Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  Britten began work on these songs some six weeks after those three eventful London days in April, during those mysterious other three days in June when he was visited in rapid succession by illness and inspiration. Everything about the Quatre Chansons Françaises is extraordinary, starting with the fact that a prep-school boy could so confidently embark on setting such intense French texts as two poems apiece by Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine; he jettisoned his setting of a fifth poem, ‘Dans les bois’ by Gérard de Nerval. He found the poems in The Oxford Book of French Verse, so he may not have known anything yet about symbolisme in general and the Verlaine–Rimbaud milieu in particular: he would come, fully informed, to Rimbaud when setting his prose poems in Les Illuminations (1939), yet even here there’s a sense of the fourteen-year-old Britten using French as a means of distancing and encoding, to provide seriousness and obliqueness. It was, after all, still the language conventionally spoken in front of servants, so that they wouldn’t understand. In opening with a deliriously evocative setting of Hugo’s ‘Nuits de juin’, he aptly registers the time of year and his own feverish state and perhaps also intends an allusion to Berlioz and his Les Nuits d’été. Then comes Verlaine’s ‘Sagesse’, with its plaintive oboe-led underlining of the conclusion, ‘Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà / De ta jeunesse?’ The third song is by common consent the most remarkable. The poem, Hugo’s ‘L’Enfance’, is about a five-year-old child who continues to sing and play while his mother is dying, and dies, of consumption: the flute’s instantly memorable nursery-rhyme motif becomes compromised and melancholic as the song proceeds, and the juxtapositions of lightness and darkness have an almost cinematic vividness, prefiguring Britten’s film scores of the 1930s. At about this time, and certainly after he went away to school in the autumn, he began to experience terrifying nightmares, which must have been connected with the Hugo poem, about his own mother’s death. The final ‘Chanson d’automne’, like the other Verlaine poem, is treated by Britten emphatically as a farewell to innocence: ‘Je me souviens / Des jours anciens / Et je pleure…’ The orchestral writing throughout Quatre Chansons Françaises is astonishing for a boy who had yet to study orchestration and had very seldom had the opportunity to hear an orchestra: he seems, with Bridge’s encouragement, to have absorbed elements of Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel, Wagner and Berg. By the time he completed the work, in August 1928, his prep-school days were over.

  4

  ‘I like this place quite, but I feel horribly strange and small,’ wrote Britten to his ‘darling Mummy and Pop’ on 21 September 1928, after spending his first night in Farfield, his boarding house at Gresham’s School, Holt. He was sharing a study with three other boys who were ‘quite nice’, although Marshall, who was captain of the study, had ‘a rotten old gramophone, on which he plays miserable jazz all the time!’50 That note – a bit prissy and joyless for a boy two months short of his fifteenth birthday – is one we shall hear again: it would both restrict his range of pleasures and concentrate his talent, a quid pro quo of which he gradually became helplessly aware. He had met some of the staff, including ‘a funny little chaplain’, and he was eager to report, with the pride befitting a former head prefect and victor ludorum, that he was in 3b, ‘not at all a bad form … above Purdy [from South Lodge] … and Dashwood from Aldeburgh’. He had not yet met the Director of Music, Walter Greatorex.

  Two days later, he had. Greatorex famously greeted him with the words, ‘So you are the little boy who likes Stravinsky.’ When Britten had finished playing some late Beethoven, he asked, ‘And who taught you that?’ before going on to tell him that he had ‘a very flimsy technick (?) … that it was hopeless for a boy of my age to play late Beethoven and that my love of Beethoven will soon die’. When they came to the Chopin Polonaise in C sharp minor, Greatorex first disputed Britten’s dynamic interpretation of bars 5–8 – ‘I played them f, he said they ought to be pp practically’ – and then, which was worse, showed how he thought it should be done, ‘playing with no two notes together, and a gripping touch, and terrible tone. I don’t think much of his technick (oh I don’t know) technich (?)!’ Greatorex ‘as good as said it would be no good whatsoever for me to go into the musical profession’ – although ‘as good as said’ may mean he said something rather more equivocal – after which Britten dramatically concluded: ‘Music in this school is now finished for me!’ But that didn’t prevent him from admitting, a few lines on in the same letter, that ‘This school is not half as bad as I expected’, nor from saying how much he had enjoyed the previous evening’s choir practice (‘great fun, I sing alto you know’) and that day’s ‘very nice service in the Chapel’. This service, with its plainsong and unfamiliar hymns, was different from the resolutely ‘low’, evangelical style to which he was accustomed, and it was somewhat spoilt by the inevitable organist: ‘Mr Greatorex, who played the organ, does not play well.’51

