by Neil Powell
By the time the guests who had been mysteriously invited to a garden party had assembled at The Red House – among them, in another reconciliation, Eric Crozier and Nancy Evans – the secret was out: Britten had been appointed a life peer in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Rita Thomson liked to take some of the credit: she said that she’d threatened never to speak to him again if he refused it (he was rumoured to have turned down a knighthood earlier). But some of his friends had reservations: Lord Harewood found it ‘unnecessary’ and Donald Mitchell thought ‘it didn’t seem sensible’. Both should have known better. Britten viewed his peerage in the same spirit as he regarded all the other honours which had come his way, as a mark of esteem not for him but for music. Also, he joked, given the trouble he now had writing, it took much less effort for him to sign letters with the single word ‘Britten’ than with his full name.
Although during 1976 he undertook two arranging tasks (a new set of eight folk songs for Pears and Ellis, and a version of his Dowland-based Lachrymae for viola and string orchestra), wrote a little cello piece as the theme for a multi-composer set of variations to mark Paul Sacher’s seventieth birthday and began a long-contemplated setting of Edith Sitwell’s Praise We Great Men, Britten was to finish only one more work: the Welcome Ode, Op. 95, to mark the Queen’s visit to Suffolk during her Silver Jubilee year. After the festival, in an attempt to escape from what was already becoming an oppressively hot summer, he and Pears, accompanied by Rita Thomson, flew to Bergen in Norway, where they stayed at the Solstrand Fjord Hotel and Britten worked on the piece; he completed the composition sketch in August, soon after his return to Aldeburgh, and asked Colin Matthews to orchestrate it. The Welcome Ode, for children’s chorus and orchestra, sets three celebratory texts – ‘Summer Pastimes’ by Thomas Dekker and John Ford, ‘The Fairies’ Roundel’, published anonymously in 1600, and Henry Fielding’s ‘Ode to the New Year’ – and it would indeed be performed, by the Suffolk Schools’ Choir and Orchestra conducted by Keith Shaw, at the Corn Exchange, Ipswich, in the presence of the Queen, on 11 July 1977. That the work bearing Britten’s final opus number should have been for children, for Suffolk and for the Queen seems absolutely fitting.
‘I don’t need to fight any more,’ Britten told Pears; he might almost have added, ‘As it is, plenty.’ There was champagne for the guests at his sixty-third birthday on 22 November, but he was too ill to drink it. Old friends trooped upstairs to his bedroom, one by one, to say – without saying – goodbye. Britten had once told Imogen Holst of his ‘very strong feeling that people died at the right moment, and that the greatness of a person included the time when he was born and the time he endured’.42 Now, when he asked Rita Thomson if he were dying, she replied: ‘Well, you are very, very ill, love.’43 Pears, who had continued throughout the autumn with his professional schedule, to the bafflement of those who failed to understand that it was the only way he could hope to stay sane, eventually cut short a Canadian tour in mid-November and returned to The Red House. The Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich came to talk, read prayers for the dying and administer Holy Communion (which Britten, according to Pears, accepted mainly to make the bishop happy). On Friday 3 December, after eating a light supper, Britten fell peacefully asleep; but later that night, Susie Walton – who was sharing nursing duties with Rita Thomson – noticed that his breathing had deteriorated. Pears, when summoned, told Rita: ‘I’ll stay with him, you go and sleep.’44 At 4.15 on the morning of Saturday, 4 December 1976, Benjamin Britten died peacefully in his partner’s arms.
4
I remember that Saturday morning with unusual clarity. I was a young writer and teacher, living in a small town on the Hertfordshire–Bedfordshire border. I’d decided to drive into Bedford to do the weekend shopping and thought I might treat myself to a new LP while I was there. What I wanted was the recent recording, by Anthony Rooley and the Consort of Musicke, of John Dowland’s Lachrimae (1604): there was a basic classical department upstairs in the little HMV shop which ought to have had it. However, as I wrote in my journal for 4 December 1976:
It wasn’t there, but in order to discover this I had to leaf through the section called ‘Composers A–E’, since Dowland isn’t popular enough to earn a section of his own. I did come across several records of Britten, including the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings which I’ve been meaning to buy; I hesitated, but decided to pursue the Dowland, without success. Returning home, I heard of Britten’s death on the lunchtime news, and one of my reactions was an odd sense of failure – that I hadn’t got the record before I’d heard of his death, that I’d never heard him at Aldeburgh after all, that I was too late.
I felt I knew Britten … Partly it’s the absolute certainty that I could listen to and be enriched by any of Britten’s work – even the enormous amount I don’t know. I have confidence in it in that very rare way …
That last feeling – and I’d have said the same about Auden – was, I suspect, quite commonly shared. For Britten was one of the few exceptional creative artists whose greatness I thought I could take on trust: if I sometimes failed to appreciate it, that was almost certainly because I wasn’t listening properly. His death, like Auden’s, seemed to shake the cultural foundations in a way that possibly doesn’t happen any more. Incidentally, that juxtaposition with Dowland was just a marvellous coincidence: I hadn’t yet discovered Britten’s Lachrymae.
