Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  As ever on such occasions, Britten’s composure was perfect; as ever, it was a mask. Throughout the performance, he had been pacing to and fro at the back of the theatre, too nervous to sit down; afterwards, amid the backstage congratulations, he was stony-faced. Only later, during the celebratory party given by Ralph Hawkes at the Savoy, did he begin to relax. Even so, it would take time for him to realise what he had just achieved.

  Britten’s achievement in Peter Grimes is characteristically paradoxical. The work is at once old-fashioned in its construction of linked set pieces and radical in its borrowing of montage techniques from the composer’s experience in film and radio. From the opening moments, when Grimes is summoned to appear not only in court (to explain the death of his apprentice) but also in his own opera, it’s clear that Britten is going to work hard on behalf of his central character. Peter Grimes’s replies are surrounded by a halo of strings, almost as if he were Christ before Pontius Pilate in a Bach Passion; after this, his subsequent transitions from rough belligerence to aching introspection will be astonishing but not absurd. The pub scene which closes Act 1 – introduced, punctuated and concluded by the storm outside – is an especially bold exercise in juxtaposition: its edgy jollity and violent undercurrents are first disrupted by Peter, who enters and unexpectedly launches into his achingly inward aria ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ before this is swept away by the supposedly cathartic round ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’; yet it too will be upset by Peter’s own subversive version of the song, before Hobson the carrier arrives with the new apprentice and the storm licks round the act’s end. Britten’s sense of the cinematic is equally evident in the Sunday-morning scene which opens Act 2, in which the useless pieties of the offstage church service, complete with choir and organ, repeatedly nudge against the evolving human drama of Peter and Ellen on the street outside. This scene is the pivot on which the opera turns: by the end of it, the townsfolk are self-righteously setting off in pursuit of Peter in his hut. Two scenes packed with event, energy and development thus necessarily give way to the more sombre half of the opera: the by now inevitable sequence of the new apprentice’s accidental death – not at his employer’s hands but in a terrified fall – followed by Peter’s descent into madness and his eventual suicide by drowning.

  The critical reception was not one of unqualified praise; it was better than that. Because the opera was treated seriously, often at length, as a masterpiece, there was room for the reservations which form part of intelligent analysis. For instance, Frank Howes in The Times was worried about that anti-climactic final scene while, writing in Time and Tide, Philip Hope-Wallace detected ‘some failure … in solving the problem of operatic tempo’ and suggested that there was a problem with Grimes himself: ‘We never really meet the man. His death breaks no heart. His suicide is a mere item of police court news.’83 Though harsh and arguably misguided, Hope-Wallace’s objections are all the more interesting because they would be so exactly answered by Britten in Billy Budd. Several reviewers were puzzled by the unresolved tension between sadistic villain and sympathetic outsider in Grimes (to which one possible reply is that it can be resolved only by his death), but almost everyone agreed that Pears was magnificent in the role. Scott Goddard, in the News Chronicle, thought that he ‘gave a profoundly sympathetic rendering of the part for which he will be remembered’ and concluded that the opera ‘is a work that must not be ignored by those who admire originality and take the art of opera seriously’.84 The following year, when Goddard contributed the chapter on Britten to A. L. Bacharach’s British Music of Our Time, he dealt with the furore which had preceded the first night before adding: ‘When at length Peter Grimes was heard, it was found to be finer as a work of art, less tendentious as a vehicle for ideas, less portentous as a manifesto than friends or enemies had implied.’85 Among the most thoughtful of the first reviewers were William Glock in the Observer and Desmond Shawe-Taylor in the New Statesman, both of whom wrote twice and in some musical detail on Peter Grimes. Glock, who found ‘the most masterly writing of all’ in the church scene at the start of Act 2, returned to the subject a fortnight later in indignation, not with the opera but with those who had described it as ‘fierce and challenging’: ‘What spoiled babies we have become. I should have thought that the most noticeable thing about Britten was his gift for making statements of undoubted originality in terms which everyone could understand.’ He also added ‘a last comment on Britten’s treatment of words’, insisting that ‘Nowhere in “Peter Grimes” is there anything stiff or self-conscious’.86

