by Neil Powell
After this flurry of activity, Britten took a short break in Dublin before he returned to Aldeburgh and to composing. His first tasks were the incidental music for a BBC programme, Men of Goodwill: The Reunion of Christmas, and a long-promised song cycle for Nancy Evans, A Charm of Lullabies, Op. 41, which he completed on 17 December. The following day he wrote to Pears: ‘Well – all my chores are done – the BBC have got their score, & yesterday we posted off to Nancy a “Charm of Lullabies” (??) all nicely washed & brushed, & quite charming & successful I think now – five of them.’9 He had found the texts in A Book of Lullabies, edited by F. E. Budd; the work was first performed in The Hague by its dedicatee on 3 January 1948. Next, there was Saint Nicolas, Op. 42, a commission for the centenary of Pears’s old school, Lancing; Crozier had been working on the text since September. The original proposal (and a cheque for £100) had come from Esther Neville-Smith, who was married to a member of staff, but it was the school’s sixth-form master and historian Basil Handford who suggested, as a counterpart to the Hymn to St Cecilia, a work celebrating the patron saint of children, seamen and travellers and of Lancing College itself. The school is part of the Woodard Corporation, a fact that, as Handford explained in Lancing College: History and Memories, had rather special consequences for the commissioned work, which ‘would be performed by the joint choirs of Lancing, Hurst, Ardingly and St Michael’s with perhaps contingents from other schools’. Moreover, there had to be ‘a special part for female voices, to be sung from the western gallery’ and a movement in which the choir ‘is divided into several sections so that each school could have its own short section to sing’.10 This was, of course, the kind of fiendish challenge Britten relished, just as he relished the chance to create surprising effects: on a visit to the school, he was discovered, according to Handford, ‘in Chapel walking round saying “how can I make a noise like bath water running out?”’11 For Britten, the most resonant movement would surely have been the seventh, ‘Nicolas and the Stolen Boys’, with its refrain ‘Timothy, Mark and John / Are gone! Are gone! Are gone!’ and their mysterious resurrection from a pickled and preserved state, an image of the frozen child within himself.
The work was performed at Lancing, with Pears as Nicolas and Britten conducting, on 24 July, but the school gave permission for two earlier performances to take place during the first Aldeburgh Festival, where it formed part of the inaugural concert in the parish church. ‘In return for this kindness,’ said the programme note, ‘it is asked that the two Aldeburgh performances shall be regarded as privileged occasions, and that public criticism of the Cantata shall be reserved for the Centenary performance at Lancing College.’ It was well received: ‘it testified yet again to the composer’s genius for securing the most telling effects by the simplest of means’, said The Times; Charles Stuart in the Observer found the ‘keynote’ was ‘gaiety’ and ‘shamelessly enjoyed’ the storm music; for Desmond Shawe-Taylor in the New Statesman and Nation, the first three episodes were ‘meltingly beautiful’ and there was ‘great beauty’ later on too. But Shawe-Taylor, perhaps drawing on undeclared personal knowledge (he was a close friend of Edward Sackville-West, with whom he shared a house in Dorset), added a telling codicil: ‘Though it may be presumptuous to say so, I feel strongly that what Britten needs at this moment is a rest from occasional commissions, a rest from concert-giving and accompanying, a rest from peripatetic chamber opera, and a long period of renewed exploration into the depths of his extraordinary genius.’12 Part of Britten must have ruefully assented to this wish, while the rest of him knew that it wasn’t in his nature to grant it for long.