Britten’s death led the BBC news bulletins that day. The following morning, it made the Sunday papers’ front pages. The Queen sent a personal message of condolence to Peter Pears. On the day of the funeral, Tuesday 7 December, the cortège looped around Aldeburgh to travel back along the entire length of the High Street, where the shops were closed and the festival flag flew at half mast. It was at once the town’s gesture of respect for Britten and an acknowledgement of his own respect for the town: a burial in Westminster Abbey had been proposed, but he hadn’t wanted that. His grave in the annexe of the parish churchyard at Aldeburgh was lined with reeds from the marshes at Snape by Bob and Doris Ling, the caretakers at the Maltings; inside the church, the Festival Singers performed his early Hymn to the Virgin and the congregation sang the hymns from Saint Nicolas. ‘Ben will like the sound of the trumpets, though he will find it difficult to believe they are sounding for him,’45 said the Right Reverend Dr Leslie Brown, Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, at the end of his address. Among the mourners were Britten’s three siblings (Barbara, Robert and Beth), Pears, Rita Thomson, Rostropovich and Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine. In due course, Pears would be buried beside Britten and Imogen Holst nearby: even in death, the guiding creative spirits of the Aldeburgh Festival wouldn’t forsake the place.
Of Britten’s three enduring legacies, the first and the finest is, rather obviously, his music. Perhaps because he had suffered from the whims of fashion during his lifetime, his posthumous reputation was to enjoy a long period of steady consolidation. ‘Everything about Britten’s style – his deliberate parochialism, his tonal orientation, his preference for classical forms – went against the grain of the postwar era,’ writes Alex Ross.46 Britten felt this unfashionability most acutely during the 1960s: his music seemed both conservative when compared with that of younger composers and hopelessly staid in a world which had begun to take pop music seriously. Yet, at the same time, part of the musical audience never quite lost its bemused sense that he was ‘modern’ and ‘difficult’, a delusion which persisted long after his death. I remember following a pair of elderly concert-goers out of the Maltings one evening in the early 1990s: on the stairs, one turned to the other and glumly remarked, ‘I don’t know quite what to make of Britten’s so-called Cello Symphony,’ exactly as if they had just been listening to a controversial piece receiving its first performance. But what looks like a pincer movement of disapproval – or, as Thersites has it, ‘Fools on both sides’ – may actually have worked in Britten’s favour: it prevented him from being pigeonholed, thus ensuring that those
who sought to denigrate his achievement would do so from laughably contradictory positions.
While his status as a great composer is now largely undisputed, there remains a good deal of lively (and healthy) debate about where that greatness is most to be found. Although the widely held notion that he was mainly an opera composer is one which he himself challenged, the central importance of the operas is undeniable. But which of the operas? John Bridcut has recently argued that The Turn of the Screw ‘is one of the wonders of twentieth-century opera, with a strong claim to be Britten’s greatest’.47 For me, the supreme achievement lies in the group I’ve already defined as his sea trilogy: Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice. Choosing between them is impossible and, happily, unnecessary. While writing this book I tended to value most the one I was thinking about at the time: at this moment (partly, no doubt, because it comes last) I can readily agree with Ian Bostridge in regarding Death in Venice as ‘perhaps his greatest opera’.48 And mentioning Bostridge hints at a vital element in our continuously evolving perception of Britten’s work: the way in which a succession of younger British tenors – among them Bostridge, Mark Padmore, James Gilchrist, Nicky Spence and Allan Clayton – have steadily liberated both the operas and the song cycles from the ghostly presence of Peter Pears. This isn’t for a moment to denigrate Pears: it is simply to say that, during his lifetime, it was almost impossible for another tenor to sing Britten without sounding different and somehow wrong; whereas, after Pears’s death, it was at last time for the works themselves to grow up and leave home. Nowhere is this more evident than with Death in Venice, which couldn’t avoid being burdened by the particular circumstances of its composition and early performances and which has correspondingly benefited from the different dynamics of recent productions: for example, the DVD filmed at Teatro La Fenice in 2008 – with Aschenbach a quite spruce middle-aged intellectual and a tall, dark Tadzio – completely banishes any lurking paedophile overtones. So the operas, like the plays of Shakespeare, now make their own way in a world where they will be endlessly reinvented, with inspiring and occasionally infuriating consequences.