  Those last two points would have especially pleased the composer. In his own introduction to the opera, published in the Sadler’s Wells Opera Book to accompany the production, he wrote: ‘One of my chief aims is to try and restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell.’87 It’s a large and justified claim, made with persuasive modesty and indicating the special importance of Purcell for Britten during the 1940s; it may also slyly remind us that Purcell too could create a major opera from a poor libretto (Britten’s own realisation of Dido and Aeneas would be produced in 1951). More intentionally sly were his gracious acknowledgements to Sadler’s Wells, whose ‘existence has been an incentive to complete Peter Grimes’ and where ‘the qualities of the Opera Company have considerably influenced both the shape and the characterization of the opera’. He hoped that ‘the willingness of the Company to undertake the presentation of new operas’ would ‘encourage other composers to write works in what is, in my opinion, the most exciting of musical forms’.88 This was a hope shared by William Walton, who wrote Britten a self-confessed ‘“fan” letter’, praising his ‘quite extraordinary achievement’: ‘It is just what English opera wants and it will I hope put the whole thing on its feet and give people at large quite another outlook about it.’89 It’s a handsome letter from the older composer, even if it doesn’t quite square with Walton’s reported lack of enthusiasm at the first night and his vote against a recording of Peter Grimes to be supported by the British Council, of whose Music Committee he was a member. By the time he received it in the third week of June, Britten himself had begun ruefully to admit that he might have achieved something special. Writing to an appreciative audience member, the mother of his 1930s colleague Basil Wright, he was ‘awfully glad’ that she had liked it and ‘excited that it is going so well’: ‘It looks as if the old spell on British opera may be broken at last!’90 If one spell had been broken, another had been created: ‘I do not remember ever to have seen, at any performance of opera, an audience so steadily intent, so petrified and held in suspense as the audience of Peter Grimes,’91 wrote Edmund Wilson. And the spell spread beyond the theatre: a bus conductor would shout to his passengers in Rosebery Avenue, ‘Sadler’s Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?’

  A week after the Sadler’s Wells premiere of Grimes, Britten conducted the LSO in the first performance of Four Sea Interludes from ‘Peter Grimes’ at the inaugural Cheltenham Festival. These interludes, which were destined to have a separate life as one of Britten’s most popular orchestral works, had originated in the practical necessity of having music to cover scene changes and to indicate time passing: they were in part a homage to his mentor Frank Bridge, who had died in 1941 and whose episodic, impressionistic The Sea had ‘knocked sideways’ the ten-year-old Britten when he heard it in Norwich. But they also seem to be – even more than the rest of the opera – music that couldn’t have been written anywhere but the Suffolk coast. Their unmistakable sense of spiritus loci goes well beyond the mimetic recreations of storm and calm and distant church bells: while their focus is self-evidently the sea at Aldeburgh, they are also redolent of Snape, with its marshes and mudflats, its curlews and skylarks, and its huge shifting sky. Goddard, rounding off his 1946 essay on Britten (with a clear sense that the composer was likely to render it out of date by the time it reached print), a
dded a final sentence to his comments on Peter Grimes: ‘And when the Four Interludes from the opera were played at the Cheltenham Festival a few months [sic] later, there was no questioning the quality of vision Britten had experienced nor his remarkable success in expressing that vision in music of great emotional power, penetrating beauty and a completely individual manner of writing.’92 Also at Cheltenham was another senior composer, Rutland Boughton, who, having heard the Interludes, found himself ‘compelled to run to town for the complete work, and I rejoice in it even though my old ears cannot always accept your dissonances…’93 Boughton, who was to lecture on opera in London on 1 September, wanted to refer to Grimes and wondered whether there might be further performances at Sadler’s Wells in the autumn. But that, as Britten told him, was not to be: ‘I am afraid that there won’t be any performances in London in the near future: there has been a big bust-up in the company, & the Governors of the Wells have sided with the “opposition” to Grimes, & so it doesn’t seem likely that it will be revived there.’94 There were in fact to be ten further performances of the opera at Sadler’s Wells the following spring – Pears and Cross, having by this time resigned from the company, appeared as guest artists – and on 13 March it was broadcast live from the theatre, though apparently not without technical problems, by the BBC.

