by Neil Powell
Since their return to England, Britten and Pears had made some important new friends. One was Clifford Curzon, probably the finest and certainly the most fastidious English pianist of his generation, with whom Britten was to perform and record the two-piano works written for ‘the two gizzards’ or ‘the little owls’, as he called the Robertsons. Another was Michael Tippett, who had been in the audience at the National Gallery performance of the Michelangelo Sonnets; when Britten was shown Tippett’s A Child of Our Time (not to receive its premiere until March 1944) in December, he thought it ‘a grand work’, and in 1943 Tippett was to compose Boyhood’s End for Pears and Britten. There is a clear shift of emphasis here, away from the left-wing documentary-makers and literati who had figured so largely in Britten’s pre-war London life and towards relationships solidly underpinned by shared musical values. But a third new friendship, though creatively productive, was emotionally rather more complicated. This was with the music critic Edward Sackville-West, who had written with such enthusiasm about the Michelangelo Sonnets. By that time, he and Britten had already met and discussed the possibility of incidental music for a two-part radio drama, to be called The Rescue, based on the Odyssey of Homer. When shown a draft version of the opening pages in October, Britten was delighted: ‘It has quite a terrifying atmosphere, & grand opportunities for juicy music!’32 The following month, on 16 November, there was a private concert at 96 Cheyne Walk, a few steps from 104a. James Lees-Milne was there, in his driest Casca-esque mood:
Rick [Stewart-Jones] and John Russell organized a concert at Whistler’s House, 96, in which Eddy and young Benjamin Britten played on two pianos Schubert and Chopin, and a tenor, Peter Pears, sang extremely competently the Dichterliebe of Schumann as well as Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, composed by Britten himself. Everyone said what a good concert this was. I am so ignorant I can only judge music emotionally, not intellectually.33
Then, at the beginning of December, Britten received from Sackville-West an overwrought letter, which began ‘Dear White Child’ (an allusion to Auden’s ‘dear white children’ in the Hymn to St Cecilia) and, after a glancing reference to The Rescue, continued: ‘How foolish I am to be writing to you like this! how foolish ever to have told you how much – how unspeakably I love you! For I know from experience how unwelcome and embarrassing it is to be loved by someone for whom you cannot care.’34 Britten replied with calming kindness and ‘real affection’, wanting their friendship to survive (as it did), not least because ‘I love being with you & picking your brains’.
The first public performance of the Michelangelo Sonnets at Wigmore Hall was followed on 28 November by that of the confiscated and reconstructed Hymn to St Cecilia, given by the BBC Singers conducted by Leslie Woodgate; it had already been broadcast on 22 November, which was both the saint’s day and the composer’s twenty-ninth birthday. This benignly approachable piece, Britten’s final collaboration with Auden and dedicated to their mutual friend Elizabeth Mayer, was also well received. Although Britten sometimes seemed unable to ‘distinguish between the divine spark and the spark of the firework manufacturer’, in this work he had ‘not invoked St Cecilia in vain’, said Gerald Abraham in the Observer. ‘It is not merely that the “Hymn” sounds well; Britten’s music almost always does. This is music that will probably last when Mr Britten’s Roman candles are long burnt out.’35 A week later, A Ceremony of Carols (subsequently revised by the composer) was performed at Norwich Castle by the women’s voices of the Fleet Street Choir, who also gave the first London performance on 21 December at the National Gallery: neither the forces nor the venues were ideal for a work written with boy trebles in mind and, with its processional opening and recessional conclusion, intended to be heard in a church. On 13 December, Pears gave the first performance of four folk-song arrangements (‘The Bonny Earl o’ Moray’, ‘Little Sir William’, ‘The Salley Gardens’ and that encore favourite ‘Oliver Cromwell’) in their orchestral versions, with the New London Orchestra conducted by Alex Sherman; two days after this, he successfully auditioned for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company and at once embarked on a hectic sequence of operatic roles, starting with Tamino in The Magic Flute. And on 22 December, the BBC Midland Light Orchestra under Rae Jenkins gave, as a BBC Forces Service broadcast, the first English performance of Matinées Musicales.
