Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  But Britten’s anxieties weren’t to be so easily assuaged. A few days later, it was the New York traffic which troubled him: ‘Please, darling, remember to look left when stepping off pavements,’ he wrote, and drew a little diagram to illustrate the point.30 The following week, writing to tell Pears that they were at last on the telephone (though he probably wouldn’t use it for ‘a hectic 3 minutes of transatlantic call, with fading, & not daring to say what I really feel’), he described the ‘terrific sea today, most wonderfully beautiful; big racing clouds, lots of bright sun, & the gigantic waves all white’, adding: ‘Don’t be jealous, because you’ll be home soon…’31 Then he spent a day in Lowestoft, where there were ‘some remarkably fine-looking fishermen & boys, terrifically tanned & strong, in their curiously attractive clothes. You’d have loved it!’32 And in early November: ‘It is really heavenly here, & I can’t wait for you to enjoy it with me.’33 It sounds as if he realised he had yet to convince Pears that Suffolk was the place to be.

  Britten, of course, was an incurable worrier; he was also just starting work on a major composition, the Spring Symphony, Op. 44, which already had a complicated history. It had been commissioned, as ‘a symphony with voice’ and at a fee of $1,000, by Serge Koussevitzky in March 1946. At the beginning of 1947, Britten was ‘planning it for chorus & soloists’ while emphasising that it would be ‘a real symphony (the emphasis is on the orchestra) & consequently I am using Latin words’:34 he presumably had Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms in mind as a precedent. But by August 1948, when he told Erwin Stein that he was reading possible poems for his ‘Spring piece’, he had evidently changed his mind about Latin texts: he may well have been influenced in this decision by Forster, who was again staying in Crabbe Street and, following the broad hint in his festival lecture, pursuing the idea of becoming Britten’s next librettist, although the opera’s subject had yet to be chosen. His new plan for the symphony was to create a small anthology of English poems which would chart the transition from winter to spring, and his initial resource was a battered copy of Elizabethan Lyrics from the Original Texts, edited by Norman Ault, which he had possessed since 1932. ‘The work started abysmally slowly & badly, & I got in a real state,’ he wrote to Pears in New York (he was in a real state already). ‘But I think it’s better now. I’m half way thro’ the sketch of the 1st movement, deliberately not hurrying it, fighting every inch of the way. It is terribly hard to do, but I think it shows signs of being a piece at last.’ He was finding the first part of this movement, setting anonymous sixteenth-century words about a bleak winter’s night, ‘such cold music that it is depressing to write’;35 it is indeed eerily chilled, the chorus singing a cappella with icy percussive interjections. For a couple of minutes, we may wonder whether this is going to be an orchestral work at all, let alone a symphony; even by the end, despite its organisation into four parts corresponding to four symphonic movements, many listeners will understandably have heard it as a cycle of twelve songs.

  In Pears’s absence, which in this sense may have been beneficial, Britten began to make good progress. He had sketched out six of the songs by 5 November: ‘the Winter one (Orch. & Chorus), the Spenser (3 trumpets & you!), the Nashe (everyone), the Clare driving-boy (with soprano solo), a Herrick Violet (for Kathleen), and a lovely Vaughan one about a shower for you’.36 Pears returned briefly in mid-November before setting off again to sing the Serenade in Lausanne, after which Britten took a break to meet him in Holland. Back in Aldeburgh early in December, he sent a confident telegram to Koussevitzky: ‘SYMPHONY WELL ON WAY TO COMPLETION.’37 But it wasn’t. His ‘tummy’ had gone ‘all wrong again’ and he thought he had a stomach ulcer; for three months, despite spending three weeks with Pears in Italy early in the new year, he suffered from his usual lingeringly unspecific winter illness, accompanied by exhaustion and depression, and the Spring Symphony had to await an actual spring for its resumption. In mid-March, he was back at work and pleased with it, ‘apart from one still beastly bit that I can’t, can’t, can’t get right’.38 It was finished by May and received its first performance not from Koussevitzky but at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 14 July, as part of the Holland Festival, where it was conducted by Eduard van Beinum; the soloists were Jo Vincent, Kathleen Ferrier and Peter Pears. This was the second time Britten had denied Koussevitzky the premiere of a work commissioned by him, and the conductor was much displeased, relenting only when the composer had explained about his illness and his inability to get to America to hear the work at Tanglewood. He was, however, able to get to Amsterdam from where he sent Koussevitzky a not altogether tactful telegram beginning ‘DELIGHTED TO TELL YOU SYMPHONY GREAT SUCCESS IN HOLLAND’.39

