by Neil Powell
Ashton, born in 1904, was the finest English choreographer of his time. He and Britten had so much in common that one might have expected them to have collaborated sooner or more often; but Britten was as wary of the outstandingly talented as of the conspicuously homosexual; and Ashton, like Auden, was both. He too had Suffolk connections: his mother’s family came from Yaxley, where in 1948 he bought a cottage close to his ancestral graves. He had met Britten before the war, at a dinner given by William Walton, and afterwards wrote to him on a postcard of Bronzino’s Don Garcia de’ Medici: ‘Is this really your adorable self?’123 They had contemplated a ballet using Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Now, while Ashton’s new London home in Yeoman’s Row was being redecorated, he looked forward to at last working with Britten in what he imagined would be tranquil and pleasant surroundings. He was in for a shock. ‘Ben wouldn’t speak to Christie or allow him inside his own theatre,’ he told Julie Kavanagh. ‘We weren’t allowed to stay in Glyndebourne or go into the bar. The moment the rehearsal was over, we got into a bus and went to a house on the cliff somewhere.’124 He may have exaggerated the details, but he was right about the tension: Christie was to greet members of the audience with the encouraging words, ‘This isn’t our sort of thing, you know.’125 And there was also friction between Ashton and Crozier, who had a subtly delineated idea of how the opera should be: he had already disagreed with Ebert, who thought it was about ‘social criticism’ and ‘mendacious prudery’ instead of being ‘a simple lyrical comedy’,126 but now he found Ashton’s exuberantly comic approach too farcical for his taste. Crozier’s disapproval pushed Ashton to the brink of resignation yet despite this, and although he thought the stressed personal relationships at Glyndebourne both ‘small-minded’ and beyond his comprehension, he did enjoy working on Albert Herring, from which he took away two enduring rewards: with his fee he bought an enormous Aubusson rug for the drawing room at Yeoman’s Row, greatly astonishing his new housekeeper, Mrs Lily Lloyd (who was, as it happens, my grandmother), while the opera itself sowed the seeds of his own masterpiece, La Fille mal gardée.
‘Freddie Ashton has done an excellent production and the sets look delightful,’127 Crozier told the conductor Hans Oppenheim after the first night on 20 June 1947. He had forgiven Ashton, but not Glyndebourne’s owner or the opera’s early critics. The receptive audience at the dress rehearsal, he reported, had dared to laugh ‘loud and long at all the things they were intended to think funny’, causing Christie to describe them as ‘a very vulgar audience’. The first-night audience were much stuffier, and so were the reviews. ‘A salacious French story of Maupassant is translated by Eric Crozier into a rustic English comedy of the way a bumpkin kicks over the traces, and the result is a charade,’ wrote Frank Howes in The Times; while Richard Capell in the Daily Telegraph thought that ‘all these [Britten’s] talents have gone to no more purpose than the raising of a snigger’. But other reviewers were more sympathetic, and one – Charles Stuart in the Observer – made a crucial three-way connection: ‘Britten has never given us a lovelier, wittier or defter score than Albert Herring, which makes the perfect pendant to Peter Grimes and comforts many who had diagnosed a falling-off in The Rape of Lucretia.’128 For a pendant to Grimes, even more than a counter-balance to Lucretia, is precisely what Albert Herring is: another man set apart by his oddity in a Suffolk village, this time viewed through a comic rather than a tragic lens, with the connection slyly emphasised by moments of self-parody (compare, for instance, the ‘Good morning’ exchanges of Mrs Sedley, her ‘nieces’ and Swallow in Act 1 of Grimes with those of Lady Billows, the Vicar and the Mayor in Act 1 of Herring). It is often helpful to see Britten’s compositions in terms of their interconnectedness, as in the group of Purcell-related works, rather than in isolation.