  Poor Walter Greatorex: almost everyone sides with the bumptious new boy against him. Yet a pampered and sheltered fourteen-year-old – homesick, ‘longing for November’, a small fish in a big pond for the first time in his life – is not necessarily a reliable witness. He chose to take Greatorex’s remark about Stravinsky, whose work he had in fact not yet come across, as a sarcastic slight; whereas a more mature boy, or one accustomed to the quizzical ways of public-school masters, might have detected a note of wry admiration or even camaraderie. For his part, Greatorex must have felt that it would do no harm to take this precocious young pupil of Frank Bridge down a peg or two, and he wasn’t entirely wrong: after all, the main purpose of Britten being at Gresham’s was for him to acquire some general education and School Certificate passes, just in case his musical ambitions came to nothing. Greatorex would have been well aware that an overconfident prodigy would be just as likely to disrupt the school’s musical life as to enhance it; he may also have recognised that a somewhat humbled Britten would stand a better chance of fitting in socially. It was by no means the first time that he had encountered creative genius among his pupils. The writer Michael Davidson, whose brother-in-law Christopher Southward taught the violin in Greatorex’s department, remembered him saying: ‘There’s a boy you’d like to meet – writes very good verse I think. His name’s Auden.’52 Davidson was then a 26-year-old journalist in Norwich, the poet W. H. Auden a sixteen-year-old pupil at Gresham’s. There followed, wrote Davidson, ‘a poetical relationship which for two years or so absorbed me’; so it was a bold and perceptive introduction, whether or not Greatorex knew or cared that both Auden and Davidson were, like him, homosexual. At that time Greatorex was ‘a principal worshipper’ at the Southwards’ home, The Beeches, which was something of a sanctuary for writers and musicians. He was clearly no philistine; equally clearly, his conservative musical instincts and his old-fashioned keyboard technique would have been intolerable to a forward-looking pupil of Bridge. Although Greatorex, born in 1877, was actually only two years older than Bridge, he seemed to belong to a different generation and a different musical world.

  Auden, who was at Gresham’s less than a decade earlier, had a very different estimate of Greatorex as man and musician. It was to him, Auden said, that he owed ‘my first friendship with a grown up person … he was what the ideal schoolmaster should be, ready to be a friend and not a beak, to give the adolescent all the comfort and stimulus of a personal relation, without at the same time making any demands for himself in return’.53 Musically, ‘he was in the first rank. I do not think it was partiality that made me feel, later when I heard Schweitzer play Bach, that he played no better.’ Robert Medley, another member of the 1930s Auden circle who was at Gresham’s during the early 1920s, wrote that he and his contemporaries ‘never penetrated the mystery of how it was that Greatorex, whom we regarded as one of the great musicians in the land, came to be stranded in Holt’.54 Stephen Spender, also at Gresham’s, remembered the boys debating whether he was ‘the eighth or the ninth greatest musician in England’.55 In their day, Greatorex was known as
‘The Ox’, in Britten’s as ‘Gog’, which suggests that his impressive figure with its domed head and stern late-Beethovenian scowl had solidified into something still more imposingly mythological.

