Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  Up early & get to Soho Square at 9.45. Some bother over parts for orchestra, but I eventually get down to Blackheath at 11.0 for big T.P.O recording. A large orchestra for me – Fl. Ob. Bsn. Trpt. Harp (Marie Kotchinska – very good), Vl, Vla. Vlc. CB, Percussion & wind machine – a splendid team. The music I wrote really comes off well – &, for what is wanted, creates quite alot of sensation! The whole trouble, & what takes so much time is that over the music has to be spoken a verse – kind of patter – written by Auden – in strict rhythm with the music. To represent the train noises. There is too much to be spoken in a single breath by the one voice (it is essential to keep to the same voice & to have no breaks) so we have to record separately – me, having to conduct both from an improvised visual metronome – flashes on the screen – a very difficult job! [Stuart] Legg speaks the stuff splendidly tho’.21

  Night Mail was first seen at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge on 4 February 1936 and a London commercial release followed a month later; but by this time Auden had resigned from the GPO Film Unit.

  2

  If Britten had achieved nothing but his work on film scores during 1935, we wouldn’t be able to accuse him of indolence. However, this was very far from the case. He had promised to compose a set of ‘insect pieces’ for the oboist Sylvia Spencer, who had given a performance of his Phantasy Quartet with the Grillers on 4 December 1934, and on 17 April he told her he had ‘written two insect pieces – sketched three more – sketched the scoring for accompaniment of string orchestra’; the two surviving insects, ‘Wasp’ and ‘Grasshopper’, were eventually performed in 1979 and published the following year. Britten continued:

  In fact out of a simple little piece for oboe & piano has grown (or is growing) a large and elaborate suite for oboe & strings. It is all your fault, of course; I didn’t want to write the blessed thing – I am supposed to be (a) finishing a string quartet (b) finishing a violin & piano suite (c) writing an orchestral work for Norwich Festival 1936 (d) writing an orchestral work for Robert Mayer …22

  The suite for oboe and strings failed to appear, although Mitchell and Reed plausibly suggest that some of the material may have have found its way into the Temporal Variations for oboe and piano; the string quartet was his revision of ‘Go play, boy, play’ into Three Divertimenti; the suite for violin and piano, the ‘Moto Perpetuo’ which became his Op. 6, would be first performed (and broadcast) on 13 March 1936 by Antonio Brosa and the composer; and the orchestral work for Norwich was to become Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8. Only the commission for Robert Mayer – presumably for one of his children’s concerts – seems to have sunk completely without trace. And there was other unfinished business, such as Friday Afternoons, which had been impeded by a problem of textual copyright. This was evidently a composer with his hands full, only a week or so before that ‘most surprising day’ when he was suddenly invited to lunch with Cavalcanti and Coldstream.

  Despite the pressures of work, he still found time to attend some concerts and to hear many more on the radio, commenting on them in his usual forthright style. The War of the Conductors had, if anything, increased in ferocity. ‘When F.B. conducts the chief advantage is to be able to listen to the music without bothering about the interpretation. The shows are always “just right”,’23 he wrote, formulating a principle which would be crucial to his own conducting and to which he returned: ‘What is so fine about his shows are that he is content to give us the music – without the stunts of a Mengelberg or a Koussevitsky or the ignorance of a Beecham or a Boult.’24 On 20 January, Bridge conducted a BBC concert in which Haydn (‘v. beautifully played’) and his own ‘thrilling’ Enter Spring framed ‘Schönberg’s lovely Verklärte Nacht – which the strings play splendidly’,25 an influential work for Britten as well as an intriguing piece of programming. The mutual admiration between teacher and pupil was undimmed: a few weeks later, staying at Friston, they talked ‘until past midnight’, about Bridge’s ‘life, a matter of the Will’o the wisp character of his success both as composer & esp. as conductor’, a conversation whose shape may well have influenced Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Back in London, though, there was a ‘Very deadly show – a typical, ignorant, listless Boult concert’,26 while towards the end of the year he heard ‘Boult sterilize Purcell’s very lovely King Arthur’: ‘Performance (apart from BBC Chorus) was scandalous … Boult at his worst & most typical.’ But, he very perceptively noted, ‘what a lovely style of prosody Purcell has! and fine sense of instrumental colour’.27 Then there was the ‘public menace’ Henry Wood, who ‘ought to be shot quickly before he does much more murdering of classics ancient & modern’28 but who, despite this powerful wish, managed to remain alive until 1944.

