, Britten began to compose a piece for her to sing at the following year’s festival. Almost thirty years earlier, Eric Crozier had suggested Racine’s Phèdre as the basis for a chamber opera to follow The Rape of Lucretia; now Britten turned to Robert Lowell’s recent version of the work, in rhyming couplets, as the text for his Phaedra, Op. 93, a cantata for mezzo-soprano, strings, harpsichord and percussion. There are five sections. A chime introduces the brief Prologue, in which Phaedra recalls the wedding day on which, turning aside from her new husband Theseus, she caught sight of her stepson Hippolytus. Then a short Recitative quickly brings us to the point at which ‘Venus resigned her altar to my new lord’. In the third Presto section, Phaedra’s description of Hippolytus as a ‘monster’ gives way to a confession of love accompanied by a thumpingly percussive and increasingly irregular heartbeat which surely mirrors Britten’s own. Next comes a confessional Recitative addressed to Phaedra’s maid Oenone: when she concludes that ‘Death will give me freedom’, there’s a fleeting reminiscence, assisted by the accompanying strings and harpsichord, of Dido’s lament in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, another role Janet Baker had made her own. A characteristically energetic string passage leads to the final Adagio section, in which Phaedra confesses her love to Theseus and vows to take ‘Medea’s poison’ before the music finally resolves into a Mahlerian chord of C major with added sixth and ninth.

  Phaedra might indeed have made an excellent chamber opera, but it is overwhelmingly effective as a fifteen-minute cantata. It is, in more than one sense, a further pendant to Death in Venice: it concerns a mature individual’s love for a beautiful young man and it ends in death; yet, as in the opera, the musical conclusion speaks once more of acceptance and redemption. Britten completed the cantata on 12 August: his amanuensis Colin Matthews played it through with him at the piano, with Britten sitting on the right of the keyboard and playing the vocal line with his left hand. Two months later, again with Matthews’s invaluable help, he began his final major work, the String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94, dedicated to Hans Keller. The piece consists of five movements, of which the central one is the utterly astonishing ‘Solo’: here the first violin begins a rapturously unfolding song without words and modulates into a central passage of perfect birdsong – not seabirds, but inland birds from Horham – before it returns to its uncannily articulate lyricism. This is buttressed by two shorter, contrastingly boisterous movements, ‘Ostinato’ and ‘Burlesque’, and these in turn are framed by the opening ‘Duets’ and the concluding nine-minute ‘Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima)’: Britten’s last great composition, the finest of his string quartets, could scarcely have ended otherwise than with this movingly elegiac example of his favourite musical form. The Venetian subtitle reminds us that the quartet was completed during the holiday which he was persuaded to take in November by Bill and Pat Servaes, who had already planned a trip to Venice with their Chilean friend Esteban Cerda. Britten, now in a wheelchair, was manoeuvred with some panache by Rita Thomson: they stayed in a suite at the Hotel Danieli, with a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal, opposite the church of Santa Maria della Salute, whose bells (heard only once a year, on 21 November, a prelude to Britten’s birthday) provided the basis for his passacaglia. As ever, he responded well to being ‘mothered’ and, as he finished the quartet, seemed like a man liberated from the pressures of a lifetime. If he had previously identified with Aschenbach, now he was exorcising him.

  With Britten back in Aldeburgh before Christmas, Colin Matthews was joined by his brother David to play the quartet through to Britten as a piano duet. In his journal, David Matthews noted how well Britten looked after his holiday, despite his
less firm voice and his difficulty in walking. On 17 December, the brothers at first made ‘rather a botched job’ of the piece but, after lunch and some more practice,

  we did produce a reasonable through-performance for him. & it was a moving occasion as the quartet is certainly a masterpiece & proves his creative powers are quite undiminished. The long passacaglia finale is especially fine, a serene piece in E major. After we have finished there was a silence and then Ben said, in a small voice: Do you think it’s any good? We assured him that it was.40

  Britten had been asking that question, in one form or another, throughout his composing life: he was never quite sure. This was among the reasons why he so needed to have trusted friends about him, as he did once again that Christmas: Basil Coleman, their old quarrel forgotten, was among the guests. Early in the new year, a complete performance of Paul Bunyan was broadcast on Radio 3 with Norma Burrowes as Tiny, George Hamilton IV as the Narrator and Pears as Johnny Inkslinger; the conductor was Steuart Bedford. Britten, when he heard it, was moved to tears: he hadn’t, he said, realised that it was such a strong piece.

  It was by now clear that his condition was deteriorating rapidly: the possibility of a further operation was mooted, but both Ian Tait and Michael Petch, the registrar at the National Heart Hospital, agreed that the risk was too great. In March, Britten made a new will, in which the first priority was providing generously for Pears: ‘This is far more important to me than anything that is going on in Aldeburgh, or anything to do with my music.’41 Aldeburgh and his music would be well looked after, nevertheless, for he had never lost his ingrained habits of frugality and he would die a wealthy man. Meanwhile, to anyone who had managed to remain ignorant about his state of health, the Aldeburgh Festival of 1976 might have given the impression that Britten was composing with renewed vigour. A Birthday Hansel, which in January had been performed privately for the Queen Mother – with both her daughters, as well as the composer and Rita Thomson, present – at the home of Lady Fermoy, was performed by Pears and Ossian Ellis. Phaedra received its first performance from Janet Baker and the English Chamber Orchestra under Steuart Bedford. And Paul Bunyan was at last staged at the Maltings, directed by Colin Graham. But the second Saturday of the festival, 12 June, held a surprise in store.