  The Spring Symphony is a more subversive work than it seems. The obvious precedent, after Latin and Stravinsky had been jettisoned, is Mahler, in works such as his second (‘Resurrection’) symphony and Das Lied von der Erde (and whose fourth feels like a ‘spring’ symphony); but Britten seems determined to disrupt any expectations raised by this thought, as when the decorous boys’ chorus of Mahler’s Third Symphony is ironically echoed by the cheery mob in ‘The Driving Boy’. What we don’t get in this work, for all its avowedly celebratory intent, is tranquillity or happiness or Mahlerian expansiveness: ominously, the longest song (just under nine minutes in the composer’s own recording) is the wintry first one. As for tranquillity, the second, slow ‘movement’ seems to be moving towards it in Auden’s ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’, which belongs to his prep-school-teacher days; but this is violently disrupted by lines which by 1949 had become startlingly anachronistic: ‘And, gentle, do not care to know, / Where Poland draws her Eastern bow, / What violence is done…’ When we reach the finale, setting words from Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, we at last seem to enter a world of unselfconscious rustic jollity, a May Day celebration, complete with mooing cow horn, which ends on an apparently optimistic C major; yet, on the words ‘I cease’, it does just that, vanishing into silence like an interrupted dream. It’s a musical joke of which Haydn would have been proud, except for its blackness. But it does confirm one’s sense that the Arcadian ideal towards which the Spring Symphony strives is now out of reach, partly because this is a composition by the altered, post-Belsen Britten and partly because his implicit hope that a return to the east coast might enable him to recapture some of his childhood joys and innocence hadn’t been fully realised.

  So he turned to the next best thing: writing a work for actual children which would be both socially useful and emotionally therapeutic. This was Let’s Make an Opera!, a sort of do-it-yourself kit for the English Opera Group to stage at the 1949 Aldeburgh Festival: it would comprise a short, musically illustrated play about the writing and rehearsal of the piece, followed by a performance of a one-act opera, The Little Sweep. Although Britten had begun thinking about ‘a new Children’s Opera’ in October 1948, it wasn’t until April 1949, with his librettist Eric Crozier now installed not too far away in Southwold, that he had the time and energy to compose the piece. Writing to Ralph Hawkes in March, he provided a point-by-point account of his various projects and plans; ‘The Children’s Opera’ comes fifth in his list. It’s worth quoting the two paragraphs he devotes to it, because they perfectly illustrate his combination of focused creativity and hard-headed practicality:

  Eric has written a charming little libretto for a one-act children’s opera and is in the process of writing an introductory act in play form showing the preparation by the children of this one-act piece. The cast consists of five professional singers and six children, and the audience constitutes the chorus (a neat device for saving money, don’t you think?) I have left myself ten days for composing this, but I do not anticipate any difficulties arising.

  The first performance will take place in Aldeburgh, in the Aldeburgh Festival in June, then in Wolverhampton and Cheltenham, and we are hoping to arrange a tour in the autumn. We have already picked some startlingly good children t
o take part. They all come from Ipswich, where they are at various schools.40

  In fact, Britten wrote the piece during the first three weeks of April; on the 7th, Crozier reported that he had ‘seldom seen Ben so cheerful … He is loving writing the children’s opera and goes about with a beaming smile.’41 Yet, the very next day, Britten told Pears: ‘It’s funny writing an opera without you in it – don’t really like it much, I confess, but I’ll admit that it makes my vocal demands less extravagant!’42 This was a kind and tactful half-truth: he was enjoying himself partly because he was for once free of the complicated emotional baggage which accompanied writing for Pears. In its place was a simpler emotion: his inextinguishable pleasure in childhood. As with the Young Person’s Guide, he had particular children, besides the performers, in mind; and, as with Albert Herring, the piece is sprinkled with local allusions. These particular children were Lady Cranbrook’s, along with her two nephews, who supplied names for the children in the opera; the nineteenth-century setting was Iken Hall, the home of Margery Spring-Rice; and the housekeeper was called Miss Baggott, after the Aldeburgh grocer. Beyond these specific references, Let’s Make an Opera! was a crucial part of Britten’s contract with Suffolk: his recognition that he must give something back to the place which (on the whole) had proved friendlier to him than he might have dared to expect.