  Working in London meant living in London, so Britten returned without enthusiasm to his old lodgings at 173 Cromwell Road, Burleigh House, while he ‘searched for a flat’. This flat-hunting had been given additional urgency by some ‘great discussions with Mum on her future – oh these problems!’:29 Mrs Britten understandably disliked living alone above her late husband’s dental practice in Lowestoft and was planning a move to Frinton-on-Sea, where she had Christian Science friends; but Britten, just as understandably, found this dubious in principle and undesirable in practice, since it deprived him of his Suffolk base and his childhood connections. He had also been talking at length to his elder sister Barbara about ‘troubles of life – rather overwhelming at the moment – she is very good & nice on these matters’,30 which included their mother’s planned move and his own sexuality. The flat he found, liberating him from Burleigh House although not from his family, was in West Cottage Road, West End Green, NW6: he was to share it with his dressmaking sister Beth and there would be a room for their mother whenever she wanted to visit London. There were, he discovered, aspects to this process which he’d never quite thought about before: ‘A dreadful business when one has so much work to do, because all the furniture has to be procured,’ he explained, unnecessarily, to Marjorie Fass. ‘However, anything to get away from Boarding Houses.’31 There were further domestic discoveries in store after they moved in on 6 November: ‘One snag about this flat life is the time taken up by household jobs.’32 By chance rather than by design, he had always until now lived in places where such things were done for him.

  During the autumn, partly as a result of his increasing sense of independence but also thanks to the influence of his colleagues at the GPO Film Unit, Britten became for the first and last time in his life a committed political animal. The Abyssinian war, which mightn’t previously have engaged his attention, was the subject of frequent diary entries. At first he viewed it with detachment – ‘Great indignation & excitement in London’ – but within a week he was participating in the indignation himself: ‘The Italians begin to use poison gas in their “civilisation” of Abyssinia.’33 Without necessarily reading very widely or thinking very deeply about it, he found himself trying on some second-hand communist clothes. ‘I envy you most terribly going to Russia!’34 he told the violinist Henri Temianka on 15 November, while on 23 December he wrote ‘a long letter to Mrs Chamberlin (Kersty) in defence of Communism – not a difficult letter to write! It has shocked a lot of people that I am interested in the subject!’35 Shocking musical friends in East Anglia was probably about as far as this interest was going to take him.

  In Lowestoft on Christmas Eve, however, he was deeply shaken by a musical loss: ‘Hear that Alban Berg dies. This makes me very miserable as I feel he is one of the most important men writing to-day. And we could do with many successors to Wozzeck, Lulu & Lyric Suite. A very great man.’ Then he added, above the date, a postscript: ‘Go for a very long & mysterious walk – 10.30–11.30. Think alot about Alban Berg.’36 Henry Boys, who had done so much to foster Britten’s admiration for Berg, later remembered the ‘absolute desolation’ of a telephone call from Britten on 28 December; the following day, in West Hampstead, the two men spent the afternoon ‘talking (Berg), gramophoning (Mahler, Kinder
totenlieder) & playing (Berg – Wozzeck)’.37 One can’t help noticing that Britten was more obviously moved by this death than by his own father’s; and, although this is largely explained by the English middle-class habit of emotional reticence, the sense of a specifically cultural bereavement affected him profoundly. Berg was, moreover, the musical hero he had wanted but failed to meet. And neither he nor anyone else had yet heard the work of Berg’s which was to affect him most.

  3

  ‘1936 finds me infinitely better off in all ways than did the beginning of 1935,’ wrote Britten on New Year’s Day. He sounds chirpy, and with good reason, but beyond the chirpiness lies some shrewd self-assessment. First, he noted that he was at last earning his living, ‘with occasionally something to spare’, and this was certainly true: in addition to his pay of £5 per week from the GPO Film Unit, he had negotiated a weekly retainer of £3 from his publishers Boosey & Hawkes; his guaranteed income of £8, excluding any freelance fees, was approximately double the national average wage. Nevertheless, he prudently reminded himself, there was nothing to be hoped from performing rights with his GPO work, since that became Crown Property. He had ‘ideas for writing alot of original music’ – a rather important one would start to take shape the very next day – and was enjoying ‘alot of success but not a staggering amount of performances, tho’ reputation (even for bad) growing steadily’: he was perfectly clear about the gulf between quality and reputation, and he had already acquired the distrust of critical opinion which would last a lifetime. He was equally perceptive about his personal relationships, aware of his ‘bad inferiority complex’ with Auden, Coldstream and Wright, yet ‘fortunate in having friends like Mr & Mrs Frank Bridge, Henry Boys, Basil Reeve (& young Piers Dunkerley – tell it not in Gath) and afar off Francis Barton’. Finally, he was happy with his ‘pleasant, tho’ cold’ flat and the company of Beth, ‘with whom I get on very well’, if still mildly surprised by the notion of housework. ‘So for 1936.’38

  The lucid, organised intelligence of this progress report is something the younger Britten couldn’t have quite managed: it signals a newly achieved degree of calmness and maturity. The following day, after a morning at Soho Square and an afternoon at Blackheath working on Night Mail, he invited Auden home for supper: ‘We talk amongst many things of a new Song Cycle (probably on Animals) that I may write. Very nice and interesting & pleasant evening.’39 This, of course, was to be Our Hunting Fathers, of which he would later say ‘it’s my op. 1 alright’,40 even though it was actually his Op. 8: that retrospective redesignation – by which he surely meant ‘This is my first completely mature work’ – seems exactly in accord with the new year spirit in which it was conceived. But it was inevitable that Britten’s sense of newly achieved clarity should illuminate some cobwebby corners, and just as certain that Auden should interest himself in this illumination.

  Concerning ‘young Piers Dunkerley’, we should proceed with caution, as indeed Britten himself did: it’s as well to note, first of all, that while ‘tell it not in Gath’ is a biblical phrase about Saul and Jonathan (II Samuel 1:20), who ‘in their death … were not divided’ (1:23), it is also a phrase used habitually by Britten about other kinds of supposedly secret matters. After leaving South Lodge, Piers had gone on to Bloxham, a public school in north Oxfordshire; his parents had separated when he was much younger and Britten saw himself, not for the last time, partly fulfilling the role of an absent father, providing helpful advice and occasional treats. On the evening of 10 January, he had arranged for Piers and his sister Daphne to be among the extras required for the party scene in Calendar of the Year in which Auden was to appear as Father Christmas; the other participants included the Romilly brothers, Giles and Esmond, who had famously run away from Wellington to start a radical-pacifist magazine, Out of Bounds. Britten, looking on, found the scene ‘amusing to watch … although I feel Auden made some mistakes in choice – some being definitely Bohemian!’ It went on until 11.30, ‘tho’ I dispatch Piers & Daphne (who make a success) by 10.45’. His feeling of unease remained: ‘Piers makes friends with Giles Romilly – not too great, I hope, tho’ Giles seems nice, & may broaden Piers mind a lot – which he needs – but he is a nice lad for all that.’41 This diary entry is important and easily misread. For instance, we may well be amused (as Auden, at this time a ‘Bohemian’ to his fingertips, would certainly have been) to find ‘Bohemian’ apparently used in such an archly disapproving tone. But this isn’t quite what Britten means: the party was supposed to be that of ‘a typical respectable upper-middle-class family’, and his point is that some of the assembled extras failed to look the part. Moreover, his worry about the influence of Giles Romilly, though unmistakably touched with envy, was entirely understandable: he rightly felt protective of Piers, a sensitive and impressionable fifteen-year-old who wasn’t having a particularly easy time at his new school.

  On 16 January, a day which began in fog and ended with heavy snow, Britten spent the morning working at Soho Square before lunching with his colleagues, Auden, Coldstream, Cavalcanti and Wright. Then:

  Take afternoon off to see Piers Dunkerley – take him to a cinema (only see a very poor Tom Wallis–Ralph Lynn show – saved by two good Disneys ‘Music Land’ & Pluto’s ‘Judgment day’) & out to tea. I have a lot to talk to him about – he being to all intents & purposes fatherless & obviously having a difficult time – poor lad. Giles Romilly isn’t too good for him I fear. However he unburdens his soul in a long walk across Hyde Park after tea at the Criterion – & I do feel I’ve helped him a bit. But what a boy to help! So splendid in brain & form – and delightful company.42

  There’s both tone and undertone here: although his genuine concern and goodwill are beyond reproach, an underlying element of nostalgic voyeurism can’t be denied. Britten had discovered the pleasure of giving pleasure, especially to the young, and he perfectly understood that any hint of impropriety would spoil it. When he saw Piers again at Easter (cinema and tea, followed by a long conversational walk), the undertone was more emphatic: ‘Bloxham seems a queer school, & it makes one sick that they can’t leave a nice lad like Piers alone – but it is understandable – good heavens!’43 He reported on this meeting with his ‘foster child Piers D.’ to his friend and confidant John Pounder: ‘I had a long talk with him the other day which was a great strain on me (“the normal functions” etc. etc). You can’t imagine how delightfully paternal I can be!’44 The following day, he saw Piers again: they saw some ‘lovely, witty Silly Symphonies’, followed by a large tea ‘& walk & ping-pong with the lad after’. ‘He is a nice thing,’ Britten continued, ‘and I am very fond of him – thank heaven not sexually, but I am getting to such a condition that I am lost without some children (of either sex) near me.’45

  Britten, of course, could ‘leave a lad alone’ and he viewed adults who couldn’t with distaste: rehearsing his Te Deum (a work he had completed on the evening of 20 January as King George V lay dying) with Reginald Goodall’s choir, he found that the boy soloist had been replaced because ‘the old good one has been taken off by some man to live with him – for obvious reasons – & Goodall is rightly indignant’.46 He was anxious not only to assure himself of his own correct behaviour but also to distance himself from the ‘Bohemianism’ of the Auden circle. Visiting David Layton, an old friend from Gresham’s, in Cambridge, he approvingly noted: ‘He is a very good sort – clean, healthy, thinking & balanced.’47 (Auden would have aspired to only one of those four qualities.) He read the recently published Mr Norris Changes Trains by ‘(Auden’s friend) Christopher Isherwood’, and found it ‘splendidly done – & very exciting’. But: ‘I feel he over accentuates the importance of the sex episodes – necessary as they are for atmosphere.’48 And when he and Beth went to the first night of The Dog Beneath the Skin, he admired Auden’s choruses (‘the best part of the show was the speaking of them by Robert Speaight’) but disliked Rupert Doone’s overemphatic direction and felt that, despite being ‘very much cut’,
the play ‘even might be more so – alot of it moves to slowly I feel’.49 Nor did he think much of Herbert Murrill’s accompanying music.

  Books about the Auden ‘gang’ by its members – such as Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows and Christopher and his Kind, Spender’s World Within World and The Temple – invariably touch on Auden’s early desire to assemble his friends as if they were a pack of creative playing cards: the Poet (himself), the Novelist (Isherwood), and so on. Since ‘the Composer’ had until recently been a vacancy unfilled, he had been delighted to welcome Britten into the group. However, among the younger Auden’s less admirable, though by no means uncommon, traits was an intuitive conviction that everyone else really wanted to be like him; Britten, with his largely unreconstructed middle-class values, seemed to him (as estate agents used to say of derelict houses) ripe for conversion. Accordingly, in March, he dedicated two poems to Britten. The first of these, ‘Underneath the abject willow’, is definitely a call and possibly an invitation to sexual action; the second, ‘Night covers up the rigid land’, looks like an acknowledgement of sexual rejection; but it needs to be borne in mind that, since these both occur among a prolific sequence of undedicated ballad-like love poems, there may be more mischief than passion at work here. That caveat entered, the opening stanza of the first is fairly explicit:

  Underneath the abject willow,

  Lover, sulk no more;

  Act from thought should quickly follow.