The Glyndebourne cast included Pears as Herring, Joan Cross as Lady Billows, with Frederick Sharp and Nancy Evans as the corruptive pair of lovers, Sid from the butcher’s and Nancy from the bakery; the English Opera Group Chamber Orchestra, a forerunner of the ECO, was conducted by the composer. Pears, who celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday during the run, was on the elderly side as Albert, though he would be in his fifties by the time he recorded the work in 1964 (the young John Graham-Hall, who made his Glyndebourne debut in Peter Hall’s 1985 production, looked much more convincing in the part). Also among the cast were three ‘children’: Emmie and Cis were sung by adult sopranos, but the part of Harry was taken by thirteen-year-old David Spenser, an experienced boy actor suggested by Nancy Evans. It was the first time in an opera that Britten had created a singing role for a boy. ‘He treated me with a lot of humour, which made it easy for me, because every time I opened my mouth to sing he would give me a look of utter astonishment which made us both laugh,’ Spenser remembered. ‘His eyebrows would go up, up, up, and there was a quiver of a smile on his face, as if he was surprised I’d even attempted the last phrase.’129 It was a hugely enjoyable experience for a boy whose parents had split up when he was five: his father was in Ceylon and he lived with his mother, the breadwinner, for whom he had to do most of the cooking and housework. Britten, he found, was more than just a father-substitute: he was approachable on equal terms, ‘a lovely listener, a soother … one of the few people in the world, at that time, that I could talk to’.130 After Glyndebourne and the English Opera Group’s subsequent European tour with Lucretia and Herring, Britten invited the boy to stay at his new home in Aldeburgh.
He completed the purchase and moved in during late August. Crag House, a substantial pink-stuccoed building, lies between Crabbe Street (on its inland side) and Crag Path, the town’s modest promenade, its rear windows and garden directly overlooking the shingle beach with its huts and fishing boats. One of Britten’s first acts on acquiring the property was to have the postal address altered to the less pompous ‘4 Crabbe Street’; it was Crabbe, after all, who had brought him there. At last he could really feel he was back where he belonged, living and working within sight of the North Sea, just as in his Lowestoft childhood: both the ground-floor sitting room and his first-floor study – with a grand piano in each – had big windows facing the beach. For Pears, although he interested himself as usual in the choosing of carpets and curtains, the place had no such resonance: this was a simple fact of difference between them. Both men were by this time, as creative artists go, relatively well off: Pears had bought their London house and had begun to collect valuable paintings; Britten owned both the Old Mill (which he had let) and the house in Aldeburgh, as well as a 1929 Rolls-Royce Shooting Brake which he had acquired in the previous year. That their enthusiasms were so different, though mutually enjoyed, was one of the strengths of their relationship: in many respects – including the great married tradition of bickering over breakfast – they behaved just like any other couple. A series of photographs taken in 1948 shows them buying vegetables from Jonah Baggott’s stall outside the post office in Aldeburgh’s High Street: the ease and normality of the scene is impressive even today. They managed to seem superbly unaware of the fact that, in social terms, they were doing something extraordinary.
David Spenser came to stay in Crabbe Street at the very end of August, the day after Britten had returned to Aldeburgh from London, where he had been recording the Donne Sonnets with Pears for HMV. Pears, meanwhile, had travelled north to sing at the inaugural Edinburgh Festival, to which Britten had also been invited (they would have performed Die Schöne Mullerin together) but, wanting to get down to some composing, had declined; nevertheless, he told Ralph Hawkes in his ‘first letter from the new house’, ‘I’m fairly well represented with Y.P.’s Guide, Illuminations (Peter) & P.G. Interludes’.131 The move was hardly complete and there was no guest bedroom ready, so David had to share Britten’s double bed. But any anxiety on the boy’s behalf would be misplaced: he was enjoying a holiday by the sea with a kind friend, with whom he swam every morning and walked in the afternoons, who played the piano for him each evening after supper, and
whose housekeeper, Barbara Parker, made ‘the most lovely apple pies’ which he recalled half a lifetime later. David, at thirteen, knew about homosexuality and recognised it in the ‘slightly camp’ Ashton, but the issue simply didn’t arise for him with Britten: ‘There was no hanky-panky or I would have certainly told my mother. It was a very big bed, and I just went to sleep. The next time I came to visit, not long after, I had the spare room, which by then was ready.’ For his part, Britten even put up with David’s fondness for Chopin and Brahms and his dislike of Mozart, merely remarking: ‘One day you will realise that Mozart was the greatest composer who ever lived, and Brahms was the worst.’ After his first visit, David wrote in his thank-you letter: ‘I don’t think I have ever been happier in my life.’132 His host felt this too: ‘Little David went off yesterday morning – rather sadly, poor little thing,’ he told Pears on 4 September. ‘His home life is hell, but I think his existence has been made a little brighter by being treated properly for a few days.’133 He sounds rather pleased with himself, and not without cause: it was what he had wanted for Harry Morris, but this time he had got it right.