So the year was ending with more in the way of performance and praise for both Britten and Pears than they would have dared to imagine when it began. Nevertheless, an otherwise happy Christmas was ‘blighted’ by the unexplained arrest of their friend and advocate Canon Stuart Morris on a charge under the Official Secrets Act; after a trial held in camera, he was sentenced to nine months in prison. More cheerfully, Beth Welford, who was imminently expecting her second child, had moved to the safety of Snape, where Sally – Britten’s niece and Pears’s god-daughter – was born on 13 January 1943. At Wigmore Hall on 30 January, Walter Goehr conducted the first English performance of Les Illuminations in its orchestral version, with Pears as soloist; a few days later, Britten and Pears left Cheyne Walk and moved to a maisonette at 45a St John’s Wood High Street, NW8. This time, it was Pears who wrote to their common confidante Elizabeth Mayer in terms which neatly illustrate his and Britten’s differing approaches to domestic life: ‘It was very exciting going round choosing curtain materials – I wish you had been there. You can imagine how I enjoyed it and Ben loathed it! They are nice curtains…’36 At least Britten now had somewhere to unpack his things.
He had hardly done so when once again, following a recurrent late-winter pattern, he became seriously ill: it seemed possible that overuse of the proprietary drug usually called M&B (sulphonamide, manufactured by May & Baker) had weakened his long-term resistance to seasonal bugs. This year, however, he developed measles and was sent to Grove Hospital in Tooting, a circumstance which he managed to find ludicrous: ‘Yes – isn’t this a major bore? – at my age too – Measles at Tooting!’37 He had plenty to think about musically and, thanks to Enid Slater, plenty of books to read. She had sent him a life of Constable, in whom he detected a kindred spirit: ‘Apart from having an almost sexy love for his paintings, I admire his extraordinary oneness of purpose, & character to go on with lack of success.’38 Ralph Hawkes, indulging the invalid’s passing fancy, gave him a score of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, as he was ‘impatient to see how the old magician makes his effects’. Possibly to Hawkes’s relief (as well as ours), Britten assured him that his own forthcoming opera wouldn’t be ‘as lush or glittering as this one – after all there is a difference between Vienna & Suffolk!’39 Once out of Grove Hospital, he would need to go somewhere quiet and rural for a few weeks to recuperate; fortunately, he knew just the place.
2
The Old Mill stands on rising ground, just north of the village centre in Snape, with views across the River Alde to the marshes and reed beds beyond. At the crossroads is the Crown, on whose main bar, with its curved high-backed settles, Britten and his designer Kenneth Green would base the Boar in Peter Grimes; in 1943, there were several village shops, now mostly compressed into one small modern ‘convenience store’ on the site of a former garage. A few hundred yards beyond the Crown, a narrow railing-fenced bridge, demolished in 1959, crossed the Alde to the ‘commodious wharf and warehouse’40 founded by Newson Garrett and the handsome range of nineteenth-century industrial buildings known – despite actually being in the neighbouring parish of Tunstall – as Snape Maltings. Along the northern bank of the river, the Sailor’s Path leads to the coast, four miles away at Aldeburgh. This is Crabbe’s country, and Britten’s: he may not have been a true local, but neither was he an ‘incomer’. He was indisputably a Suffolk man, with relatives in the county (some of whom had lived at the Old Mill in his absence), so he could justifiably feel that he was back where he belonged. ‘We are so happy here in Snape,’ he wrote, ‘Beth & the children, Kit, when he can get away, & the same for Peter…’41 It was a good place for him to recuperate: he was at ho
me and with a family around him.
Beth remembered that, in the months following his return to Snape, her brother struck ‘a bad patch’ and became ‘convinced he would never write anything again’; but this time, instead of contemplating an alternative career in hardware, he spent his days ‘walking across the marshes, walking in fact anywhere, everywhere’.42 In doing so, he discovered the missing element in his creative routine: for almost the rest of his life, he would rise early, work through the morning until lunch at one o’clock, walk in the afternoon, work from tea until dinner and, after dinner, read or talk or listen to music. During one of these walks, he was passing the Maltings, ‘singing at the top of his voice and waving his stick in the air, when he suddenly realised that a group of people were staring at him’. ‘They must have thought I was mad,’ he told his sister, an impression doubtless reinforced by the fact that, according to Oliver Knussen, ‘Britten had one of the most appalling singing voices of any composer I’ve ever come across … no pitch to speak of – just a kind of Sprechstimme drone.’43 His routine wasn’t, however, quite as puritanically rigid as it may seem. ‘Sometimes,’ Beth said, ‘when I went to take him his coffee, I found Ben reading a “who-dunnit”. When I looked surprised, he would look up guiltily and say that it relaxed him,’44 just as potboilers and cartoons had done a decade earlier.