His one remaining compositional ‘chore’ during the early months of 1948 was his realisation, Op. 43, of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay and John Christopher Pepusch, for the English Opera Group: it was first performed at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 24 May, with Pears as Macheath and Nancy Evans as Polly Peachum, conducted by Britten. He worked on the composition during his concert tour with Pears of Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands, which lasted from late January until early March. However, writing to Ralph Hawkes from the American Hotel in Amsterdam, he cancelled a proposed American tour in terms which anticipate Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s advice: ‘In future I am planning only the shortest concert trips with Peter, a week or two here & there … 6 weeks, or 2 months more, away entirely without work is now unthinkable.’ Meanwhile, the New York Met production of Peter Grimes had opened on 12 February: it was ‘certainly the talk of the town’, Hawkes assured him and, to prove it, his picture was on the cover of Time, against an incongruous background of fishing nets and ropes. While grudgingly admitting that the publicity was useful, he found it ‘not exactly to my taste’, and he was irritated by errors in the accompanying profile – above all by the comment that he, an indefatigable correspondent, ‘doesn’t answer letters’. He also formed a clear opinion of the Met’s production: ‘It does seem to have been catastrophic! I am only too thankful I wasn’t there…’13 But he was ‘there’ to see Covent Garden’s second cast, before their version went on tour in May: ‘I must frankly say I was shocked by it,’ he told David Webster, the Royal Opera House’s general administrator. Richard Lewis, he thought, might have made an adequate Grimes with more rehearsal, but Doris Dorée as Ellen Orford was ‘an unsympathetic character both in voice and acting’ and was ‘quite obviously temperamentally unsuited for the part’.14
As usual, Britten had been undertaking more than enough composing and performing work to exhaust anyone else – even he described it as ‘a particularly worrying patch of life, overwork & depression’15 – without taking into account the small matter of planning the inaugural Aldeburgh Festival. Fortunately, he was a natural organiser with a firm grasp of detail and a clear head for figures: he once said that if he hadn’t been a composer he might have been an accountant. (But it was Oliver Knussen who shrewdly pointed out that Britten ‘could have been anything that involved the effective deployment of small components within big masses’, rather mischievously offering ‘a general … or at least a chess master’16 as examples; he would also, of course, have made an excellent schoolmaster.) Another useful and possibly unexpected talent was his ability to deploy a light touch as when, just before Christmas in 1947, he was invited to talk about the planned festival during the interval of a concert in Ipswich. The next day’s East Anglian Daily Times reported:
Mr Britten, having affirmed his affection for the county in which he was born, said that Aldeburgh seemed to him to be the ideal place for the type of festival he had in mind. The festival he liked was not the kind which concentrated everything on music, but the sort of thing ‘where one can wander about’. For several years past, he said, he had been writing large-scale musical works, not a single one of which had ever been performed in Suffolk. In these days of universal suffering, he did not see why this should be so. (Laughter.)17
Britten could make people laugh because he initially seemed so buttoned-up – he was his own straight man – and also because, despite his slightly mannered speech, there wasn’t a hint of self-aggrandisement about him. At the same time, he was quietly confident about his festival’s ambitions: it ‘would steadily expand, and in ten years’ time, perhaps, it might be possible to build a Suffolk Opera House in Aldeburgh’.
Now the founders’ earlier tactical planning began to pay off. The cachet of Lady Cranbrook’s title proved invaluable in securing the support of the golfing and yachting sets, whom she privately referred to as ‘the Antibodies’. Lyn Pritt of the Wentworth Hotel provided an office and telephone for the festival’s newly installed general manager, Elizabeth Sweeting, who had previously worked at Glyndebourne and more recently joined the English Opera Group as Anne Wood’s assistant. On a torrentially wet January night, a well-attended public meeting at the Jubilee Hall heard about the proposals; by the end of the evening, those present had subscribed several hundred pounds as a guarantee against loss. By the beginning of February the first Aldeburgh Fes
tival had dates – 5–13 June – and a draft programme which Britten outlined with gleeful enthusiasm to Elizabeth Mayer: ‘We are planning 3 performances of “Albert Herring” – many concerts in the Church (including, Peter & me, Clifford Curzon, two choral concerts including my new St Nicolas Cantata etc.), lectures (including E. M. Forster, Kenneth Clark, Guthrie), exhibitions of modern paintings as well as the local painters Constable & Gainsborough! & Popular concerts, & bus excursions around the district, as well as a Festival dance!’18 Booking opened in mid-March and a few days later Britten could report to Pears that about a quarter of the tickets had already been sold. Soon there was a handsome poster announcing that the festival (‘in association with THE ARTS COUNCIL OF GREAT BRITAIN’) would include the following attractions:
THE ENGLISH OPERA GROUP
in
‘ALBERT HERRING’
*
PETER PEARS AND BENJAMIN BRITTEN
*
CLIFFORD CURZON
*
The ZORIAN STRING QUARTET
*
SAINT NICOLAS
a new cantata by Benjamin Britten
*
LECTURES AND EXHIBITIONS OF PAINTINGS
Perhaps the most brilliant and astonishing thing about this programme is the way in which it remains entirely true to Pears’s original formula of ‘A modest festival with a few concerts given by friends’.
