by Neil Powell
They spent the second and third weeks of June partly in Toronto – where the CBC had studios and Boosey & Hawkes an office – and partly in Grand Rapids, Michigan, some 250 miles further west, where they stayed with the organist of Park (First) Congregational Church, Harold Einecke, and his wife Mary, whom Pears had met when on tour with the New English Singers. From its name, or even from an uninstructed glance at a map, Grand Rapids may appear to be more exotic than the medium-sized industrial city it is; but, as Philip Larkin once said of Coventry, ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, and in this case something happened. It was at Grand Rapids in June 1939 that Britten and Pears consummated their relationship – given Ben’s background and personality, it is entirely possible that this was his first full sexual experience – and formed a ‘pact’: a very civil partnership that would last a lifetime. From Toronto on 19 June, Ben dashed off a clutch of letters to catch a sailing of the Queen Mary for England. To Wulff, he wrote excitedly that he was ‘thinking hard about the future’ and that America, which was ‘tremendously large & beautiful’ and ‘enterprising & vital’, might be the place to stay. To Lennox, he more carefully said that ‘things are going fine out here’, rather enigmatically adding: ‘We had a terrific time in Grand Rapids.’8 His commissioned work for CBC began to take shape, a toccata for piano and string orchestra: with its rapturous glissandos, it would be the most ecstatic piece he had ever written and it would be called Young Apollo, Op. 16. When, a month later, it was complete, he described it to the photographer Enid Slater as ‘founded on the end of Hyperion “from all his limbs celestial…” It is very bright & brilliant music – rather inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never seen before. But I’m pleased with it – may call it “The Young Apollo”, if that doesn’t sound too lush! But it is lush!’9 Even though Wulff was certainly the Young Apollo he had in mind (and Keats, we will remember, was among Wulff’s favourite poets), the piece’s sensual energy also springs from his transformed relationship with Peter and the ‘sunshine’ this had brought into his life.
Next, they travelled to New York, staying briefly at the inexpensive, Auden-recommended George Washington Hotel. Although Pears had been to the city before, Britten obviously hadn’t; when given a guided tour of the sights, including Broadway, by Boosey & Hawkes’s representative Hans Heinsheimer, he tried to look as if he was enjoying himself. He subsequently told Wulff that New York was ‘a staggering place – very beautiful in some ways – intensely alive & doing’,10 but he didn’t fool Heinsheimer: ‘It was absolutely awful. I still remember this unbelievably polite smile Ben had – really Ben always smiled nicely – but really it was a flop.’11 They stayed only four days in the city, though this was long enough for Pears to re-establish contact with his friend Elizabeth Mayer, and on 1 July Britten and Pears went north as a self-acknowledged couple to visit Aaron Copland and his partner Victor Kraft at Woodstock: indeed, the example of Copland and Kraft must have given them confidence in defining their own partnership. They liked Woodstock so much – the Hudson and the Catskills were more to Britten’s taste than Broadway – that they decided to rent a studio there for a month: here they established a domestic routine, including time allotted to housework (a concept Ben never quite grasped); after that, their working day was interrupted only by a light lunch until six, when they would set out for Copland’s cottage, bathe in a stream, play tennis and finally eat their main meal of the day at a snack bar which was called the Trolley Car. Apart from finishing Les Illuminations and Young Apollo, Britten worked on A.M.D.G. (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam), choral settings of seven poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. On 12 July, he returned briefly to New York for a very successful open-air performance of his Bridge Variations by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Frieder Weissmann: ‘I had to go twice onto the platform to bow – the orchestra was very pleased & so was the audience (about 5000!),’ he told Beth. ‘The write-ups have been marvellous – so I feel rather “started” in New York now!’12 He assured his sister that she would ‘adore this city’ and seems to have fallen momentarily in love with it himself – as who wouldn’t, with all that applause ringing in his ears? But his description in the same letter of ‘Woodstock in the Kingston District of the Hudson River (look it up on the map) near the Catskills Mts’ as ‘very beautiful’ strikes a more authentic note: in New York, as in London, he couldn’t wait to get back to the country. It was from Woodstock, two days earlier, that he had cabled to Ralph Hawkes: ‘JUST FINISHED TWO NEW RIMBAUD SONGS SUITABLE WITH OTHERS FOR PROMENADE PERFORMANCE STOP SENDING SCORES THIS WEEK CONCERTO FOLLOWING’.13