  Gresham’s had been chosen by the Brittens because the school ‘didn’t actively hate music, as so many other public schools did’;56 it offered music scholarships, was within a reasonable distance of home and had a reputation of being generally fairly civilised. Although an old foundation, dating from 1555, it had only recently attained public school status and it prided itself on having broken with a number of nineteenth-century traditions. Most boys slept in individual cubicles rather than dormitories; they were not compelled to join the cadet force, though if they wouldn’t join they had to explain why not; and they had to subscribe to an ‘honour system’, which meant that they would report their own and others’ transgressions to their housemasters. Auden, while acknowledging the decency of the idea, said that it turned the school into a fascist state and made innocent boys neurotic (though elsewhere he would argue that childhood neurosis was a usefully creative thing). In a diary entry of 1929, Britten agreed: ‘I think the “Honour System” is a positive failure in Farfield … Atrocious bullying on all sides, vulgarity & swearing. It is no good trying the Honour System on boys who have no honour. Boys, small & rather weak are turned into sour & bitter boys, and ruined for life.’57 He may well have been right, although the note of primness is striking, especially in a private diary: he seems overanxious to insist, even to himself, that he is wholly unlike his boorish contemporaries, as if trying to fend off any suspicion that he might be less than impeccably virtuous. Britten thought he disliked Gresham’s, but what he actually disliked was being in close proximity to a large number of insensitive, uncreative people: he always would. When, for instance, he discovered that ‘If you are original, well you are considered a lunatic, & consequently become unpopular’,58 he was making a discovery which applied well beyond the confines of his or any other school. During his two years at Gresham’s, he was frequently ill, despite which – as his letters home show – his spirits usually seemed to rise in the peaceful isolation of the sickroom.

  The high point of Britten’s first term at Gresham’s was to be his escape from it, when in early November he travelled to London for lessons with Harold Samuel and Frank Bridge. His diary entries for 9 and 10 November record his ‘Wonderful Lesson’ with Samuel, the ‘absolutely wonderful’ concert at the Queen’s Hall that evening (the Hallé under Sir Hamilton Harty playing symphonies by Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms) and his ‘very nice’ lesson with Bridge the following morning. But they are interesting in another way too. The entry for 9 November opens: ‘Set off for London at 8.40 in morning by train, very slow. Mrs Fletcher takes me to Sheringham in car. Meet Mummy at Ipswich. Get to Liverp[ool] St[reet] at 1.20.’ And the entry for 10 November closes: ‘Barbara takes me to King’s Cross, Ruth takes Mummy to Liverp. St. I get to Holt feeling absolutely miserable, cold and hungry at 7.19.’59 He had spent well over eight hours of the two days on trains, a circumstance which would become familiar during the years he shuttled between Holt, Norwich, Lowestoft, London and the Bridges’ country home in Sussex, though his father would drive him to and from school in the family car which Britten grandiloquently renamed the ‘Rolls-Crossley’. What he observed or experienced in the long solitary segments of these train journeys is unrecorded, but they made a lasting impression on him. When, much later, he came to set eight poems by Hardy in Winter Words, perhaps the most deeply personal of all his song cycles, Britten chose not only ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’, which includes the boy with the violin (although in his own case it was a viola), but also ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, where the final stanza describes his young self’s predicament with quite astonishing accuracy:

  Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,

  Our rude realms far above,

  Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete

  This region of sin that you find you in,

  But are not of?60

  He would always feel warily ambivalent about the ‘region of sin’ which he was either ‘in’ but not ‘of’ or, just as uncomfortably, ‘of’ but not ‘in’.

  His other escape from Gresham’s was back into the world of his home and his prep school. Basil Reeve, a close friend and contemporary from Lowestoft and himself a gifted musician, remembered how completely Mrs Britten continued to dominate her younger son: even when Britten was in his mid-teens, ‘I could only see him with her permission.’61 The fact that the Reverend Cyril Reeve, Basil’s father, was vicar of St John’s, Mrs Britten’s preferred church, was one obvious recommendation; while Basil’s musicianship meant that he could be roped in to perform at her private concerts. So there were clear reasons why ‘Ben’s mother decided I was a good person for Ben to know’, as Reeve told Donald Mitchell. ‘That’s really how it happened. So she arranged his life. His mother really made him a great musician. That’s absolutely clear to me.’62 Although she seems to have arranged a strict timetable even for Basil’s visits, it was possible within this for the two boys to evade her direct supervision by walking into the town to Morlings music shop, where they might buy scores, listen to records, or even set about playing piano duets; it was on these walks that Benjamin told his friend about his mother’s determination that he should become ‘the fourth B’ and his own developing ambition to be a rather different kind of composer. He hadn’t yet begun to question the supremacy of those other three Bs, whom he continued to arrange in a fluctuating private hierarchy: ‘Brahms has gone up one place,’ he noted in November 1928; ‘Beethoven is still first and I think always will be, Bach or Brahms comes next, I don’t know which!’63 In ways she may not have understood, Mrs Britten was right in her belief that Basil was ‘a good person for Ben to know’, both for the easy-going equality of their friendship and for the unpressurised pleasure of their music-making beyond her home.