While working on the incidental music for the radio series An American in England, which was broadcast weekly to America at 3 a.m. London time during the summer of 1942, Britten had been astonished by the brilliance of the RAF Orchestra’s 21-year-old principal horn, Dennis Brain, for whom he ‘took every opportunity to write elaborate horn solos’. Then, during the feverish leisure of his stay at Grove Hospital, he found that he was ‘intrigued by the Nocturne idea for Voice & Horn’;45 not, of course, for any old voice and horn, but specifically for Pears and Brain. It was to be Britten’s first major composition since returning to England but, as he worked on it at Snape, he was cautiously if knowingly modest. Writing to Pears on 21 March, and regretting that he’d been unable to accompany him in recitals, he casually mentioned that ‘at least I’ve been able to write things for you’,46 while in early April he told Elizabeth Mayer that he had ‘practically completed a new work (6 Nocturnes) for Peter [and] a lovely young horn player Dennis Brain, & Strings’. ‘It is not important stuff,’ he added, ‘but quite pleasant, I think.’47 This unimportant stuff would be dedicated, as an elegant acknowledgement of the love he couldn’t return, to Edward Sackville-West, who had advised him in choosing the poems to be set, and it would be called the Serenade, Op. 31, for tenor, horn and strings.
Britten’s selection of texts for this work is of special interest because – unlike those for Les Illuminations and the Michelangelo Sonnets, which were in languages likely to be safely incomprehensible to an audience (at least on first hearing) – they were in English. In discussing the Serenade, Humphrey Carpenter drew attention to the composer’s engaging habit of ‘wandering about the house and picking books from the shelves at random’,48 when he was having trouble with his work, as an explanation for his wide and eclectic knowledge of poetry; but this belongs to a slightly later period, when he had a more established home and a larger library. In fact, he found all but two of the poems in the Serenade in the copy of Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse which he won as a school prize in 1930. He listed sixteen possibilities on the back flyleaf, of which he was to set five: ‘Blow, Bugle, Blow’ (Tennyson), the anonymous ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, ‘Hymn to Diana’ (Jonson) and ‘Sonnet: To Sleep’ (Keats) were included in the Serenade, although Britten discarded his posthumously published setting of Tennyson’s ‘Summer Night’ (‘Now sleeps the crimson petal…’), partly on musical grounds but also, Donald Mitchell suggests, ‘perhaps because so overt an affirmation of the composer’s love for his soloist might have generated problems in the early 1940s’. This would have mattered less if the poem had been in French or Italian. Of the two remaining poems in the Serenade, Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ would probably have been known to Britten, but the stanzas from Cotton’s ‘Evening Quatrains’ (‘The day’s grown old, the fainting sun / Has but a little way to run…’), which so magically follow the horn’s Prologue, may well have been unfamiliar to him: Mitchell suspects ‘that it was exactly here where Sackville-West may have stepped in, perhaps with more suggestions among which were Blake’s and Cotton’s texts’.49 If so, and even if his influence were confined to the scene-setting Cotton, Sackville-West’s role in shaping the Serenade was a crucial one. In fact, the cycle’s final shape follows the kind of pattern which becomes increasingly familiar in Britten’s settings of English poetry: outer movements evoking night and sleep surround a dark centre, here provided by Blake’s ‘O Rose, thou art sick!’ and the terrifying fifteenth-century dirge.
Pears, however, at first had reservations. ‘How are the songs?’ he asked in an undated letter from Blackpool Opera House, where he was about to sing the Duke in Sadler’s Wells’s production of Rigoletto. ‘I do hope I didn’t damp your poor old enthusiasm too much about them…’50 They had evidently had one of their quite frequent (and neither shocking nor surprising) disagreements the previous weekend during Pears’s visit to Snape: it’s conceivable that Pears felt some jealousy or resentment about Sackville-West’s involvement with the work. On 1 April, Britten reassured him: ‘[D]on’t worry, the Nocturnes will be worthy of you by the time I’ve finished!’51 As indeed they were when Pears and Brain gave the first performance later that year.