Although Britten’s recent life had been dominated by the production of three operas in three successive years, he had continued to fit in other work, such as the Occasional Overture, for the opening of the BBC Third Programme in September 1946, and the Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria for Walter Hussey at St Matthew’s, Northampton. With Pears, there had been concert tours of the Netherlands in October–November 1946; of Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark in January–February 1947; and of Italy in April–May. Then, in July and the first part of August, there was the EOG’s European tour with Lucretia and Herring, ending in Lucerne: they had an Arts Council grant against loss of £3,000, but they lost the same again. It was while they were en route from the Holland Festival to the Lucerne Festival – the scenery was in three lorries, while most of the singers and musicians went by train – that the Group’s founding friends, who were travelling in Britten’s Rolls, began to confront the glum fact that touring on this scale was, for a small company, unsustainable. Then, as Eric Crozier later recalled, one of them made a ridiculous and brilliant suggestion. ‘“Why not,” said Peter Pears, “make our own Festival? A modest Festival with a few concerts given by friends? Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival?”’134
CHAPTER 6
A MODEST FESTIVAL
1947–55
1
Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival? Where to start? The town is small and, as festival locations go, remote: on the bulge of the East Anglian coast, at the end of the road. Until 1963, it was marginally more accessible than Southwold or Orford, since it still had a branch railway which connected with the not especially main line at Saxmundham and a local train humorously known as ‘The Aldeburgh Flyer’, but the timetable definitely hadn’t been arranged with concert-goers in mind. Aldeburgh had hotels and guest houses for summer visitors, though these couldn’t begin to cope with the numbers a music festival might generate. Its only suitable venues were the parish church, the cinema and the tiny 300-seat Jubilee Hall – also between Crabbe Street and the beach, a hundred yards from Britten and Pears’s home – unless you were to count (and they would) the Baptist chapel in the High Street. Yet it’s strange that, even now, beginning to list the reasons why a festival in Aldeburgh couldn’t work seems to make the idea all the more irresistible.
Britten, Pears and Crozier must have tried hard to banish the first act of Albert Herring from their memories as they assembled their committee of the locally great and good. Among the first of these was Margery Spring-Rice, of Iken Hall, near Snape: she was the granddaughter of Newson Garrett, who had built the local Maltings, and she would live to see the Aldeburgh Festival’s eventual transformation of the redundant malthouse into its main concert hall. ‘I think the “Festival Idea” has cheered her,’ Britten reported to Pears in September; ‘she thinks it is the idea of the century, & is full of plans and schemes.’1 She proposed an initial meeting at Iken Hall and suggested the involvement of the Countess of Cranbrook, who lived nearby at Great Glemham, where Crabbe had once been rector. Crozier remembered calling on ‘Colonel Colbeck, the Mayor, and Mr Godfrey, the Vicar, for their advice’ and then giving ‘a tea-party for local friends and acquaintances’.2 Resembling Albert Herring’s Lady Billows only in her determination, Fidelity Cranbrook chaired the first formal meeting of the Executive Committee, held on 27 October at Thellusson Lodge in Aldeburgh: among those present were the rector, the Revd R. C. R. Godfrey, and (a sound strategic choice) G. L. Ashby Pritt, the owner of the Wentworth Hotel; Anne Wood was there, ‘representing the English Opera Group’, and ‘Mrs C. E. Welford’ – Ben’s sister Beth – tactfully represented the Britten family. Apart from describing the festival’s quite promising financial basis and registering such interesting details as the Bishop’s insistence that two hundred free seats should be available at any performance in the church, the minutes of this initial meeting record what would prove to be a momentous decision: ‘It was AGREED that the Festival be called “The Aldeburgh Festival”, but the question as to whether the words “Music” and/or “Drama”, and a reference to Mr Britten’s name be included, was left open.’3 The significance of this is threefold: the festival was named to reflect its roots in the town and the community (as, for instance, ‘East Suffolk Festival’ wouldn’t have done); the ‘Music and…’ formula, which became ‘Music and the Arts’, allowed it to embrace exhibitions and literary talks; and the wise reluctance of ‘Mr Britten’ to have his name included in the title indicated that this wasn’t to be focused on one composer in the manner of Salzburg or Bayreuth.