The two new songs were ‘Royauté’ and ‘Antique’; but in the event only ‘Being Beauteous’ and ‘Marine’ were to be performed by Sophie Wyss at Queen’s Hall on 17 August and the version of Les Illuminations with which we are familiar today wasn’t completed until 25 October. Given that Britten had started thinking about the cycle before the end of 1938, this is by his standards an unusually long gestation period, covering a momentous period in the composer’s life, for a piece lasting around twenty-five minutes; Ian Bostridge, who is among its finest modern interpreters, describes it as ‘a work of transition’. One of the several ways in which this is true concerns its actual structure, which altered considerably from the outline Britten sent to Hawkes on 3 June, most strikingly in the placement of ‘Being Beauteous’, which he moved from third to seventh position – or eighth, if we count IIIa (‘Phrase’) and IIIb (‘Antique’) as separate items. This song provides a cautionary example of the danger involved in too easily linking composition with biography. It now follows the dreamily introspective ‘Interlude’ for strings (where, as in the opening ‘Fanfare’, we seem temporarily to be in the more innocent world of the Bridge Variations), which concludes with a disconcertingly gentle, anything but ‘sauvage’, reappearance of the cycle’s thrice-repeated motto, ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’. Then comes ‘Being Beauteous’: ‘an erotic vision dedicated to P.N.L.P., Peter Pears, it was also professionally the work which represented Britten’s allegiance to his companion’, says Bostridge, correctly noting that, although written for Sophie Wyss, ‘it became part of Pears’s repertoire and Wyss disappeared from Britten’s life’.14 The song’s placing and its dedication seem unambiguous, until we recall that it was written in March (the manuscript full score is dated 11 April) and that the ‘Being Beauteous’ Britten had in mind when composing it was not Peter but Wulff, who neglected to listen to the first broadcast performance and so forfeited his claim to it. On the other hand, the later ‘Antique’ – ‘Gracieux fils de Pan…’ – is dedicated to K.H.W.S.
We might be tempted to accuse Britten of having it both ways; but the temptation should be resisted because, although that is just what he is doing, accusation would be out of place. Peter was not a substitute or a replacement for Wulff: they were different kinds of love and so capable of coexistence. Peter was, among other things, a mother to Britten; Wulff, among other things, a son. This, indeed, is something Peter seemed unnervingly to grasp when he wrote to Wulff in June: ‘I am looking after Ben as well as he deserves…’15 (Britten’s childhood friend Basil Reeve told Donald Mitchell, even more disconcertingly, that ‘His mother’s voice and Peter Pears’s voice were fantastically similar’,16 and the same point was made, presumably by the same person, to Beth Britten: ‘A close friend of Ben’s who had known my mother well and heard her voice, remarked to me recently, that Peter’s voice was very like my mother’s, and she had just died.’)17 So Les Illuminations is also ‘a work of transition’ in this second sense: when it began, Britten’s emotional needs were confused and unsatisfied; by the time it was finished, he had found a permanent and, as we shall see, remarkably resilient solution to this problem. And that, surely, is why the piece has its false ending. When the phrase we hear at the start, ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’, appears for the third time at the close of the eighth movement, ‘Parade’, it seems to complete the work; but it is f
ollowed by ‘Départ’:
Assez vu. La vision s’est rencontrée à tous les airs.
Assez eu. Rumeurs de villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.
Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. Ô Rumeurs et Visions!
Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs!
Britten too has had ‘enough’ – especially of noisy towns and life’s setbacks – and here finds the more reflective, elegiac voice of his later song cycles, the new sound to celebrate his new affection.
