by Neil Powell
3
This is where the Britten myths, and the anti-Britten myths, really begin. Eric Walter White’s pioneering study, which first appeared in German as Benjamin Britten: eine Skizze von Leben und Werk, was published in English by Boosey & Hawkes in 1949 as Benjamin Britten: A Sketch of his Life and Works (and in subsequent editions by Faber as Benjamin Britten: His Life and Operas); this was followed by a special Britten Number of Music Survey, edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller, in spring 1950. These generous tributes to a composer still in his thirties did not find universal favour. In particular, the anonymous TLS review of White’s book, noting that ‘every religion’ develops ‘a canon of sacred writings’ and mentioning Karl Marx and Mary Baker Eddy as examples, continued: ‘It was, therefore, to be foreseen that the latest and most flourishing of our musical sects would furnish itself with a written account of the life and works of its hero, a neat and unpretentious gospel discreetly combining the qualities of hagiography with those of a modern publicity agency.’ The reviewer, Martin Cooper, may conceivably have been misled by the imprimatur of Britten’s music publisher on the title page, whereas the book had in fact been commissioned by Atlantis Verlag in Zurich; but that hardly begins to excuse the tone of his review. Cooper found it ‘incongruous’ that ‘the central character, and indeed the hero’ of Peter Grimes should be, in White’s words, ‘a maladjusted aggressive psychopath’, which suggests that he would have had trouble understanding Macbeth, and he also found incomprehensible some comparatively lucid remarks by Ronald Duncan about Lucretia. But perhaps the most barbed section of his review dealt with the absence, in Grimes, of convincing female characters which, he thought, ‘accentuates the extraordinary emotional unbalance of the whole plot’.54 In the climate of the time, this would have been very widely read as a coded reference to the ‘emotional unbalance’ of Britten’s sexuality.
The two mid-century myths about Britten, closely linked and equally untrue, were that he had surrounded himself in Aldeburgh with a homosexual coterie and that he had betrayed his social principles by sycophantic fawning on members of the aristocracy. But, as we have already seen, he had no taste for what would later be called the gay scene and he tended to distance himself from men such as Auden and Ashton. On the other hand, while most of his ‘corpses’ were male, he enjoyed long and stable friendships with numerous women, including Elizabeth Mayer, Mary Behrend, Imogen Holst and Marion Stein. It was Marion Stein’s marriage in September 1949 to the Earl of Harewood, a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II (an occasion to which Britten contributed and conducted a ‘Wedding Anthem’ with text by Ronald Duncan), which fuelled the second myth. But Britten’s connections with both were firmly grounded in music: George Harewood was president of the Aldeburgh Festival, a writer on opera and a music administrator; Marion was the daughter of Boosey & Hawkes’s Erwin Stein, whom Britten had first met in pre-war Vienna and whose London house he and Pears now shared. Wilfully misinterpreting these quite straightforward facts, the American critic Virgil Thomson would claim that the musical establishment in England was ‘chiefly controlled by Britten and his publisher, the latter linked by marriage to the throne’.55
Although a prolific letter writer, Britten was cautious about public utterance: he trod carefully in interviews and he seldom committed himself to print except on very specific occasions such as short programme notes on his own works or brief introductions (as, for example, to a history of the Boyd Neel Orchestra in 1950). So when, rarely, an opportunity occurred for him to explain what he was about, in a clear putting-the-record-straight way, he tended to seize it: his speech of acceptance on being made a Freeman of the Borough of Lowestoft in July 1951, an honour which genuinely touched him, was just such an occasion. The local dignitaries and townspeople, assembled in the theatre where the six-year-old composer had once appeared in The Water Babies, might seem an improbable audience for Britten’s most passionately lucid statement of his artistic credo, but for him this would have been half the point: as with his wartime CEMA concerts and his post-war provincial recitals with Pears, he believed that anything presented outside the capital must be at least as good as that offered to privileged Londoners. After thanking the Borough of Lowestoft ‘for the great and rare compliment it pays to Art generally, by so honouring me, a humble composer’, he gave a succinct explanation of his own cultural rootedness in Suffolk:
Suffolk, the birthplace and inspiration of Constable and Gainsborough, the loveliest of English painters; the home of Crabbe, that most English of poets; Suffolk, with its rolling, intimate countryside; its heavenly Gothic churches, big and small; its marshes, with those wild sea-birds; its grand ports and its little fishing villages. I am firmly rooted in this glorious county. And I proved this to myself when I once tried to live somewhere else. Even when I visit countries as glorious as Italy, as friendly as Denmark or Holland – I am always home-sick, and glad to get back to Suffolk.
Here – and by pointing out, in his next paragraph, that Peter Grimes, Albert Herring and Let’s Make an Opera! are all set in Suffolk – Britten is staking his claim as a very particular kind of artist: one whose work, like that of Constable and Gainsborough and Crabbe, is inseparable from its creator’s birthplace and preferred habitat; Hardy in Wessex and Elgar in Worcestershire are also like this, but such figures became increasingly rare during the mobile, deracinated twentieth century. And of course with Britten the Suffolk landscape and seascape become implicit in everything he wrote after his post-war return there: we will recall him saying to Bobby Rothman that he didn’t need to hear the gulls – because the sound of gulls had been part of his inner being from the day he was born.