The song cycles, too, have been refreshed by new interpreters. When the 2009 Aldeburgh Festival included a series of concerts in which young singers, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau, performed virtually all Britten’s songs for voice and piano, it felt like a deliberate gesture of handing on. Of those cycles, Winter Words remains for me the greatest: Britten, as we have seen, engaged with Hardy’s poems at a deeper level than with anything else he set. The three major song cycles with orchestra – Les Illuminations, Serenade, Nocturne – are different again; here, despite the noble efforts of Bostridge and others, we must continue to give thanks for an invention Britten didn’t always love, the gramophone, and particularly for Decca’s loyal support of the composer and his work. To be able to hear, now and always, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings performed by Peter Pears and Dennis Brain, for example, is a privilege of a kind undreamed of by earlier composers and their audiences. The monumental recording of the War Requiem with the three soloists for whom it was written, a feat unmanaged by the first performance in Coventry, is a simply astonishing historical document of the mid-twentieth century. The disc of Noye’s Fludde, made in the parish church at Orford, provides as great a lift to the spirit as any I know. And so on.
If we think of Britten as primarily a composer for voices or for the voice, we should remember that his career effectively began with two startling short works for orchestra: the mysteriously discarded Double Concerto and the Sinfonietta. Then there are the concertos for piano and for violin, the Sinfonia da Requiem and the amazing Cello Symphony, while many listeners are belatedly coming to admire The Prince of the Pagodas. For generations of children, musical education has begun with The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: mine certainly did, in the shape of the Malcolm Sargent recording on 12″ Columbia 78s, and I have them still. Away from the orchestra, Britten wrote three suites for cello and three of the century’s finest string quartets, the last and most remarkable of them during his final illness. For reasons possibly connected with a day in December 1976, I’ve a special affection for the Nocturnal after John Dowland and for Lachrymae, especially in the late version for viola and string orchestra.
Just as everyone seems to have personal favourites among Britten’s work, so most of us must own up to blind spots and regrets. My own major blind spot – as the attentive reader will already have gathered – concerns the three church parables: this is partly because, through no fault of their own, they bump into other prejudices of mine, and I may get over it. I’m also not easily persuaded by twentieth-century choral music in general: again, mea culpa. As for regrets, I mean those useless wishes for a composer to have written more of this or that. In Britten’s case, the lack of solo piano music – and his professed dislike of an instrument he played so marvellously – remains slightly baffling; and one can’t help feeling wistful about the comparatively small tally of full-length orchestral works, for no one has ever deployed instrumental colour with greater imagination or subtlety. In this, one of his few contemporary rivals was Duke Ellington, whom he might have heard in the 1930s in London, or thirty years later, when they both appeared at the Leeds Festival; yet, while Britten gratefully embraced the musical colours of the gamelan, he had a kind of shyness about learning from jazz. That, too, may be a matter for regret, as well as providing an answer to Mervyn Horder’s ‘salient question why Britten couldn’t write, or at least never wrote, a swinging tune’.49 But enough of regrets.
Britten’s second enduring legacy is the organisation now known as Aldeburgh Music, together with the Britten–Pears Foundation and the Britten–Pears School of Advanced Musical Studies. By some sort of miracle, although not without some inescapable rows and ructions, Snape Maltings has grown into a cultural campus of performing and rehearsing spaces which surpasses Britten’s most ambitious dreams. At the same time, The Red House has become an archive and exhibition centre, undergoing major extension and refurbishment for Britten’s centenary year. Although there are now year-round events at the Maltings, the Aldeburgh Festival in June remains the heart of the matter: it seems entirely proper that, unlike Bayreuth or Salzburg, this hasn’t become an occasion designed to honour a single composer, although the appointment of Pierre-Laurent Aimard as artistic director in 2009 raised some eyebrows when he was described in the press as ‘not an unequivocal admirer of Aldeburgh’s founder’.50 The subsequent appearance of Pierre Boulez at the 2010 festival, not to mention some of Aldeburgh’s electronic and multi-media adventures, would surely have had the same effect on Britten’s and Pears’s ghosts as the first performance of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy. Yet to say that is to acknowledge that any lively arts organisation will at times provoke (as Aldeburgh has always done) anger and dissent. And to lament that the festival has become tainted by modishness on the one hand and by commercial sponsorship on the other is simply to make a more general observation about the state of the arts in our time.
The last of Britten’s three enduring legacies is his non-musical one. He and Pears taught gay men of my generation the astonishing lesson that it was possible for a homosexual couple to live decently and unapologetically in provincial England. As Bernard Levin put it five years after Britten’s death, in his movingly eloquent portrait of the Aldeburgh Festival: ‘his private life was a model of devotion and integrity – it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the example set by Britten and Pears went far to instil throughout this country a sympathetic understanding, so long and so brutally denied, of homosexual love’.51 The fallings-out with some former friends and colleagues, which have been accorded almost delirious over-attention by some writers on Britten, are on any scale of natural justice colossally outweighed by his generosity to other friends and colleagues, to young protégés and fellow musicians and, not least, to the countless ordinary people whose musical lives he transformed, from wartime CEMA concerts to the enduring loc
al magic of his Aldeburgh Festival. Basil Coleman said of Britten and Pears: ‘I would be half the person I am if I hadn’t known them; it was a privilege to be with them. They had extraordinary generosity and capacity for kindness, understanding and caring.’52 Pears’s view of Britten was even simpler: ‘He was a good man. How could he not be having written all that beautiful music?’53 As it is, plenty.
