by Neil Powell
There were two reactions to this: one on the part of practising musicians like Elgar and Frank Bridge, who realized the value of the classical tradition yet whose utterances were characteristically English; the other, and temporarily more influential, reaction was that of the folksong group. This group adopted English folksong as the chief influence in their work, and disregarded most of the lessons Europe had to give. It held up the progress for twenty-five years, but it has now entirely subsided, since audiences found it monotonous melodically and harmonically.89
That sweeping gesture with which Britten consigns composers such as Vaughan Williams to the dustbin of musical history is breathtaking, but hardly less astonishing is his praise of the once-detested Elgar. In a second article for American readers, ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’ (Modern Music, January/February 1941), he went further. Elgar, he wrote, represented the ‘professional’ approach to music, as opposed to the amateurism of ‘Parry and his followers’, and was moreover ‘a most eclectic composer, his most obvious influences being Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Franck’.90 One reason for this change of heart was that Britten’s own musical language had become more conservative, but another and far more significant one was his recognition that Elgar – like Bridge, like Britten himself – was a composer who had learned from Europe while fashioning a modern English music.
It was inevitable that some members of the musical establishment at home would regard these articles as instances of sniping ingratitude from someone who was safely out of the country at a troubled time. Matters were made worse when news seeped out that the absent composer had accepted a commission from the government of Japan. When Ralph Hawkes returned to London after his own extended visit to America, in September 1940, he wrote glumly to Britten of the ‘difficulty’ in getting his work performed and the ‘caustic comment’ passed on his absence abroad. Most of the comment had been directed at Auden and Isherwood, until the first performance in England of the Violin Concerto, given by Thomas Matthews, with the LPO conducted by Basil Cameron, at the Queen’s Hall on 6 April 1941. This had the unanticipated effect of shifting the attack, on two fronts, to Britten. The first of these began with an enthusiastic review in the Sunday Times of 4 May by Ernest Newman: ‘If anything had been required to strengthen my former feeling that Mr Britten is a thoroughbred, this fine piece of writing would be enough.’ It was the word ‘thoroughbred’ which incensed readers to such an extent that on 8 June Newman returned to it: ‘A few weeks ago I used the word thoroughbred in connection with Benjamin Britten’s new violin concerto; and ever since then I have been fighting single-handed the battle of Britten.’ This in turn prompted a furious letter from George Baker, which concluded: ‘I would like to remind Mr Newman that most of our musical “thoroughbreds” are stabled in or near London and are directing all their endeavours towards winning the City and Suburban and the Victory Stakes, two classic events that form part of a programme called the Battle of Britain; a programme in which Mr Britten has no part.’91
Meanwhile, the Musical Times of June 1941 carried a letter from Pilot-Officer E. R. Lewis about ‘a young English composer now in America’ who, the writer erroneously asserted, had taken American citizenship. Lewis was particularly vexed by the ‘particular favour shown by concert-givers, particularly the B.B.C.’ towards the unnamed composer: ‘The one justification of such prominence is overwhelming merit, and this composer’s reputation hardly fulfils that condition.’ By simultaneously belittling Britten’s reputation and exaggerating the meagre number of performances his work was now receiving, Lewis prepared the ground for a rhetorical question: ‘Why should special favour be given to works which are not of the first rank when they come from men who have avoided national service, and when so many British artists have suffered inroads upon their work so as to preserve that freedom which, musically, they have not yet enjoyed to the full?’92 Though based on misapprehensions, in its muddled way this expresses a widely held resentment. In the ensuing correspondence, two writers (both, as it happens, with East Anglian connections) made important points. Gerald Cockshott – a schoolmaster, writer and composer from Norwich – drew attention to musical casualties of the previous war, such as Ivor Gurney and George Butterworth, and argued that although Britten might not be making ‘any immediate contribution to the national cause’, it was ‘by its cultural achievements that a nation will be judged’.93 And Jack Moeran wrote to dispel the illusion that Britten had fled at the outbreak of war: ‘I would point out that he left this country many weeks [actually months] earlier, and that at the time of the outbreak he was already fulfilling engagements in the U.S.A.’94
