by Neil Powell
It makes even less sense than usual to speak, in Britten’s case, of his being young or old ‘for his age’. He acquired ‘from the very first day I was in a school’ – and by this he obviously means South Lodge rather than the tiny and innocent Southolme – an awareness of the power and excitement of violence, but that doesn’t imply that he could yet connect it with anything sexual. He was out of phase with himself: in some respects, precociously well informed; in others, startlingly innocent. And this was partly a consequence of the confined geographical orbit in which he lived: many boys, at nine or ten years old, do some significant growing up while talking dirty in a gaggle on the bus or train home from school, but Britten’s home was just along the road; even the traditional rituals of cigarettes, obscenities and sexual exploration ‘behind the bike sheds’ would have been denied to a serious boy who didn’t need a bike to get there and who, when the long school day was over, mainly wanted to go home and compose. Moreover, he remained in this highly protective environment for an unusually long time, not going on to board at Gresham’s School, Holt, until he was nearly fifteen.
Nevertheless, some transforming experience seems to have occurred towards the end of his final year at South Lodge, 1927–8. It was, in any case, a momentous time for him, the year in which he achieved all those unrepeatable schoolboy honours as well as the year in which he met the composer Frank Bridge: he possessed the outward confidence of a talented boy who knew exactly where he wanted his talent to take him. There could hardly have been a more auspicious moment for some sort of sexual awakening to take place. Much later he told the director and librettist Eric Crozier that he had been ‘raped by a master at his school’: he didn’t say which school, and the absence of a qualifying adjective such as ‘prep’ or ‘private’ suggests that he was referring to his public school, Gresham’s, rather than South Lodge. But assuming (for the time being) that he was talking about South Lodge, he didn’t say ‘headmaster’: so he would have meant not Sewell but one of the assistant masters, who in prep schools were often young men filling in a year before or after university. It may well have been a provocative remark designed to disconcert a professional colleague with whom he had a fairly edgy relationship, although the biographer Humphrey Carpenter pointed his suspicious finger at an ‘opportunity’ suggested by Britten’s diary entry for 13 June 1928: ‘Set off to play Match against Taverham, but I only get 1/2 way and I go back to School in Capt. Sewell’s car as I am not well. Lie down at school and come home after and go to bed.’31 But after three days’ illness, he returned to his diary – and to an entry unmentioned by Carpenter – on 17 June: ‘Am much better, go to the Colemans’ to tea, I got up at 12 o’clock … Rewrite some songs, written on Friday and Saturday namely Dans les bois, and begin to rewrite Nuits de Juin.’32 Was this, for young Benjamin Britten, the moment in childhood when a door opens and lets the future in?33
Probably it was. But I suspect that the way in which the door opened for him was far less sensational, though no less profound, than Carpenter suggested. For this was the year in which his friendships with two of his South Lodge contemporaries – John Pounder and, especially, Francis Barton – became intensified by the emotional force of adolescence and further sharpened by the sense that, with his imminent departure from the school, they might be about to end (although, as we shall see, they both continued well into adulthood). Francis, the son of a Sussex clergyman, was a lively, bright boy who looked and was, but didn’t act, two years younger than Ben. There’s a charming photograph, taken that summer term, of the pair smiling from an open railway-carriage window at Lowestoft station: perhaps they’re setting off for one of those away cricket fixtures, wearing their badged South Lodge caps, Ben in a smart jacket and prefectorial tie, Francis in his striped blazer. Francis, leaning over Ben’s outstretched arm, grins with impish dimpled pleasure; yet Ben’s smile has something more subtle and complex, even proprietorial, about it. Surely, he was in love: though this wasn’t a word he could have used to Francis, in the privacy of his dreams or his creative consciousness he can’t have had much doubt about it. Those three days of illness, so near the end of the summer term, may well have been the catalyst which transformed his emotional turmoil into astonishingly mature musical utterance: he began work on the Quatre Chansons Françaises, his first truly adult compositions. The future had definitely been let in.