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
1 Britten Minor
1. William White, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Suffolk, p. 497 • 2. Britten on Music, p. 145 • 3. Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography, p. 11 • 4. Letters from a Life, 1, p. 210 • 5. BB to Ethel Astle, 30 September 1937, LL1, p. 83 • 6. Ibid., LL1, p. 82 • 7. Basil Reeve, LL1, p. 14 • 8. BOM, p. 311 • 9. David Matthews, Britten, p. 1 • 10. BOM, p. 177 • 11. Beth Britten, My Brother Benjamin, p. 32 • 12. MBB, p. 30 • 13. MBB, p. 27 • 14. MBB, p. 39 • 15. MBB, p. 41 • 16. MBB, p. 51 • 17. Decca LW 5163, sleevenote • 18. Benjamin Britten: Pictures from a Life, plate 36 • 19. BOM, p. 178 • 20. HCBB, p. 9 • 21. BOM, p. 179 • 22. As Oscar Wilde might have observed, to lose one school may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness (or perhaps arson). • 23. LL1, p. 84 • 24. EMI 5 56534 2, booklet note • 25. BOM, p. 311 • 26. LL3, pp. 48–9 • 27. LL1, p. 84 • 28. HCBB, p. 10 • 29. HCBB, p. 21 • 30. Guardian, 7 June 1971 • 31. HCBB, p. 21 • 32. Diary, 17 June 1928, LL1, pp. 91–2 • 33. The phrase is Graham Greene’s, from The Power and the Glory. • 34. Available at www.brittenpears.org • 35. BOM, pp. 61–2 • 36. R. V. Britten to the British Broadcasting Company Ltd,? July 1926, LL1, p. 86 • 37. BB to Mrs Britten, 28 August 1926, LL1, p. 88 • 38. BOM, p. 62 • 39. BOM, p. 250 • 40. MBB, p. 54 • 41. A. L. Bacharach (ed.), British Music in Our Time, p. 75 • 42. Nevertheless, The Record Guide of 1955 lists as still available an ‘antique’ recording of Bridge’s Suite for Strings (1910) which pre-dates Bacharach’s book • 43. Argo ZK 40, sleevenote • 44. BOM, p. 77 • 45. BOM, p. 250 • 46. BOM, p. 62 • 47. BOM, pp. 250–1 • 48. PFL, plate 46 • 49. BOM, p. 251 • 50. BB to Mr and Mrs Britten, 21 September 1928, LL1, p. 93 • 51. BB to Mrs Britten, 23 September 1928, LL1, p. 96 • 52. Michael Davidson, The World, the Flesh and Myself, p. 126 • 53. W. H. Auden, Prose 1926–1938, p. 57 • 54. Stephen Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden: A Tribute, p. 38 • 55. Grasshopper (Gresham’s School, 1950), LL1, p. 223 • 56. BOM, p. 147 • 57. HCBB, p. 29 • 58. Journeying Boy, p. 27 • 59. Diary, 10 November 1928, LL1, p. 95 • 60. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, p. 514 • 61. LL1, p. 10 • 62. LL1, p. 11 • 63. Diary, 13 November 1928, JB, p. 14 • 64. Diary, 31 July 1928, LL1, p. 104 • 65. HCBB, p. 28 • 66. Diary, 24 May 1936, LL1, p. 104 • 67. Diary, 8 January 1937, JB, p. 400 • 68. HCBB, p. 29 • 69. Oliver C. Berthoud to BB, 16 March 1971, LL1, p. 115 • 70. BB to Mr and Mrs Britten, 19 January 1930, LL1, p. 119 • 71. Diary, 1 March 1930, JB, p. 35 • 72. Diary, 22 May 1930, LL1, p. 97 • 73. BB to Mrs Britten, 18 March 1929, LL1, p. 109 • 74. LL1, p. 104 • 75. Diary, 16 January 1930, JB, p. 29 • 76. BB to Mr and Mrs Britten, 19 January 1930, LL1, p. 119 • 77. Diary, 5 September 1930, LL1, p. 136 • 78. J. R. Eccles to Mrs Britten, 21 June 1930, LL1, p. 131 • 79. Nick Clark, Kevin Gosling and Lucy Walker, Young Britten: Schoolboy, Composer, p. 9