Among these friends, none was more remarkable than E. M. Forster who, although he hadn’t published a novel since A Passage to India in 1924, was widely regarded as England’s greatest living novelist until his death in 1970. He had first met Britten in 1937, at a dress rehearsal of The Ascent of F6, where ‘he witnessed an angry scene’ between the composer and the director, Rupert Doone. He had been at the National Gallery performance of the Michelangelo Sonnets in 1944 and had subsequently bought the HMV records, although he had no equipment on which to play them; hearing of this, Britten sent him a gramophone. He arrived to stay in Crabbe Street and to explore Crabbe’s landscape some days before the start of the festival: ‘in the evenings’, says his biographer, P. N. Furbank, ‘Britten and Pears played and sang for him and improvised parodies at the piano’; he thought them ‘the sweetest people’.19 The lecture he gave, on ‘George Crabbe and Peter Grimes’, is full of quirky observations and disarmingly modest about his own role in bringing Britten and Pears back to England (he merely says that they read Crabbe ‘with nostalgia’), but it is also, as was his way, just a little naughty. ‘It amuses me to think what an opera on Peter Grimes would have been like if I had written it,’ he says, mock-innocently; it turns out that his version would have ‘starred the murdered apprentices’ and had ‘their ghosts in the last scene’ before ‘blood and fire would have been thrown in the tenor’s face, hell would have opened, and on a mixture of Don Juan and the Freischütz I should have lowered my final curtain’.20 While he praises the Britten/Slater version, he hints that it wasn’t quite operatic enough for his taste. His chance would come soon enough.
For many, the highlight of the festival was Albert Herring, which received three performances in the Jubilee Hall: having been heard in differently unsuitable venues such as Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, Albert had come home to a small Suffolk town, which was where he belonged. It was Forster, in his retrospective essay ‘Looking Back on the First Aldeburgh Festival’, who caught the magic of this occasion:
The full company of the English Opera Group, and its orchestra, had come down from London, and much fitting into the Jubilee Hall had to be contrived. There was not room for the harp and percussion amongst the other instruments. The harp had to be up in the auditorium with a screen in front, and the percussion on the opposite side was blanketed by gaily coloured eiderdowns to deaden the sound. The stage too was congested. The naughty children had to bounce with discretion, and Albert’s sack of turnips to be dumped where no one would trip. I had seen the opera before in the immensities of Covent Garden, where the problem was not so much to avoid collisions as to get into touch. I preferred the Aldeburgh performance. It was lively and intimate. The audience, after a little hesitation, started laughing, and Joan Cross, in the part of a dictatorial lady, seemed inspired to every sort of drollery. The music kept going, balance between voices and instruments was attained and maintained, but the feeling in the Hall was not so much ‘Here we are at last having an opera in Aldeburgh’ as ‘Here we are happy’.21
There is of course no room for a bar in the Jubilee Hall: during the interval the audience either spilled out onto the adjacent beach or went for a drink in the Cross Keys which – only a couple of doors away along Crabbe Street – is actually no further from the auditorium than the bar is at Snape Maltings. One member of the audience who went to the pub in the interval famously said: ‘I took a ticket for this show because it is local and I felt I had to. I’d have sold it to anyone for sixpence earlier on. I wouldn’t part with it now for ten pounds.’ Forster reports the story, so Britten would have heard it and been delighted by it. Three days after the festival ended, he described his pleasure to Edward Dent: ‘We have just come out from a most interesting experimental Festival here, in Aldeburgh; hundreds of people came – and Albert Herring was received with joy in the Jubilee Hall! What we seem to have proved without a doubt is that local people react strongly and encouragingly to this kind of local festival.’22
2
By the summer of 1948, Britten’s international reputation as a major composer was assured; he and his partner were settled in an attractive and comfortable house in the place where he knew he belonged; and he had triumphantly created in Aldeburgh a festival which exemplified his most deeply held principles about music and community. So why wasn’t he happy? One reason, not to be underestimated, is the fact that, for anyone prone to depression, the moment when accumulated successes naggingly insist ‘Now you should be happy’ can be the most depressing of all. And Britten hated the incidental consequences of his increasing fame: among the most vexatious of these was overhearing people talking about him when he travelled by train between Suffolk and London. ‘What do you do then?’ his sister Beth asked. ‘I go outside and stand in the corridor, or move into another carriage.’23 But there were other reasons too.