Illness had forced Britten to cancel scheduled appearances – William Glock had to deputise for him at a Wigmore Hall performance of the Michelangelo Sonnets in March – although what irritated him most was that a recording for Decca of the Hymn to St Cecilia by the Fleet Street Choir had gone ahead without his permission or supervision. He tried to get it withdrawn and managed to have it re-recorded, yet he remained unhappy: ‘It is a pity,’ he told Hawkes, ‘but the moral is, don’t get measles!’52 At least he recovered in time to give a concert with Pears and Clifford Curzon, at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge on 25 April, which included the first British performances of his two-piano pieces. He also accepted a slightly eccentric invitation from the Revd Walter Hussey, of St Matthew’s Church, Northampton, which reached him via Hawkes, ‘to write some music for our Jubilee celebrations next September’. Throughout his church career at Northampton and later as Dean of Chichester, Hussey was energetic and successful in commissioning work both from composers and from visual artists; what almost certainly clinched the matter for Britten was the postscript added to his letter of 22 March, in which he apologised for seeming ‘impertinent’ but hoped ‘you will forgive me and put it down to enthusiasm for a great “bee” of mine – closer association between the arts and the Church’.53 Britten replied that he shared Hussey’s ‘bee’ and was sure he could manage an anthem: ‘Something lively for such an occasion, don’t you think?’ The result would be Rejoice in the Lamb, Op. 30. A more modest anniversary was the tenth birthday of the Boyd Neel Orchestra in June: many of its regular members were now servicemen, but it proved possible to assemble eighteen players for a celebratory concert at Wigmore Hall on 23 June and for this occasion Britten composed his Prelude and Fugue, Op. 29. The typically unsettled, questing violin melody of the prelude is followed by a dazzlingly energetic fugue and an elegant reprise of the opening theme: it’s a mystery that this enjoyable little work (of just under ten minutes) is so seldom heard.
‘One great new friend Peter & I have made, an excellent composer, & most delightful man, Michael Tippett is having a bad time & may have to go to prison (you can guess what for),’54 Britten told Elizabeth Mayer on 22 May. Shortly after he and Pears gave the first performance of Tippett’s Boyhood’s End at Morley College on 5 June – the first work written specifically for them by another composer – Tippett was indeed sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs, having refused to undertake non-combatant military duties. He was, ho
wever, amused to be given charge of the prison orchestra in succession to Ivor Novello, who had been convicted of petrol-coupon fraud. On 11 July, Britten and Pears gave a recital in the prison, at which John Amis contrived to be present in the guise of page-turner:
But when we got inside I explained to the chaplain that the turning over was so complicated that we needed an extra person to help, someone who could read music. The chaplain replied he had no one on the staff who could read music. I asked if we could borrow prisoner No. 5832, Tippett, M., who was known to us and could read music. The chaplain said it was against all the rules but he would see what he could do. So Michael came on to the platform with us and we turned alternate pages. It was a very moving occasion.55
With remission, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs on 21 August. He went straight to have breakfast with Britten and Pears at St John’s Wood High Street and then on to an afternoon concert at Wigmore Hall, at which the Zorian Quartet performed his second String Quartet.
For Rejoice in the Lamb, Britten chose to set extracts from Christopher Smart’s marvellous though extremely strange Jubilate Agno, a decision which may have slightly alarmed Walter Hussey, to whom he wrote on 28 May: ‘I am afraid I have gone ahead, and used abit about the cat Jeffrey, but I don’t see how it could hurt anyone – he is such a nice cat.’56 In fact, the two men established an easy rapport before they met, through letters which display a charming lightness of touch on both sides. These culminated in Hussey’s list of queries about the work, sent in late August, which he arranged as a typed questionnaire, with blanks to be completed and phrases to be deleted, and headed with the following rubric: ‘Five minutes only – I hope – are necessary for this paper. Candidates should attempt all questions.’ Britten dealt with this in the appropriate spirit, signing it ‘E. B. Britten (minor) *(School Certificate – 5 credits)’ and adding a footnote: ‘*In addition to this startling qualification, it might interest you to know I was also a valuable member of all the elevens, Victor Ludorum, held record for several years for Throwing the Cricket Ball (until broken by a beastly boy in a gale), apart from my highly distinguished career in the Junior Tennis World. So now you know the stature of the composer you’re dealing with –!’57 On the day of the performance, Britten was accompanied by Michael Tippett, who at his instigation had composed a Fanfare for Brass for the same occasion, and with whom he processed in surplice and cassock to the choir stalls: Britten, Hussey remembered, had ‘slight hesitations’ but Tippett ‘encouraged him and they walked together and sat in the choir in like style’.58 After the performance, Britten wrote to Hussey to say that it had been ‘a great experience’ and to thank the choir and the soloists, as well as the organist, Charles Barker, who had played ‘most intelligently & sensitively’.59