  At the same time, there was another, and grander, opera to be made: the one for which Forster was to be, with Crozier’s assistance, the librettist. Forster was full of enthusiasm, after his visit to Aldeburgh in August 1948, but he had no idea about a suitable story. In October, Britten and Crozier proposed The History of Margaret Catchpole: A Suffolk Girl, a mid-nineteenth-century novel by Richard Cobbold, which Forster rather damply told Crozier had ‘attracted’ him ‘at first’, adding: ‘There seems to me good reason that Ben should not write yet again about the sea.’43 A few weeks later, however, Britten suggested Herman Melville’s late novella, Billy Budd, Foretopman, which he had first read about in Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: ‘Billy Budd is a remote unearthly episode, but it is a song not without words … Evil is labelled and personified instead of slipping over the ocean and round the world … Melville – after the initial roughness of his realism – reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory.’44 One can easily see how Britten would have been drawn to this account of a work which makes it sound like a first cousin to Crabbe’s Peter Grimes (and also how this poses an immediate problem). ‘I have read Billy Budd,’45 Forster cautiously conceded on 11 November; and, indeed, a footnote in Aspects of the Novel recording his indebtedness ‘to Mr John Freeman’s admirable monograph on Melville’ almost implies that he hadn’t. Anyway, he read it now: there happened to be a convenient recent edition, published by John Lehmann in 1947, with a preface by his old friend William Plomer. At the heart of Melville’s tale, which is narrated with a good deal of moral philosophy and historical circumstance, is the disastrous relationship between three characters: Budd, the beautiful but stammering press-ganged sailor; Claggart, the master-at-arms whose thwarted love can only be expressed by destroying Billy; and Vere, the virtuous and scholarly though ultimately helpless captain of the Indomitable. Forster was taken with the story’s dramatic possibilities and, no doubt, its sexual implications, but Crozier was initially unconvinced.

  Early in the new year, the three collaborators met in Aldeburgh and made rapid progress: they decided on the overall shape of the work, including its framing prologue and epilogue, and the allocation of Captain Vere as a tenor role for Pears; a synopsis and a sketch of the Indomitable, both in Britten’s hand, survive from the meeting and, within a few days, Forster had sent Crozier ‘a rough-out for Vere’s opening speech’. They reassembled at Crabbe Street for three weeks in March: the two librettists divided their responsibilities – ‘Morgan is in charge of the drama, I am in command of the ship, and we share matters out between us,’46 wrote Crozier – while Britten finished his Spring Symphony. They seemed to be getting on splendidly; Crozier was especially delighted by Forster’s insistence that he should have equal billing as co-author. It was Britten who began to have misgivings. He thought the libretto ‘astonishing’ and Forster ‘at the height of his form’ yet, as he told Ralph Hawkes, ‘I am afraid the subject and the treatment will be controversial.’47 This caution seems out of character from someone who had previously enjoyed taking risks with sexually charged texts and giving the public not quite what it expected, but Britten had changed: he was almost forty and steadily becoming an establishment figure at a time of increasing hostility towards homosexuals and, in America, towards those with past or present left-wing political allegiances. Despite his fame and his festival, there were ways in which he had seldom felt less secure.