Living in Crabbe Street wasn’t turning out quite as planned. One early scheme was that Crozier, who was awaiting a divorce from his first wife, should have rooms at the top of the house, as at Oxford Square, which in due course might be converted into a self-contained flat when he was able to marry Nancy Evans; but this left insufficient space for Pears when he and Britten needed to be out of musical earshot of each other. Early in 1948, Britten told a disappointed Crozier that the idea was off, generously suggesting to Nancy Evans that he might instead buy them a cottage in Aldeburgh (there were two for sale) to use as their own local base. But in February, the divorce itself ran into legal difficulties and was indefinitely postponed. Pears, meanwhile, had familial troubles of his own: his mother died in October 1947 and his father early in 1948. Consequently, he and Britten decided to give up the house in Oxford Square, which had become unnecessarily large for them – ‘we were never there much’, Britten airily told Elizabeth Mayer, meaning he was never there much, and it was ‘incredibly expensive’ – although selling what was by then a very short lease proved tricky and time-consuming. Their erstwhile London tenants the Steins were moving to 22 Melbury Road, W14 (off Kensington High Street), where, reversing their previous arrangement, Britten and Pears sublet two rooms from them.
They would ‘concentrate on the Aldeburgh house’, Britten continued. ‘Peter has taken a great interest in the house & has many ideas re furnishings & curtaining – but these are very, very difficult & expensive these days. Still we manage – & with our new Constable & Turner, & several John Pipers we feel very grand!’24 Here, the distinctness of their enthusiasms, which were at best happily complementary, begins to seem more pointedly marked: Britten makes it clear that he isn’t greatly bothered about
soft furnishings, while ‘very grand’ comes with built-in irony from someone not keen on grandeur, least of all in Aldeburgh. There is an inescapable clash of outlooks here between Britten, who had come home to the Suffolk coast with its simple childhood pleasures of swimming and walking and good plain food, and Pears, whose instinct was to import more in the way of metropolitan sophistication into their lives. ‘Little by little … his home had become Suffolk rather than London,’25 writes Pears’s biographer Christopher Headington, of the decision to sell Oxford Square; yet the question of how far Pears really felt at home in Crabbe Street is far from straightforward. Humphrey Carpenter points out how little time he actually spent in Aldeburgh in these years: ‘for example during 1951 he was there for only six visits of a few days each, including the Festival’.26 Soon after Kurt Hutton had photographed Britten and Pears buying vegetables in the High Street, he took some equally famous pictures of them in Billy Burrell’s fishing boat, with Burrell, his lad Robin Long (‘the Nipper’) and E. M. Forster. Britten, next to the boy, appears easy and avuncular as he usually did when near children; Forster is wearing the attentive old codger face which came so naturally to him and, in one shot, the flat cap to go with it; only Pears, his arms more stiffly braced against the edge of the vessel, looks as if he would really rather be somewhere else. In many published versions of these photographs, including those in Carpenter’s biography, Pears (on the left of the picture) has been cropped out altogether. It seems an oddly symbolic absence.27
Pears was definitely and distantly absent during the autumn of 1948, when he went to America: this wasn’t, for once, a matter of professional engagements but a holiday spent revisiting old friends, such as the Mayers, and taking some lessons from his old singing teacher, Clytie Mundy. He travelled by air to New York on 17 October: it was his first transatlantic flight. Britten saw him off at the airport (‘I loathed, more than any moment of my silly life, leaving you’), then wept in the car back to London, accidentally scattered £5 notes over Liverpool Street Station, and had to be met and comforted at Saxmundham by his sister Beth. After he had stayed overnight with the Welfords at Hasketon, Beth took him into Ipswich to try on a new suit, presumably as a diversion, but there he caught sight of a newspaper headline, ‘“… believed lost” – & immediately feared the worst’.28 In the afternoon, after his sister had taken him back to Aldeburgh, a telegram arrived from Pears to confirm his safe arrival, and after supper Britten settled down to try and hear the first broadcast performance by Nancy Evans and Ernest Lush of A Charm of Lullabies ‘thro’ a mixture of Latvian Brass-bands, & Viennese Commentary’ on the Third Programme, whose medium-wave signal was notoriously interference-prone on the east coast. The following day, Pears wrote from the Mayers’ New York home in terms whose jauntiness seems almost unkind. ‘The aeroplane is a great modern invention … not wholly uncomfortable … entirely safe and ever so hospitable,’ he told Britten. ‘The hostess was graciousness itself, the sherry was fair, the steak at Shannon was enormous, the nightcap soothed … I wasn’t frightened at all – not at all.’29