  Peter Grimes is a great – for many, the greatest – English opera; yet it deals with themes which were controversial and ambiguous and, moreover, places them in a setting which must have seemed intractably unfamiliar to most of its London audience. Its triumphant success speaks well for the intelligent receptiveness of both critics and public – though not, alas, of the management at Sadler’s Wells. In July 1945, having irrevocably altered the course of music in England, it would have been more than understandable if Britten had decided that he deserved a relaxing holiday.

  4

  At a party given by Boosey & Hawkes while Peter Grimes was in repertoire at Sadler’s Wells, Britten found himself talking to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who told him that he was about to undertake a tour of Germany, performing at venues which would include the former concentration camp at Belsen and taking with him Gerald Moore as accompanist. Like Menuhin, Britten had been ‘casting about for some commitment to the human condition whose terrible depths had been so newly revealed’ and begged to take Moore’s place. In the few days remaining before their departure, ‘Ben and I made an attempt at rehearsing a repertoire,’ Menuhin remembered, ‘only, after five minutes, to abandon it … we put our trust in luck and musical compatibility…’ Their trust was not misplaced. They took with them ‘more or less the whole standard violin literature’ and they played ‘without rehearsal, two or three times a day for ten days in the saddest ruins of the Third Reich’.95 On 27 July, at Belsen, they performed twice in one afternoon; there, among the audience, was a twenty-year-old cellist, Anita Lasker (the future Mrs Peter Wallfisch and member of Aldeburgh’s ‘house band’, the English Chamber Orchestra). She had heard of Menuhin but not of the pianist, who found himself inadvertently renamed ‘Mr Button, Mr Menuhin’s secretary’, and shortly after the concert she described this mysterious individual in a letter to an aunt: ‘Concerning the accompanist, I can only say that I just can not imagine anything more beautiful (wonderful). Somehow one never noticed that there was any accompanying going on at all, and yet I had to stare at this man like one transfixed as he sat seemingly suspended between chair and keyboard, playing so beautifully.’ Also present was an English nurse who recalled ‘two compassionate men clad simply in shirt and shorts creating glorious melody and moving amongst the people’.96 Back home at the Old Mill on 1 August, Britten in his usual self-deprecating way told Pears that ‘Yehudi was nice, & under the circumstances the music was as good as it could be’, before adding: ‘We stayed the night in Belsen, & saw over the hospital – & I needn’t describe that to you.’97 Not only ‘needn’t’, but ‘couldn’t’: both Menuhin and Pears agreed that Britten never again spoke about Belsen until very near the end of his life when, Pears told Tony Palmer, he said ‘that the experience had coloured everything he had written subsequently’.98

  What did this actually mean? It may remind us of Theodor Adorno’s hauntingly memorable, though now clearly misguided, maxim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; of course, if he had subscribed to that, Britten would never have written another note. Presumably he meant that the unclouded childlike optimism for which he had sometimes striven was no longer an option in his music, although (and quite logically) he would come to value it even more in children. Creatively, a time when ‘all went well’ was from now on only available to him as a barely accessible memory. There are very few easy resolutions in Britten’s later work; and ease, when it is attempted, is always troubled by ambiguity. His increasing preference for leaner forms and smaller forces, though also shaped by practical circumstances, was precisely consistent with this altered view of art. And so was his choice of habitat: the bleakly chastening landscape of coastal Suffolk is plainly conducive to a musical language as ruthless and clear as winter light over the reed beds.