The effect of ‘Départ’ is thus brilliantly to qualify and modify the force of the backward-looking ‘Parade’, a march whose musical source is the ‘alla marcia’ movement from ‘Go play, boy, play’. The textual source of ‘Parade’, with its adoring depiction of rough young men, is the most explicitly and violently homoerotic of all the passages Britten chose to set from Rimbaud, from which he tactfully omitted the sentence ‘On les envoie prendre du dos en ville, affublés d’un luxe dégoûtant’ (though the translation he used, Helen Rootham’s, evades the ‘take from behind’ implication of ‘prendre du dos’). Was Rimbaud recalling his alleged rape by the Communards in 1871 here? Given his sadomasochistic aspect – his knife games with Verlaine, for instance – it seems altogether possible that he would have enjoyed being sexually assaulted by some ‘drôles très solides’. And was Britten, in turn, recalling his own alleged rape at school? That would certainly give an additional – and quite characteristically ironic – bite to his reuse of music from ‘Go play, boy, play’. Such connections can’t be proved and would seem fanciful were it not for the recurrence of this juxtaposition of sexual violence and oblique references to school in Britten’s later compositions. Here again, Les Illuminations can be seen as a remarkable ‘work of transition’.
‘Woodstock has been very successful,’ Britten reported to Ralph Hawkes; it had been ‘nice & hot (not broiling like New York)’ and he had done ‘lots of work’.18 Britten and Pears planned to stay there, with the congenial company and landscape, until mid-August. Then Ben would accompany Peter to New York, before seeing him off on the Queen Mary on the 23rd: he had singing engagements planned for the autumn in England, including the first performance of A.M.D.G. As for himself, he told Beth he had no plans for the future, although he had to go to Toronto to perform Young Apollo for CBC and he thought he might travel to New Mexico, which Auden was visiting with his new boyfriend Chester Kallman; he more than once hinted that he might remain in America indefinitely. Despite his deep forebodings, he had no clear sense yet that war in Europe was imminent. Having arrived in New York, Britten and Pears paid what was intended to be, for Ben, an introduction and, for Peter, a farewell visit to his old friend Elizabeth Mayer at Amityville, Long Island, where her husband, Dr William Mayer, worked as a psychiatrist at Long Island Home. Here, something extraordinary happened: it may be simplest to say that both men fell under Mrs Mayer’s benign spell. They signed the Mayers’ visitors’ book on 21 August 1939. It was just two days before Pears planned to sail for England but, as he later said, ‘We went down there for what was supposed to be a weekend and in fact … we stayed for three years.’19
2
The Mayers had lived at Amityville since May 1937, when Dr William Mayer was appointed Medical Director at Long Island Home. The family – the parents and their four children – had emigrated from Germany in stages during the preceding troubled decade: Beata, Elizabeth’s eldest daughter from a previous marriage, and Michael both left in 1933, she to train as a nurse in Italy and he to continue his education in England; then, in November 1936, Elizabeth joined her husband, who was already working in the USA, travelling with their two remaining children, Ulrica and Christopher. This was the journey on which she and Pears first met; she had been alerted to his presence aboard the Washington by a letter from his former flatmate Basil Douglas, who also happened to have been a pupil of Elizabeth Mayer’s in Munich, where she had taught German and singing. Though she had abandoned earlier thoughts of a musical career for herself, she remained intensely sympathetic to music and musicians: her husband seems to have happily accepted that she was the dominant intellectual force in the household and her four children, whose talents lay elsewhere, were miraculously unresentful when she filled their little home with brilliantly creative people by way of compensation. There are obvious echoes here of the Britten family in Lowestoft, but with a major difference: Mrs Britten was blessed with a musically talented son, while Mrs Mayer would have liked to have been blessed with one. For Britten, Elizabeth Mayer became the latest in a series of surrogate mothers who already included Ethel Bridge, Marjorie Fass and Mary Behrend. To understand how soon and how fully he appreciated her, one can’t do better than to quote from his letter of 7 November 1939 to Enid Slater:
Peter & I have found some wonderful friends – who are (luckily) devoted to us – & on no account will let us depart. They are German émigrés (from Munich). He – is a Psychiatrist & an assistant at this mental Home. She – is one of those grand people who have been essential through the ages for the production of art; really sympathetic & enthusiastic, with instinctive good taste (in all the arts) & a great friend of thousands of those poor fish – artists. She is never happy unless she has them all round her – living here or round about at the moment are lots of them – many refugees. Wystan comes here from New York nearly every weekend – an excellent German painter lives here too, – Scharl – friends include the Manns, Borgesi, Einstein. That’s the kind of person she is. She did wonderful work under Hitler; incredibly brave things. I think she’s one of the few really good people in the world – & I find her essential in these times when one has rather lost faith in human nature.20
Stanton Cottage, where the Mayers lived in the grounds of Long Island Home, was far from large. ‘I don’t know how we all fitted in,’ said Beata Sauerlander; ‘… there was a big middle room, a huge dining room table where we all ate; and then there was the living room with a Bechstein piano. That was Peter and Ben’s domain.’21 When Auden was working in another room – filling it with cigarette smoke and continually being brought cups of tea by Elizabeth Mayer – there can have been hardly any space left for the family.