  She also approved of her son’s friendship with that other clergyman’s son, Francis Barton, after whom he urgently enquired in his letters home to her from Gresham’s. Francis was still at South Lodge: on leaving the school, Britten had been ‘frightfully sorry to say good-bye to … Francis Barton especially. He has been a ripping boy.’64 It isn’t always easy to read the nuance of outdated schoolboy slang, but ‘ripping’ implies both excellence and excitement (as in the phrase ‘ripping yarns’) and is an emphatic compliment; in Britten’s school-inspired Alla Quartetto Serisoso: ‘Go play, boy, play’ (1933), the movement dedicated to Francis is ‘Ragging’, a word from much the same segment of the verbal palette. The Bartons were, in the words of Francis’s sister Joy, ‘a noisy, happy go lucky Rectory family’ from Sussex, so Francis would have been a boarder at South Lodge. The two boys could continue to meet in Lowestoft when their respective schools’ holidays or half-terms didn’t exactly coincide, as was evidently the case in May 1929: ‘FRANCIS comes to tea,’ wrote Britten in his diary. ‘I fetch him to go for a walk (at 3.0) along the Beach. He has to go (worst luck!) about 5.45. So we don’t really see much of him. He looks so young (he is 13), about 11, but when he talks he might be 15!!! All the same he is a marvellous kid.’65 There, though faintly, is the template for Britten’s future relationships with the boys he befriended: they would have to look young but be intelligent and devoted; in return, they would receive the wisdom and affection of a brilliant older friend. In Francis’s case the relationship prospered: he came to stay with the Brittens that summer – ‘It’s been topping having him, & I miss him dreadfully’ – and Benjamin made several visits to the Bartons, on one occasion taking Francis and Joy to meet the Bridges at their country home. Nor did their disparate paths in adulthood – Francis ended up as a major-general – sever their friendship: ‘He is a great contrast to most of my friends,’ Britten later wrote, ‘being in the Marines, a Tory, & conventional, but he is so charming & ingenuous, that he is decidedly bearable!’66 In the period of such left-leaning, unconventio
nal projects as Night Mail and Our Hunting Fathers, that ‘great contrast’ would have been something of an understatement, but he was growing ironic: in 1937, he described Francis, wistfully or wishfully, as ‘my paramour at South Lodge’.67

  Many people think so readily of the adult Britten in terms of his friendships with younger boys that it almost comes as a surprise to discover that, back at Gresham’s, he developed a close friendship with an older boy, Oliver Berthoud, a sixth-former who left at the end of Britten’s third term. ‘The only reason why I don’t want the end of term is because Berthoud is leaving … He has been marvellous to me, in spite of being a house-pre…’68 Carpenter says that Britten had become the ‘object’ of Berthoud’s ‘attentions’, and this in itself wouldn’t have been at all improbable: the curly-haired blond child had by now grown into a darker, leaner, good-looking teenager with an engagingly wry and knowing smile. But Carpenter’s implication is, as so often, crude and simplistic: Berthoud was a talented pianist and his role was essentially collaborative and protective in the face of an institutional philistinism which both boys disliked. He eventually became headmaster of Trinity School, Croydon, from where he wrote to Britten on 16 March 1971 a letter which vividly captures the quality of their friendship as well as their occasionally anarchic musical life at Gresham’s: