Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  Finally, at a chronological distance from Schoenberg and Berg though appealing to a wholly compatible intellectual–aesthetic frame of mind, there remained Bach and, always and specially for Britten, the Brandenburg Concertos. He heard Henry Wood conduct them in November 1930, almost inevitably noting that the sixth, ‘with a mass of violas’, was ‘very fine’.99 ‘Don’t v. much like Wood’s Bach,’ he grumbled, but that didn’t prevent him from going to hear the same man conduct the same concerto, ‘rather a ragged Brandenburg no. 6’,100 two years later. It was a work for which Britten would feel a particularly intimate affection throughout his life; early in 1969, he conducted the English Chamber Orchestra in a recording of the Brandenburgs. There are wonderful things throughout the set, but the sixth is magical, especially the second movement: ‘The haunting 3/2 tune of the Adagio,’ wrote Imogen Holst at the time, ‘is a reminder that the viola was Bach’s favourite orchestral instrument.’101 And, she might have added, Britten’s.

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  After returning to his digs from a concert in November 1932, Britten casually noted: ‘Walk back with G. Finzi & G. Holst.’102 The pavement itself couldn’t have been less impressed by the fact that it happened to be carrying three of England’s finest twentieth-century composers. A couple of months later, during one of his not-sure-about-Schoenberg evenings (‘What I could make of it, owing to a skin-of-its-teeth performance, was rather dull, but some good things’), Britten had what ought to have been a momentous encounter, but ‘Meet Sch. in interval’ was all he had to say.103 Thanks to London and the Bridges, and even a little to the college about which he was so disparaging, he could bump into some of the greatest musicians of the age while remaining extraordinarily sanguine about it.

  If the process of meeting fellow musicians – performers as much as composers – had got off to a slow start, that was his own shy fault; when urged, early on, to move into a student hostel, he had stubbornly insisted on remaining in the middle-aged security of his respectable boarding house. During his early months in London, his main regular form of shared music-making was the rather uncharacteristic one of singing as a bass with the English Madrigal Choir, to which both he and his sister Barbara belonged. It wasn’t until 11 February 1931, halfway through his second term at the RCM, that he noted in his diary: ‘Meet an Italian (?) Violin Scholar at College and arrange to practise duets with him.’104 He didn’t risk the Italian’s name, Remo Lauricella, which he would for some time have trouble spelling, but his diary entries do sound a good deal more cheerful from this point onwards. Two days later he and his ‘brilliant’ new friend met to play the violin and piano reduction of Mozart’s A major ‘Turkish’ Concerto (K219) and by 24 February his tone had relaxed to one of unaffectedly hearty, schoolboyish pleasure: ‘Practise with the Italian boy in afternoon – he’s jolly good.’105 Lauricella, who was a year older than Britten, had won an open scholarship to the college at the age of fifteen; they practised together regularly on Tuesday afternoons. At the end of June, Britten composed Two Pieces for violin and piano for Lauricella and himself to play: the first, ‘Going down Hill on a Bicycle: A Boy’s Song (after H. C. Beeching)’, continues the sportive theme, although he thought the second, ‘By the moon we sport and play (after Shelley)’, ‘more satisfactory than the Bicycle one’.106 The following winter, the duo was joined by the cellist Bernard Richards, an exact contemporary of Britten who had arrived at the college on the same day in 1930, and became a trio: ‘In afternoon I go to R.C.M. & play with Lauricella until 4.0 & then play trio (Bridge – Phantasy C min.) with the addition of a ’Cellist – Richards, who is nice & very good,’ Britten wrote on 19 January 1932. ‘Great fun. We mean to do this regularly.’107 It was a neat and auspicious touch to initiate the trio’s existence with that early (and not too difficult) work by Bridge, of whom Lauricella as well as Britten had been a composition pupil; by May they would be tackling, among other things, Bridge’s more recent and demanding second trio.

  Stimulated both by what he was hearing and by what he was playing, Britten had embarked on his first great flurry of adult composition, the journey which would soon lead to the Sinfonietta, his actual Op. 1. But before reaching this milestone he wrote, between 9 March and 4 May 1932, a work of at least equal interest, the Double Concerto for Violin and Viola, partly inspired by the Walton Viola Concerto which had so impressed him a few months earlier; perhaps he imagined Lauricella and himself as soloists. If so, the idea remained in his imagination, for the piece was never to be performed during his lifetime. It received its premiere in a concert by the Britten–Pears Orchestra under Kent Nagano, in which the soloists were Katherine Hunka and Philip Dukes, at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1997: as Colin Matthews, who edited the concerto, wrote in a festival programme note, ‘the instrumentation is so carefully indicated in the draft that what will be heard is virtually 100 per cent Britten’.108 Though this is by no means the only instance of a piece first heard long after Britten’s death prompting a reassessment of the composer’s development, it is arguably the most significant. He was typically self-critical as he worked on it: on 18 March he wrote ‘an unsatisfactory beginning’ to the second movement; by 21 March it had become ‘a fatuous second movement’; and, as for the last movement, ‘I shall tear that up soon,’ he decided on 29 March.109 ‘I’m putting my Concerto away for a bit,’ he said, two days after he completed the work, and he seems to have meant for ever.110 Perhaps he abruptly found it too English and old-fashioned for his rapidly fluctuating taste; the Sinfonietta would be much more abrasive. But in fact the concerto, opening with a characteristic horn call which reappears as a ghostly flute echo towards the end of the third movement, possesses the clarity and transparency of mature Britten; the hauntingly quiet ending has that sense of hard-won and slightly compromised resolution after turmoil which would later be found in, for instance, the Cello Symphony.

  The Sinfonietta, which Britten began on 20 June and completed on 9 July, is quite different: it opens with a hint of Stravinsky and a stronger whiff of Schoenberg, as if consciously designed to rebuff the Double Concerto’s lingering Englishness. He started composing, without much sense of overall shape, ‘a movement which might be a bit of a Chamber symphony’, but by the time he finished the sketch it was a ‘Symphonietta for 10 instruments’.111 He scored it rapidly and while doing so tried it out on Ireland (‘very pleased’) and, next day, Bridge and Herbert Howells (‘they approve’); by 16 July he was sufficiently confident to telephone Anne Macnaghten, who had recently established the Macnaghten–Lemare concerts to promote contemporary British music, and to report that ‘they’re probably going to do my Sinfonietta’.112 But this jaunty confidence was to be severely tested as the Sinfonietta progressed towards its Macnaghten–Lemare premiere on 31 January 1933 and a performance at the RCM, conducted by the composer, six weeks later. ‘I have never heard such an appalling row!’ wrote Britten after a college rehearsal on 22 September. ‘However when we have a flute & a ’cello & when the other players have looked at their parts, I think it will be all right.’113 It wasn’t: the autumn became a tragicomic sequence of ‘the most execrable rehearsal’, swiftly followed by ‘the most atrocious of all rehearsals’; not until 17 November could Britten report the attendance of a full team and ‘Quite an improvement’.114 This didn’t last: when Iris Lemare rehearsed the piece in January, again with missing musicians, the result was ‘Not at all good’. Yet when the first performance took place – among a ragbag programme of works by H. K. Andrews, Gordon Jacob, Gerald Finzi and Grace Williams – he conceded: ‘Considering amt. of rehearsal & nature of same, my work went quite well – but oh!’115 The Times thought well of it, noting that Britten ‘seems to be striking out on a path of his own’,116 although the Daily Telegraph considered him merely ‘as provocative as any of the foreign exponents of the catch-as-catch-can style of composition’.117

  The piece did seem to be jinxed. On 5 February, a scheduled BBC broadcast under Edward Clark was postponed (until June 1934) w
hen the allotted forty-five minutes of rehearsal time proved insufficient. His own college rehearsals continued to trouble him too, until the last moment when, after a satisfactory final rehearsal, ‘I conduct a show of my Sinfonietta which goes quite well.’118 The day before the concert, he sent a charmingly modest postcard to Finzi: ‘If you aren’t doing anything tomorrow evening (Thursday), and you feel inclined, you might drop into the College hall and hear a show of my Sinfonietta which I shall be trying to conduct. I suddenly thought that you might like to know.’119 It was only the second occasion on which a work of his would be publicly performed at the college during his time there and it would also be, astonishingly, the last. Nevertheless, his Op. 1 was now out in the musical world. In June, Britten told his parents that Hermann Scherchen was to conduct it in a broadcast concert from Strasbourg on 7 August (‘the parts have gone off to-day’), yet the jinx persisted: due to the fallibility of radio reception in summer, he was unable to hear it and uncertain whether the performance even took place. By this time, he had completely forgotten about the Double Concerto.

  Given the number and variety of projects on which he had been engaged, this isn’t nearly as improbable as it may at first seem: ‘Hundreds of schemes are in the air at the moment,’120 he wrote on 3 April 1933, exaggerating just a bit. Another shelved orchestral work, the ballet score Plymouth Town, had its origins in a meeting with the folklorist and dance historian Violet Alford in July 1931: she supplied him with a scenario which, with uncanny prescience, involved both a nautical setting and a theme of corrupted innocence. Britten sketched the work at Lowestoft during his summer vacation and scored it in London during the autumn, completing it on 22 November; in December he submitted it to the Camargo Society – the forerunner of the Vic–Wells Ballet and the Royal Ballet – who eventually rejected it. Undeterred by this, he started a second ballet score for Violet Alford in June 1932, to be based on an eccentric scenario about Basque shepherds, at the very moment he was beginning the Sinfonietta; but this remained, not altogether surprisingly, incomplete.

  The three most significant chamber works Britten composed during 1932 and 1933 were the Phantasy in F minor for string quintet, the Phantasy, Op. 2, for oboe and string trio, and Alla Quartetto Serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’. The first of these, the only work of his apart from the Sinfonietta to be performed at the RCM, was written specifically to satisfy the requirements of the 1932 Cobbett Chamber Music Prize, which it duly won; Britten’s characteristic response to the college performance on 22 July was ‘bad – but I expected worse’.121 On 12 December it received both its first and second public performances by the Macnaghten String Quartet with Nora Wilson (viola): the composer didn’t attend the lunchtime concert at All Hallows-by-the-Tower as he was meeting his mother off the train at Liverpool Street, but he did hear it in the evening, when it was part of the third Macnaghten–Lemare concert at the Ballet Club and ‘v. badly played by Anne MacN’s quart. + Vla. Worse, by far, than rehearsals.’122 The Times, on the contrary, thought that the quintet ‘did not build up into a satisfying whole’ but that it was ‘very well played by Miss Macnaghten’s Quintet’.123 It was broadcast by the BBC on 17 February 1933, played by a quintet led by André Mangeot, an interesting figure in the musical and cultural life of the time. Born in 1883, he formed several London-based chamber ensembles and for a year in the mid-1920s employed Christopher Isherwood as his secretary. For Britten there was a further strong recommendation: ‘I had some excellent tennis with Mangeot & his two sons out at Cobham on Tuesday,’ he wrote in June 1933.124 For a fine musician to be talented at tennis as well was always sure to win his approval.

  The Phantasy for oboe and string trio was composed during the autumn of 1932: ‘More or less satisfactory – sometimes I think it is my best work – sometimes my worst’ was Britten’s characteristically cautious assessment on 10 October,125 and he continued to revise it over the following months; it was to establish his reputation as a composer of chamber music. It was written for the great oboist Leon Goossens – an early instance of Britten’s lifelong habit of composing works for outstanding specific soloists – and on 6 August 1933 it was broadcast by the BBC in a studio performance given by its dedicatee with members of the International String Quartet, led by Mangeot: Britten thought that Goossens played his part ‘splendidly’. Of the first concert performance at St John’s Institute, Westminster, given by the same musicians on 21 November, the Monthly Musical Record commented: ‘Benjamin Britten’s oboe quartet aroused considerable interest, being uncannily stylish, inventive and securely poised for a composer reported to be still in his teens.’126 Presumably the writer knew that the day of the concert was the last day on which this ‘reported’ fact would be true. November was also the deadline for works to be submitted for the following year’s International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival and, having unsuccessfully entered both the Sinfonietta and the earlier Phantasy quintet for the 1933 festival, Britten now tried again and with better luck. The Phantasy for oboe and string trio was accepted for performance at the Florence ISCM Festival in April 1934.