Although Britten and Pears had decided to remain in America by late August, the outbreak of war on 3 September troubled them deeply. Barbara cabled to her brother, evidently telling him not to return, and he immediately replied by letter. He urged her to get away from London if possible – concern for his sisters and a wish for them to make full use of the Old Mill at Snape are recurring themes in his wartime letters home – and continued: ‘So far I am taking your advice because (a) I hear that we are not wanted back (b) if I come I should only be put in prison – which seems silly, just to do nothing & eat up food.’22 Though it wasn’t true that as a pacifist he would necessarily end up in prison, his instinct was surely right; but this was by no means a lightly taken decision, and his anxiety about what he really ought to do certainly contributed to his serious health problems over the following two years. On the same day, he wrote to Ralph Hawkes, to whom he gave the simplest explanation for remaining ‘out here for a bit still’: ‘I have lots of things to do, & am at the moment staying with friends on Long Island, and inspite of everything working very hard.’23 He certainly had several projects to keep him fully occupied: there was the final shaping of Les Illuminations and the violin concerto; there was a new fifteen-minute orchestral piece which he wanted to call ‘Kermesse Canadienne’ (it became Canadian Carnival, Op. 19); and he was about to start work with Auden on the ‘school operetta’, Paul Bunyan. Businesslike as ever, he lost no time in establishing a close professional relationship with Max Winkler, of Boosey Hawkes Belwin Incorporated in New York, for whom he planned to write ‘simple marketable works’ and whose financial support would become invaluable when the transfer of funds from London became impossible; and he wrote, enclosing a warmly affectionate letter of introduction from Frank Bridge, to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the great musical benefa
ctor, who was in due course to commission his first string quartet.
A few weeks later, Hawkes passed on a slightly bizarre proposal from the British Council. It began as an enigmatic cable on 21 September, in which Hawkes, who had in effect already accepted the invitation on his composer’s behalf (‘I SAID YES’), wanted to know if he would be interested in a commission ‘FOR FULL SCALE ORCHESTRAL WORK SYMPHONIC POEM SYMPHONY SUITE OVERTURE UNDERSTAND FEE SUBSTANTIAL EVEN HUNDREDS’. Britten replied that he was ‘ABLE AND WILLING PROVIDED NO JINGO’,24 understandably feeling that it was neither the time nor the place for him to compose an overtly patriotic piece. Only when Hawkes had made further enquiries did ‘all the surprising details’ (as Britten mildly put it) become clear: the ultimate client was the Japanese government and they wanted a work, for which they provided a rather odd specification, to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese Empire. ‘SOUNDS CRAZY BUT WILL DO’, Britten replied. In an undated letter of October 1939, he explained that he had an idea for a short symphonic work, to be called Sinfonia da Requiem, ‘which sounds rather what they would like’ – although, even at that early stage, it appeared to be neither celebratory nor imperial. It was to be delivered by May 1940.