There was a subtext to these attacks on Britten and Pears, which would remain a nuisance for some years to come: the unspoken assumption that pacifism and homosexuality were inextricably linked and perhaps even amounted to much the same thing, commonly expressed in a phrase such as ‘Nancy Boys’. Anyone who ever met Britten and Pears would have realised how ludicrously wide of the mark this was, but their indignant detractors hadn’t met them. Another false assumption was that these musical absentees were lolling about and enjoying themselves abroad while their countrymen fought; whereas, of course, they were working hard, earning little, and feeling desperately homesick. It wasn’t only reading Crabbe that had made Britten long for home: his Californian summer had turned sour. In letters to his sisters, he tried hard to sound cheerful and reassuring, with travellers’ tales about hitchhikers, the blue Pacific and the extraordinary heat, but on 19 August he admitted to Beth that he was ‘abit sick of California – there is a feeling of unreality about it which is not so pleasant as you’d think’.95 In early September, he told Barbara that he was fed up with Americans generally: ‘Their driving – their incessant radio – their fat and pampered children – their yearning for culture (to be absorbed in afternoon lectures, now that they can’t “do” Europe) – and above all their blasted stomachs…’96 But it was to Wulff, now back in England and in the Pioneer Corps, that he really let rip: ‘In many ways this summer has been terrible for us – I have never felt so completely out of harmony with America … All the weaknesses of the civilised world, all the lack of direction, find their epitome in California.’97 Even New York was preferable to Los Angeles, which he thought ‘the ugliest and most sprawling city on earth’.
The day before he and Pears began their return journey east, however, Britten had an important engagement in Los Angeles: the first performance, by the Coolidge Quartet on 21 September at Thorne Hall, Occidental College, of his first String Quartet, Op. 25. He had completed it on 28 July, a few days after hearing from its sponsor that he had been awarded the Coolidge Medal, whose previous recipients included Frank Bridge, for 1941. ‘Our quartet,’ he told Mrs Coolidge on 24 July, ‘is progressing very well’; he thought it ‘my best piece so far, which is rather extraordinary for me, since at this period of work I usually am in a deep depression’.98 This wasn’t strictly true: he was often elated as he neared the end of a composition – though not always by its performance or reviews – and he had an enviable knack of immersing himself in work when depressed by other matters. But he was right to be pleased with the quartet and delighted by the performance it received from the players led by William Kroll, subsequently the founder of the Kroll Quartet; he even managed to describe the review in the Los Angeles Times as ‘quite friendly’. Though appreciative of the third movement (‘the most important movement in point of achievement’) and the fourth (‘a brilliant success’), it was obtuse about the piece’s memorably haunted opening (‘The idea was all right but the music was not effective’), a reminder that what may strike us now as characteristically Brittenesque was still puzzling and unfamiliar to some listeners. The same artists gave several subsequent performances of the work, including one in New York on 28 December attended by the composer, who reported to Mrs Coolidge that they ‘played it wonderfully’.
The String Quartet was by far the most important work Britten completed during the
second half of 1941. Back at Amityville, he had two other commissions to finish: the Scottish Ballad, Op. 26, for two pianos and orchestra, and An Occasional Overture, Op. 27. The first of these was written for his Californian hosts, Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson (who was Scottish), and first performed by them with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugene Goossens on 28 November 1941. After an unpromisingly bombastic start, it has an attractively dreamlike central episode before rather losing its way again; unlike Britten’s major works of the period, it doesn’t seem to have anything to say. The second, although commissioned by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra, seems not to have been performed at the time; the manuscript, which Britten left behind in the USA when he returned to England, was only rediscovered shortly before the composer’s death. By then, both title and opus number had been reused, and the work – a more obviously engaging piece than the Scottish Ballad – was renamed An American Overture for its first performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle in 1983.