  Alla Quartetto Serioso was a different sort of project, stemming from a younger kind of compositional impulse though partially resurfacing in two later works. It began as ‘an easy mov. for St. Quart.’,127 to be called Alla Marcia, or ‘Go play, boy, play’ (a quotation from The Winter’s Tale) on 13 February 1933, although at the beginning of April – when Britten had just been bowled over by Emil und die Detektive – this briefly became conflated with an abortive ‘Emil’ suite; abandoning that, he finished three and sketched the fourth of five movements for Alla Quartetto Serioso. Two were given titles and dedications, ‘P.T.’ for David Layton from Gresham’s and ‘Ragging’ for his South Lodge friend Francis Barton: this attempt to bring an air of adolescent, schoolboyish rough-and-tumble to serious composition was, of course, utterly in character. The three completed movements were first performed at All Hallows-by-the-Tower by the Macnaghten String Quartet on 4 December 1933 and repeated at a Macnaghten–Lemare Ballet Club concert on 11 December: ‘Anne did her best with my “Go Play, Boy, Play” – but again I want 1st class instrumentalists besides enthusiasm.’ Britten is said to have walked off rudely afterwards, without thanking Anne Macnaghten, which would have been a plausible way to avoid saying anything about the performance, although his diary entry continues: ‘Go on to MacNaghtens for supper after.’128 Perhaps he ate in sulky silence. The fragments were extensively revised as Three Divertimenti (1936), while the original version of Alla Marcia was to resurface in the ‘Parade’ section of Les Illuminations, Op. 18.

  He was no less busy with works for voices. The Three Two-Part Songs of 1932 (Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Ride-by-nights’, ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘The Ship of Rio’) and the Two Part-Songs of 1933 (George Wither’s ‘I Lov’d a Lass’ and Robert Graves’s ‘Song: Lift-Boy’) are minor compositions, undignified by opus numbers, but A Boy Was Born, Op. 3, is another matter altogether. Initially, Britten thought of this simply as a ‘work for Chorus’ and a ‘Christmas work’, though he seems to have had a sense from the outset that it would prove to be both ambitious and troublesome. On 12 November 1932, after his haircut at Whiteley’s, he bought from Chatto & Windus in St Martin’s Lane a copy of Ancient English Carols 1400–1700 (1928), collected and arranged by Edith Rickert, and began work; but it wasn’t until the Christmas holiday that he found time to choose most of the texts he would use in A Boy Was Born. It was to take the form of an opening – and disarmingly innocent-seeming – theme followed by six variations, in some of which two texts might be conflated: this is the kind of scheme we shall meet again in Britten’s work. It took him until Easter 1933 to reach the final section, the longest and most complicated in the piece, which continued to torment him for the next two months. He completed the work in early June and played it through to Hubert Foss, the music publisher at Oxford University Press, who approved of it; but he still had to face the ‘awful business’129 of c
opying out the parts. Almost all the texts are ‘ancient’, in the rather approximate sense of dating from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, with the exception of Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’ (Variation 5): unlike its more familiar carol setting, this is actually made bleak and wintry, an early example of Britten’s uncanny knack of writing chilly music, and it merges into the icy calm of the anonymous fifteenth-century ‘Lully, lulley, lully, lulley, / The falcon hath borne my make [mate] away’. As Christmas works go, A Boy Was Born seems neither very devotional nor very festive, its focus firmly on emotional drama rather than on theology.