3
Britten’s extravagant-looking claim, in his 1955 note, that by the time he was fourteen ‘all the opus numbers from 1 to 100 were filled (and catalogued)’ is actually a massive understatement. According to the definitive catalogue of his juvenilia prepared by the Britten–Pears Foundation in 2009,34 he had composed no fewer than 534 works by the end of 1927, which was shortly after his fourteenth birthday; the peak year was 1925 (128 works), closely followed by 1926 (108). Not all of these would have been granted the honour of an opus number, of course, but the sheer quantity of effort, energy and invention is staggering. The earliest surviving piece – a song entitled ‘Do you no my Daddy has gone to London today’ – dates from 1919, when Britten was five or six years old. The following year, he composed another song, ‘The rabbits stand around and hold the lights’, which clearly illustrates his fascination with the ‘dots and dashes’ and the musical sounds they might represent, although he had yet to grasp the exact connection between them: ‘I am afraid it was the pattern on the paper which I was interested in and when I asked my mother to play it, her look of horror upset me considerably.’35 The words don’t match the vocal line; the vocal line doesn’t match the accompaniment; neither key signature nor time signature relates to what follows, which is, as Mrs Britten discovered, unplayable. But what remains oddly impressive is the seven-year-old’s determination to put down on his own paper so much of what he has observed in other music; and there is something quite subtle about his dynamic markings, which take us from ff piano introduction through pp central passage (where, aptly, ‘Fairys are singing…’) to f conclusion. In that, coincidentally or not, there’s a hint of the life to come.
Those rabbits are from the years before he had begun his lessons with Ethel Astle; a piece such as the ‘Fantasie Improptu’ of 1922–3 belongs to a different world. The notation is clear, neat and playable: no doubt, this is the result not only of Ethel Astle’s tuition and the Seppings Music Method but of Uncle Willie’s birthday present, A Dictionary of Musical Terms. The opening bars are adapted from Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, of which a piano reduction was among Mrs Britten’s favourite pieces; that the young composer should therefore have used it in a work of his own for piano seems understandable enough. What is much more remarkable is his attempt, a few months later, to write for a range of instruments he had never heard, let alone spelt, in the ‘Walzt’, signed ‘E. B. Britten, Op. 3, No. 3’ and scored for ‘Solo Violin, Flauti, Hoboem, Clarinett in C, Fagotti, 2 Trombe in C, 2 Corni in C, Timpani, Violon, Viola, Celli, Kontra-Bassi’; the solo violin line was one he would recycle, most notably in the ‘Sentimental Saraband’ from the Simple Symphony. In the summer of 1924, he completed a volume of 12 Songs for Mezzo-Soprano to be performed by his mother, presumably with himself as the accompanist, two of which – ‘Beware!’ and ‘O that I’d ne’re been married’ – he was to revise for publication in the late 1960s: as with the Simple Symphony, one notices both his judiciousness in the retrieval of juvenilia and his baroque spirit of creative thrift. He wrote reams of piano music during 1925–6, much of it grouped into series, of which the most ambitious was Twenty-Four Themes: a waltz for every major and minor key, combining the example of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues and the influence of Chopin’s 24 Etudes. In June 1926 he composed and scored an ‘Ouverture’ which his proud father submitted as an entry for the BBC’s Autumnal Musical Festival Prize Competition: it was, explained Mr Britten in his covering letter, ‘written by a lad of 12 years, in nine days: written in his very few spare moments snatched from the hourly routine of his “Prep” school (in the very early mornings, f
or instance)’.36 Perhaps he was overdoing it a bit, as he was when he claimed that his son had ‘only an elementary knowledge of harmony’ and ‘no instruction of any kind in orchestration or counterpoint’.
Two months later, while staying miserably with a family friend in Kent (he had suffered from ‘bad diherea’, his room was ‘pested with wapses’ and he wanted ‘Daddy to come soon’), Benjamin wrote home to describe the Queen’s Hall concert he had attended with his sister Barbara and her friend Helen Hurst: ‘It was all modern music, and I have taken a great like to modern Orchestral music.’ There was Schelling’s now forgotten ‘Suite Fantastique for piano and orchestra’, which was ‘only a show of technique(?)’, ‘a Delius piece called “Life’s Dance”, this was lovely; and Holsts planets which were lovely’;37 he went on to transcribe correctly the ‘gorgeous’ 5/4 rhythm of ‘Mars’. Britten’s own ‘Suite Fantastique for large orchestra and pianoforte obbligato’ dates from the same year and was written for his parents’ silver wedding anniversary, although quite what they were intended to do with it is unclear. Soon after this, Benjamin embarked on the tone poem Chaos and Cosmos, ‘although I fear I was not sure what the words really meant’.38 But 1927 was principally the year of the string quartet, of which he composed twenty-nine. The ‘Quartette in G’, begun in the spring for Audrey Alston and the Norwich String Quartet, was extensively drafted and redrafted – there are over thirty manuscript sources in the BPF archive – and he further revised it at the beginning of 1928, so that he could take it to his first lesson with Frank Bridge on 12 January.
Bridge and Britten had first met, introduced by Audrey Alston, at the Norwich Festival premiere of Bridge’s Enter Spring in October 1927. ‘We got on splendidly,’ Britten recalled, ‘and I spent the next morning with him going over some of my music.’39 Bridge was so impressed that he made a radical suggestion: Benjamin should move to London and lodge with his friend Harold Samuel, from whom he would receive daily piano lessons, while Bridge would teach him composition. This was all too much for his conservative father – who was uneasy about Bridge, according to Beth Britten, because ‘He had long hair, was very excitable and talked a lot’40 – and his possessive mother. In fact, both parents quite sensibly recognised the outside chance that their son’s musical talent might even now dry up: he still needed to continue with his ordinary education, just in case. They decided that he should remain at home until the following summer and then go on to public school as planned; nevertheless, he would make regular trips to London for lessons with Samuel and Bridge. It sounds a messy sort of compromise, but – since it involved considerable expense, inconvenience and negotiation with schools for days off during term time – it was actually a huge gesture of confidence.
Bridge, born in 1879 and thus of Britten’s parents’ generation, was to become the musical father young Benjamin had hitherto lacked. His reputation, which now at last seems secure, was in the 1920s somewhat precarious: the shock of the First World War and its associated upheavals in European culture had transformed an extremely competent, well-mannered Edwardian composer into a challenging modernist. It was as if, for a reader of poetry, Henry Newbolt had suddenly turned into T. S. Eliot, and much of Bridge’s previous audience were alienated by the change. Writing only a few years after the composer’s death in 1941, the musicologist Jack Westrup would say that Bridge was by then primarily known to amateur singers ‘as the composer of one or two effective songs’;41 and the discography in the same volume suggests that, although by 1946 some dozen of his most celebrated pupil’s works had been recorded, there was not a single gramophone record available of music by Frank Bridge.42 His reputation was further muddied by the tendency of listeners to search in his orchestral masterpiece The Sea (1910) at first for the scene-painting of Debussy’s La Mer (1904) and later for premonitions of the interludes in Peter Grimes (1945), while many mid-twentieth-century music lovers must have first encountered his name (perhaps asking themselves ‘Who?’) in the title of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937).
But Bridge’s strength was as a composer of chamber music and, had he remained true to the spirit of such relatively unchallenging earlier works as the Phantasy Piano Quartet of 1910, not only his musical career but Britten’s might have taken a very different course. Instead, by the time Britten began studying with him, he had already published his Third String Quartet (1926) which, in the words of the composer Anthony Payne, ‘proclaimed that an English composer could achieve a rapprochement with Berg and Bartók without surrendering his independence of vision’.43 It was followed in 1929 by the marvellous Second Piano Trio: this, says Payne, ‘inhabits an unprecedented world, one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century English, indeed European chamber music’. Britten himself described it as ‘one of the finest pieces of extended musical thinking of our time’.44 Although it was ‘unprecedented’ in English (if not in European) music, the language of the piece is unthreateningly bitonal rather than atonal, its character often beguilingly melodic. In the first movement, the forward lyrical momentum is checked by the piano’s clusters of open fifths; then, after a searching central section and a tense allegro passage, the movement resolves into fragile tranquillity. Next comes a busy scherzo with a neurotic pizzicato motif, spreading out into a central melodic idea which has moments of zany, almost folksy charm. In the slow third movement, a memorably haunting melody is offset by another repetitive motif, ticking away like a clock or a time bomb; while the final hurtling allegro leads to a restatement of the first movement’s second theme and, eventually, to a sort of provisional calm. These were among the components of the creative sound-world inside Bridge’s head when he began teaching Benjamin Britten, and it would show.
It’s probably fair to say that Bridge wasn’t a natural teacher. He made no concessions to his young pupil’s age or stamina, subjecting him to ‘mammoth’ lessons of ‘immensely serious and professional study’: ‘I remember one that started at half past ten, and at tea-time Mrs Bridge came in and said, “Really, you must give the boy a break.” Often I used to end these marathons in tears; not that he was beastly to me, but the concentrated strain was too much for me.’45 It wasn’t just the epic duration of these lessons that wore Britten out: ‘Not only did he keep my nose to the grindstone, but he criticised my work relentlessly.’46 ‘I used to get sent to the other side of the room; Bridge would play what I’d written and demand if it was what I’d really meant.’ For this, the pupil remained permanently grateful:
I badly needed his kind of strictness; it was just the right treatment for me. His loathing of all sloppiness and amateurishness set me standards that I’ve never forgotten. He taught me to think and feel through the instruments I was writing for: he was most naturally an instrumental composer, and as a superb viola player he taught me instrumentally.47
That is the sort of thing an adult might retrospectively say to justify a worthwhile experience he didn’t much enjoy at that time, but Britten’s diaries tell a different story. ‘Had an absolutely wonderful lesson,’ he wrote after his first one, on 12 January 1928, setting the tone for future entries on the same subject. (That evening, though, Peter Pan was also ‘wonderful’, a word he tended to overuse.) On 26–28 April he was in London for three successive days and three lessons with Bridge, which he recorded in his diary: ‘26 Thursday: Lesson from Mr Bridge 11.0–12.45. Very nice and helpful … 27 Friday: Lesson from 9.45–12.0. Mr Bridge gives me score of his “An Irish Melody” … 28 Saturday: Lesson from 9.45–12.15.’48 He said nothing else about the Saturday lesson, hastening on to the ‘wonderful’ Beethoven concert at the Albert Hall that afternoon. He copied out the main details from the programme and pasted this into the diary: the Egmont overture, the second piano concerto and the Choral Fantasia; the soloists were duly noted and the New Symphony Orchestra was conducted by ‘DR. MALCOLM SARGENT’, to whom he would seldom sound quite so respectful. The previous afternoon, following a Prufrockian ‘Dinner at Ruths … gramophone after, and i
ces’, he had gone off to ‘Buy Ravel’s “Introduction & Allegro” for Harp etc. at Augeners’.
‘I was beginning to get more adventurous,’ he later recalled. ‘Before then, what I’d been writing had been sort of early 19th century in style; and then I heard Holst’s “Planets” and Ravel’s string quartet and was excited by them.’49 Ravel’s String Quartet in F major dates from 1903; the Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet, composed three years later, may have made an even deeper impression on the young composer, for whom the exploration of just such restricted yet colourful instrumental groupings would develop into a lifelong preoccupation. At this crucial point, in the last few months of his long years at South Lodge, he was already assimilating an eclectic range of musical influences: the standard repertoire favoured by his mother, typified by that Beethoven concert; the teaching of Bridge, English-rooted but excitedly informed by composers of the Second Viennese School; and his own largely independent discovery of modern French music, such as that of Debussy and Ravel. The logical compositional outcome might lie somewhere between the ‘early 19th century’ style which had previously dominated his work and the modernist bitonality of Bridge, a late romanticism with chromatic tinges; and that is indeed the musical language of his Quatre Chansons Françaises.