The troublesome summer was followed by an unhappy autumn, during which Britten experienced one of his rare composing blocks; this was when he seriously thought about giving up music for a job in David Rothman’s hardware store. Although he told Peggy Brosa in early November that he had been ‘working very very hard’, what he really meant was that he’d been very busy: after finishing the overture for Rodzinksi (‘which I don’t think he’s going to play after all – disappointing after the hurry’), he’d been to Boston to see Koussevitzky about performances of his Sinfonia, ‘had a fearful scare over Peter’s papers’ after an initial refusal to extend his work permit and been awarded his Coolidge Medal in Washington (‘Mrs C. caused quite a stir by calling me Benjy in front of the assembled audience!’).99 Then he was off to Chicago, to conduct the Illinois Symphony Orchestra in performances of the Sinfonia and, with Pears as soloist, Les Illuminations, on 24 November. His own estimate of this concert was positive – ‘the orchestra played well, Peter sang splendidly & had a good reception, & I wasn’t too bad (except for 2 up-beats in one spot!) with the stick’ – although he thought the reviews were ‘pretty catty’.100 That was putting it mildly: though cautious about the Rimbaud songs, they were extraordinarily hostile to the Sinfonia. ‘Seldom does one encounter a new piece so thoroughly incomprehensible,’ said Edward Barry in the Chicago Tribune. ‘The ear is baffled by its instrumental texture and passes nothing on to the mind.’ Remi Gassmann in the Chicago Daily Times agreed: ‘Mr Britten does not write for the orchestra in the sense that he provides it with music to play. He merely uses the orchestra to produce a variety of instrumental sound-effects.’101 By now, Britten had learned to be – or, at least, to appear to be – amused by this sort of nonsense. To a postcard of Picasso’s ‘Study for Guernica’ sent to Albert Goldberg, the Illinois orchestra’s conductor who had arranged the concert, he added a parenthetical question: ‘(Is the Sinfonia as obscure as this??)’.102
Next day, Britten and Pears went on to Grand Rapids, where they performed a voice-and-piano reduction of Les Illuminations, together with some of the folk-song arrangements on which Britten had been intermittently working. Then they stayed for a few days at Ann Arbor, where Auden was teaching for a year as an associate professor of English and sharing a house with a student, Charles H. Miller, who remembered how ‘Peter, handsome and irresponsible, loomed large over his Benjy, and I didn’t need Wystan to tell me, as he did in a murmured aside, “Now there’s a happy married couple.”’103 Auden must have felt this the more keenly since his own relationship with Chester Kallman, which had at first seemed so idyllic, was marred by their sexual incompatibility and Chester’s promiscuity. His sense of exclusion from this evidently successful partnership – as well as the abandonment of a planned collaboration on an oratorio – marked a further stage in the gradual process of drawing apart from Britten.