It was typical of Britten that, having invented a new form of opera, he should now invent a new shorter form of work for voice or voices and piano as his first composition in Aldeburgh. The name he chose for what would eventually be a set of five pieces, ‘Canticles’, has a perfectly straightforward musical-liturgical sense, but in the case of Canticle I: My Beloved is Mine, Op. 40, there is more specific allusion. The text is by the early-seventeenth-century poet Francis Quarles (Britten had already set his Christmas carol in A Boy Was Born), who had in turn based it on a verse from The Song of Solomon, also known as The Canticle of Canticles: ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.’ The composer’s manuscript is dated 12 September 1947 and the work was first performed by Pears and Britten at a concert in memory of Dick Sheppard, a founder of the Peace Pledge Union, on 1 November. Quarles’s poem – which, like its source, uses strikingly homoerotic language – here becomes another barely encoded love song shared between its performers: the opening lines of the second stanza (‘Ev’n so we met, and after long pursuit, / Ev’n so we joined; we both became entire’) might aptly describe their journey to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1939 and they are rapturously treated. The concluding lento section, beginning ‘He is my altar, I his holy place’, achieves a balance of eloquence and restraint unsurpassed in Britten’s word setting.
Within a week of Canticle I ’s premiere, Peter Grimes opened at Covent Garden in a new production by Tyrone Guthrie, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch and conducted by Karl Rankl; Pears and Cross returned to their original roles for the first three performances but were replaced by Richard Lewis and Doris Dorée for the rest of the run and the European subsequent tour, in which Reginald Goodall alternated with Rankl. Although welcomed by some of the ‘dear old critics’ who ‘follow along three or four years behind as usual – what bores they are’,4 the production, less realistic and indeed less Suffolky than the earlier one, was disliked by Britten, who blamed the size of the house and concluded that ‘small opera is the thing – in spite of the nice noises one can make with an orchestra of 85 & chorus of 60!’5 With the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh soon to become his operatic venue, this was just as well. But he can’t have failed to be delighted by Neville Cardus’s review in the Manchester Guardian, which precisely summed up his own ambitio
n for Grimes: ‘Here, at last, are a work and a production fit to stand four-square anywhere in the world – and not because of lofty emulation of a foreign masterpiece. Peter Grimes is English through and through, without trustful resort to folklore.’6
November 1947 turned out to be an astonishingly busy month for Britten – who, only a few weeks earlier, had been promising himself some quiet composing time in his new home. On 9 November, he introduced and, with members of the Zorian String Quartet, performed two works by Frank Bridge on the BBC Third Programme. His broadcast introduction contains a deliciously mischievous summary of the musical environment into which Bridge grew:
… the school of chamber music was really in the doldrums. The headmaster was Brahms, chief assistant masters, Schumann and Mendelssohn; the dancing-master, Dvorak, and of course above all, the Chairman of the Governors – Beethoven. Not much notice was taken of those rather dull, superannuated professors Haydn and Mozart – and though the occasional visits of the Art Master Schubert gave pleasure, his character was highly suspect.7
Ten days later, Britten and Pears gave a recital in Huddersfield of works by Purcell, Bridge and Berkeley as well as his own Donne Sonnets, while on 20 November they were in Chester performing Purcell, Schubert and Britten: just as in his CEMA days, he thought ‘dashing over the country giving recitals’ was ‘a far finer & more rewarding way of making music’8 than losing his temper at Covent Garden. On 24 November, there was a joint Third Programme recital with the Zorians, in which Britten and Pears performed four Mahler songs and two of Britten’s Purcell realisations; two days after that, they broadcast On This Island and Canticle I in a programme called Songs of Benjamin Britten. On 29 November, they took part in a broadcast of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century duets and cantatas, and then they rounded off the month with a recital of Purcell and Schubert plus Britten’s Donne Sonnets and folk-song arrangements in Cranleigh. Their appearances on the Third Programme had now become so frequent that Herbert Murrill, the BBC’s assistant director of music, felt he had to raise the matter with the Music Booking Manager.