  On his return from Germany, Britten became feverishly ill: this was possibly a reaction to the vaccination ordered by his doctor, but it was also his usual reaction to stress and, in a pattern stretching back to Quatre Chansons Françaises, it provided the creative incubation period for a new song cycle, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Op. 35, which he completed on 19 August. Although he had been thinking about setting Donne for at least two years, the task now became different and urgent. The result is perhaps the most abrasive and least amenable of his major song cycles: it opens mercilessly, with an accompaniment of pared-down chromaticism, and although it ends with the defiant ‘Death be not proud…’, it does so without any sense of triumph. The cycle’s emotional centre of gravity comes at the end of the third sonnet where, over a simple rocking two-note figure in the accompaniment, the tenor sings on almost a single note (like a pendant to ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’): ‘To poore me is allow’d / No ease, for long, yet vehement griefe hath beene / Th’effect and cause, the punishment and sinne.’ One problem for the literary-minded listener is that Donne’s great sonnets are exceptionally dependent on metrical checks and balances within each line, which Britten often overrides (this habit is naturally less intrusive in his settings of obscure or minor poems); in Pears and Britten’s 1949 HMV recording, which is the closest we have to their original intentions, Pears sounds strained or pushed at some of the more awkward moments. Yet one might with equal justice describe the cycle as courageous and uncompromising, noting too that its bleak angularities seem to belong as unmistakably as Peter Grimes to the unforgiving Suffolk coast. Behind it, neither for the first time nor the last, stands Purcell and, in this case, his Divine Hymns. The work received its premiere, performed by Pears and Britten, in a concert marking the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death, at Wigmore Hall on 22 November 1945, which was also Britten’s thirty-second birthday.

  The same venue had already hosted one Purcell anniversary concert, on the previous evening, which included the first performance, by the Zorian String Quartet, of a work completed even more recently by Britten: his Second String Quartet, Op. 36. This had been commissioned by Mary Behrend, to whom he presented the manuscript score in December: ‘I am so glad you got pleasure from it because to my mind it is the greatest advance that I have yet made, & altho’ it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on new lines.’99 Its most striking novelty is the extended, eighteen-minute-long passacaglia or ‘Chacony’ – a favourite form of Purcell’s and of Britten’s – which concludes the work, a troubled and haunting movement made instantly memorable by the bold unison statement of the theme with which it begins. The equally spaced strokes with which this movement ends seem to hint at physical violence, a memory of South Lodge or of Grimes ‘at his exercise’. John Amis, who was married to the quartet’s leader, Olive Zorian, recalled Britten attending rehearsals at their
flat, ‘advising, encouraging, strict but tactful, the model of composer behaviour’. He also noticed a characteristic of Britten’s, endearing at a distance, which could be difficult to decode: his knack of being utterly serious about music without appearing to take himself at all seriously. Amis would occasionally ask about a detail or make an admiring remark such as, ‘“Oh, I see, this new tune is really the old one upside down” … at which Ben would look hard at his score and say ‘“Oh, is it? Fancy that!” Sometimes he would wink as he said it.’100 The Times, reviewing both Purcell concerts, was slightly cautious about the quartet (‘pungent without being aggressive, original without strain’) but keener on the song cycle which ‘triumphs by its sustained intensity’.101

  Britten composed a third Purcell-inspired work in the autumn of 1945, the music for a Ministry of Education film – Instruments of the Orchestra, directed by Muir Matheson – which he completed on New Year’s Eve; in its concert version, the score would become known as The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34, subtitled ‘Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell’. The theme, from Purcell’s music for Abdelazar (it also exists in a keyboard version), is used as the basis for variations by each section of the orchestra in turn before it shoulders its way back into the fugue. Some writers on Britten pass swiftly over the piece as if its clarity and popularity make it beneath notice; but the work is remarkable for at least two reasons. Firstly, it achieves its stated and tricky aim of providing an introduction to the symphony orchestra without either longeurs or condescension. But secondly, and perhaps more intriguingly, something very particular happens when the Purcell theme makes its magnificent reappearance in the closing fugue. I remember that some years ago, at the Aldeburgh Festival, I found myself talking to a distinguished twentieth-century music specialist in the Cross Keys: when the conversation turned to that puzzling topic of music which moves the listener beyond measure, I expected my friend to nominate something difficult and obscure. No, he said, the moment when the Purcell theme re-emerges in the Young Person’s Guide is the one that does it every time. And in John Bridcut’s film Britten’s Children, there’s a touching interview in which David Hemmings makes a similar point: after humming and pomming the theme, with tears in his eyes, he says, ‘That’s the champagne moment.’ So it is, and it is also something else: the Elgar moment. For it will surely remind us of the way in which the opening theme returns, similarly transformed by its altered context, at the end of Elgar’s first symphony. Britten had already made his peace with Elgar, as we have seen, and by thus nodding towards him in the Young Person’s Guide he acknowledged two of his greatest English predecessors in a single work.