The USA declared war on Japan on 8 December, after the previous day’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The following week, Britten and Pears gave a recital under the auspices of the American Women’s Hospitals Reserve Corps at Southold High School on Long Island. Britten played Beethoven’s F major Sonata, Op. 10, No. 2, and Chopin’s B flat minor Scherzo (‘His performance of these works was truly electrifying,’ said the local paper) and accompanied Pears in a quartet of operatic arias. But it was the three groups of English songs which must have been most affecting for the homesick performers themselves: Purcell and Bridge among the composers in the first set; after the interval, four of Britten’s folk-song settings; and, at the end, Lisa Lehman’s Three Cautionary Tales and a pair of Britten cabaret songs (‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘Calypso’). Their decision to return home remained unshaken, despite the increased danger: ‘We have already our priority on the boat,’ he told Antonio and Peggy Brosa on 31 December, ‘but we still haven’t got our exit permits, and when we get them, we’ve got to wait for a boat…’ He thought, optimistically, that this might take ‘at least a fortnight or so’. The Brosas were in America and in on the secret, but he didn’t want to alarm his family in England. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘you won’t mention to anyone that we’re going back, will you, please – because I think Beth & Barbara would have forty fits if they knew I was sailing at this time.’104
Meanwhile, Britten’s work was receiving some significant performances. Pears sang Les Illuminations in New York on 22 December, to great acclaim both in the hall – ‘At the conclusion, the audience cheered, shouted “Bravi!” and generally carried on,’ reported the New York World-Telegram105 – and from the press. At Symphony Hall, Boston, on 2 and 3 January, Serge Koussevitzky conducted the Sinfonia da Requiem with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in ‘a wonderful show’, according to Britten, who was there. Following the death of his wife on 11 January, the conductor established the Koussevitsky Music Foundation in her memory and immediately commissioned from Britten the opera which would eventually be Peter Grimes. Then there was the first performance of Diversions, Op. 21, by Paul Wittgenstein and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, which pleased the composer less: he had been to Philadelphia, he told Albert Goldberg, ‘to hear Wittgenstein wreck my diversions’.106 Isherwood was at the concert and afterwards met ‘Benjy and his friend Peter Pears … They are leaving soon for England where Benjy has decided to register as a C.O. We all got sadder and sadder and drunker and drunker.’107 Yet, despite the wreckage of his Diversions, Britten’s reputation was growing: at this of all moments he might, had he felt so inclined, have opted to become an American composer, in the sense that Auden became an American poet (and Isherwood an American novelist). The fact that he had absolutely no intention of doing so, even when there was substantial money involved – a few months earlier, he had turned down the chance of becoming Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico, at the huge salary of $32,000 – is further evidence of an unbridgeable distance between the two men. If Auden aspired to be, as he lightly put it later, ‘a minor atlantic Goethe’, what might an Americanised Britten have been like? A minor atlantic Schubert? No, it wasn’t for him.
For Auden, the determination of Britten and Pears to return home was, among other things, a personal affront. ‘I need scarcely say, my dear, how much I shall miss you and Peter, or how much I love you both,’ he wrote from Ann Arbor on 31 January. Such an opening must sooner or later be followed by ‘but…’. After praise of Britten as ‘the white hope of music’ and a rash of grandly capitalised abstractions (Goodness, Beauty, Order, Chaos, Bohemianism, Bourgeois Convention) come these two paragraphs:
For middle-class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the second [bourgeois convention]. Your attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, ie sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.
Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded
by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do, eg Elisabeth, Peter (Please show this to P to whom all this is also addressed). Up to a certain point this is fine for you, but beware. You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, ie to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy.108
This is clumsily hectoring even for Auden, who must by now have had some inkling of his friend’s sensitivity; it is, moreover, wrong on several counts. Auden had never understood Britten’s relationship with younger boys, in which the principal elements were a prep-school-masterish enjoyment of fun and games, a nostalgic wish to re-experience the happier part of his own childhood and a touchingly simple desire to do good. As we have seen and will see, the boys he valued tended to be sturdy and athletic, keen on tennis and swimming, rather than ‘thin-as-a-board juveniles’. In the only case where there may have been sexual contact, the boy (Wulff) was eighteen years old: the same age, in fact, as Chester Kallman when he embarked on his relationship with Auden. Then there is the point about Britten surrounding himself with friends such as Elizabeth and Peter, creating ‘a warm nest of love’: this is true if staggeringly tactless, yet what Auden doesn’t see is that – given Britten’s combination of intense creative energy, orderly working habits, erratic health and domestic incompetence – it was a practical necessity. And there’s an appalling irony in writing ‘you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself’ to someone who was about to cross the Atlantic in a cargo ship in the middle of a world war. Britten replied, but since Auden threw away all personal correspondence, we can only guess what he might have said. Unsurprisingly (and despite a short semi-apologetic note from Auden), this exchange of letters effectively marked the end of their friendship.