This logically leads Britten to describe the kind of artist he is in practical terms: he wants ‘to serve the community’. ‘And the artist today has become the servant of the whole community … It is not a bad thing for an artist to try to serve all sorts of different people.’ Nor, he adds, is it a bad thing for ‘an artist to work to order’, instancing Dido and Aeneas, the St Matthew Passion, The Marriage of Figaro and Aida as examples of commissions which turned out to be masterpieces. Yet, despite this apparent pragmatism, he reminds his audience that artists ‘have an extra sensitivity – a skin less, perhaps, than other people’. They may do things which are ‘strange or unpopular’ and they may suffer for that: ‘Remember for a moment Mozart in his pauper’s grave; Dostoievsky sent to Siberia; Blake ridiculed as a madman; Lorca shot by the Fascists in Spain.’ After this, he tactfully returns to the more grateful and reassuring image of the ‘very small boy, dressed in skin-coloured tights, with madly curly hair’ who ‘never dreamed that he would ever appear again, on the stage of the Sparrows’ Nest, and be honoured like this by his own townspeople’.56 But there are serious subtexts buried, not too deeply, in this speech: his implication that the artist who invests in his own locality, as he had with the Aldeburgh Festival, deserves some local support in return; his clear identification with other persecuted or ridiculed creative artists while he was working on what he suspected might be his most vulnerably controversial opera, Billy Budd; his implicit plea for some critical generosity in the reception of new and unfamiliar works, a subject to which he would more explicitly return a few months later in an article called ‘Variations on a Critical Theme’ for Harewood’s magazine Opera. It is no coincidence that these two unusually frank public reflections on the relationship between the composer and his public should flank Budd’s premiere.
Forster’s tetchy sense of Britten’s inability to focus on the main work in hand is scarcely borne out by the meagre tally of his other compositions during the period of their collaboration: these comprise the Five Flower Songs, Op. 47, Lachrymae, Op. 48, Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, Op. 49, and his realisation with Imogen Holst of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Lachrymae, composed in May 1950, was especially close to Britten’s heart in two respects: it is a work for his own two instruments, viola and piano, and, as its subtitle ‘Reflections on a Song of Dowland’ sug
gests, it is founded on material by one of the greatest composers of the English Renaissance. Britten bases his ten variations on the first eight bars of Dowland’s ‘If my complaints could passions move’, incorporating in the sixth a reference to ‘Flow, my tears’ and returning to an almost unadorned version of the original song’s final strain at the end of the piece; he would use a similar strategy of ingeniously delayed gratification in a later Dowland-based piece, the Nocturnal, written for Julian Bream. Lachrymae was first performed, by William Primrose and the composer, as part of the third Aldeburgh Festival, on 20 June 1950. Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, a solo work for the oboist Joy Boughton, received its premiere at the following year’s festival, when it was performed, somewhat eccentrically, from a boat on Thorpeness Meare; almost inevitably, the score was caught by the wind and blown into the water, from which it had to be swiftly fished out and dried.
The Purcell realisation, a harbinger of things to come, was largely the result of remote collaboration: Imogen Holst was still Director of Music at Dartington. Pears, working there as a resident tutor in February 1951, couldn’t praise her highly enough: ‘She is quite brilliant – revealing, exciting,’57 he wrote. With the tireless dedication which she would soon bring to Aldeburgh, she had copied out a manuscript full score of Dido and Aeneas for Britten to work on: the Britten–Holst edition would add three numbers borrowed from elsewhere in Purcell to complete Act 2 (although Geoffrey Bush contended in a letter to The Times that it didn’t need completing) as well as a realisation of the continuo part. It was first performed by the English Opera Group, in a double bill with Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, on 1 May 1951; two differently cast performances at the Aldeburgh Festival followed in June with, respectively, Joan Cross and Nancy Evans as Dido and with George Malcolm and Britten directing from the harpsichord. Although the Britten–Holst Dido and Aeneas was destined to fall from favour as early music became increasingly concerned with period authenticity, Steuart Bedford conducted an undervalued recording of it in 1978, with Janet Baker an older and wiser Dido than in her celebrated earlier version and Pears as Aeneas, just as he had been at Aldeburgh twenty-seven years before.