  Troubling undercurrents began to develop within the team working on Billy Budd. The mercurial Crozier recorded the changing weather, which on a good day might seem impossibly sunny: ‘I do not think there ever was a happier collaboration than this one between Ben, Morgan and me,’ he wrote to Nancy Evans in August. ‘We are thrilled by the work, we like each other, we respect each other’s viewpoints, and yet we are all so entirely different in our experience and gifts.’48 But only a month earlier, he more gloomily (and more accurately) noted that Britten had ‘jokingly’ told him that ‘one day I would join the ranks of his “corpses”’, the procession of discarded former colleagues which already included Slater and Duncan: ‘I have known since early this year that Ben was done with me, and that we could not work together again – for some years, anyway.’49 Britten was, in fact, furious with Crozier who, without consulting him, had sought from Boosey & Hawkes a guarantee against future royalties: ‘I cannot feel myself bound always to use him as my librettist. I must pick & choose according to my ideas.’50 Forster, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly frustrated by Britten’s habit of working on at least three things at once and disappearing to give recitals with Pears; during April and May, they performed in Milan, Rome, Genoa, Turin, Vienna, Brussels and The Hague. From the middle of October until early December, they were in North America for their first recital tour, giving twenty concerts in the USA and Canada; Britten was unconvinced by Pears’s enthusiasm for transatlantic air travel, so they sailed on the Queen Mary. ‘How we hate this place,’ Britten grumbled, perhaps forgetting that he always had done in the days when he could retreat to the Mayers’ sanctuary on Long Island. Now it was his turn to be frustrated: he wanted to start work on composing the opera, but hadn’t been sent the finished libretto: ‘WHERE is BILLY BUDD?? I am getting desperate about it,’51 he wailed to Erwin Stein.

  ‘Where is Billy Budd to be staged?’ would have been an equally pertinent question. The uncertainty which had preceded the first performances of Grimes and Lucretia – and fuelled Britten’s preference for small-scale operas in the Jubilee Hall – returned to haunt Budd: on the one hand, there was a plan for Sadler’s Wells to present it at the 1951 Edinburgh Festival; on the other, a suggestion from David Webster at Covent Garden that the new opera should be staged there as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. When the Sadler’s Wells proposal faltered, for financial reasons, at the end of 1949, Ian Hunter at Edinburgh innocently approached Glyndebourne as an alternative partner; but that, of course, was impossible for Britten. The opera remained homeless, while Arts Council sponsorship was sought and obtained, until November of the following year: then the dilemma was finally resolved in favour of Covent Garden, where Billy Budd would be first produced, rather later than originally intended, in December 1951.

  When Britten and Pears returned from their American tour, they were looking forward to a quiet Christmas: Ben would get down to work on the opera, while Peter might even take some rest before they set off for another series of recitals, this time in Scotland, during February. Crozier, whose divorce had come through and with whom Britten remained on cordial terms, was at last able to marry Nancy Evans on ‘wh
at I know will be the happiest Boxing Day of both your lives’.52 But this winter, it was Pears’s turn to be ill, and with shingles; afterwards, he went off to a clinic in Switzerland to convalesce, where Britten imagined his ‘quick eye roving round for the blonds’ and assured him that ‘here’ – he was staying with their old friends the Behrends at Burghclere – the weather was ‘ideal mountain weather – you really needn’t have gone away!’ Britten had been to a meeting of the English Opera Group’s directors to appoint a new general manager, and they had chosen Henry Foy, ‘a flowery cove, moustache & curly hair (how I hate curls)’.53 Foy was to prove financially disastrous and would be gone within a year. But another appointment, closer to home, was altogether more successful and enduring. Their housekeeper, Barbara Parker, had left in February 1949, to be replaced by a ‘footman’ (Britten’s term) called Mr Robinson who had taken to behaving very oddly: his habit of nocturnal piano-thumping proved especially irksome. He was now succeeded by Nellie Hudson, a homely and straightforward spinster in her early fifties, from whose uncle Britten had bought the Old Mill at Snape. For almost a quarter of a century, until she retired on her seventy-fifth birthday, Miss Hudson expertly ran the Britten–Pears domestic establishment and its kitchen: at first, she said, she had been wary about ‘concert people’ and their friends, perhaps having some vague image of unwashed bohemians, but she was greatly impressed by their much-bathed cleanliness and she enjoyed cooking the traditional ‘nursery food’ so relished by ‘Mr Britten’. She mothered him, of course, and he loved it.