All these works were minor undertakings in comparison with Billy Budd, which was turning out to be the most time-consuming and exhausting project Britten had ever attempted. One cause of his exhaustion was Forster who, at the start of 1950, had a prostate operation and in March came to Aldeburgh to convalesce. At first things went well: there were visitors at weekends, including the Steins and the Harewoods (‘What a nice chap he is – so gay, friendly, and straight,’ Forster enthused), and a good deal of mutual admiration exchanged. But by the end of April, ‘Poor old Morgan’ had been ‘taken bad again’ and was packed off once more to the nursing home in London. ‘It’s a great curse for the poor old man – & he’s madly depressed,’ Britten told his sister Barbara. ‘But I think it’s best he should go & get it all coped with as we’re all getting a bit worn!’58 In fact, they were falling out over Britten’s treatment of the libretto: Forster admitted to his friend Bob Buckingham that he had had his ‘first difference of opinion’ with Britten ‘over the dirge for the Novice’: ‘He has done dry contrapuntal stuff, no doubt original and excellent from the musician’s point of view, but not at all appropriate from mine.’59 This impossible distinction dismayed and infuriated Britten, who Forster mistakenly believed had taken his criticism in good part. Nor was Britten the ideal host for an elderly convalescent: since both his parents had died while comparatively young, he had no experience of caring for the infirm old; and he was impatient with illness, his own or anyone else’s. Later in the year, when Britten and Crozier visited Forster in Cambridge, the earlier ‘difference’ exploded into a full-scale row: Forster was ‘chilly but polite’ to Crozier, but ‘To Britten he was outrageous: he spoke to him like some low-class servant who deserves to be whipped.’60 This time the contentious passage was Claggart’s monologue, ‘O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness’. In a subsequent letter to Britten, Forster resorted to his least helpful tone: ‘It is my most important part of writing and I did not, at my first hearings, feel it sufficiently important musically,’ he said. He wanted ‘a sexual discharge gone evil’ rather than ‘soggy depression or growling remorse’; he found himself ‘turning from one musical discomfort to another, and was dissatisfied’.61 His readers are used to these lapses – in which he seems high-handed, petulant and defensive – and forgive him for them; but the critically vulnerable Britten was devastated and it was left to Crozier to repair the damage. Forster, at any rate, had regained his balance in an end-of-year diary entry: ‘I am rather a fierce old man at the moment, and he is rather a spoilt boy, and certainly a busy one.’62 He returned to Aldeburgh for several visits during 1951, and in June injured his ankle while climbing the church tower: it may well have been this injury (rather than any further quarrel) that led him to stay at Billy Burrell’s bungalow in Linden Road instead of at 4 Crabbe Street. As Furbank makes clear, he was not an amenable patient.
Britten himself was ill with cystitis during July and was further slowed down by taking the antibiotic sulphonamide M&B, apparently heedless of his earlier overreliance on the drug; but he at last finished the composition draft of Billy Budd on 10 August 1951. To celebrate this and to thank the festival’s helpers and supporters, he and Pears held a grand party, ‘a gay & incredibly mixed affair – from the local Squire (Vernon Wentworth) to the girl from the telephone exchange, & my little fisherboy friend (the “Nipper”)’. A few days later, Britten played through the whole opera for the Harewoods, who compared its emotional impact to that of Verdi’s Otello, and then for Forster, who wrote to Bob Buckingham that it was ‘very fine’. But Britten wasn’t taken in. He found Forster to be ‘in a funny abstracted mood’ and told Stein that he ‘demanded to have the work played to him – but cannot remember at all what he’s previously heard of it!… He doesn’t seem to grasp it at all – or [be] really interested in the musical side of the opera!’63 It was a relief to take a break from the Indomitable and to get aboard an actual boat, which he and Pears did in September, when they were joined by Basil Coleman, who was to direct the first production of Billy Budd, and Arthur Oldham as passengers on a thirteen-ton launch captained by Billy Burrell (with Robin Long, the Nipper, as cabin boy): they sailed across the North Sea and up the Rhine, and Robin, who didn’t as a rule care much about education, wrote a careful account of the trip for his school magazine, The Leistonian. Britten, with his recurrent wish to help a disadvantaged youngster, floated the idea of his paying for Robin to go to a public school, but Burrell – the other Billy B., as Britten would affectionately refer to him – knew better: ‘You want to forget that! That’s the biggest mistake you’ll ever make.’64
As with Grimes, the relationship between Billy Budd and its source is complex. Melville supplies a detailed historical context: the story is set in the summer of 1797, soon after the Nore Mutiny which, for ‘the British Empire’, he explains, ‘was what a strike in the fire brigade would be to London threatened by general arson’;65 thereafter, he interrupts with references and supposedly personal anecdotes to support the tale’s historical veracity. His Captain Vere is wounded at the end of the Indomitable’s voyage and dies, ‘cut off too early for the Nile and Trafalgar’.66 Britten and his librettists, by contrast, allow him to survive into old age so that he can provide a framing prologue and epilogue which, in a quite different way, also serve to push the events back into the past. To their credit, Forster and Crozier retain almost verbatim many of the story’s most memorable moments, such as Billy’s ambiguous farewell to his old merchant ship the Rights of Man, Dansker’s warning about Claggart (‘Baby Budd, Jimmy Legs … is down on you’)67 and the ballad ‘Billy in the Darbies’ which ends the novella. There are inevitable losses in the transition from one medium to another. In the moment after Claggart has been felled, when Vere and Billy try to prop up the body, Melvi
lle adds a shocking short sentence: ‘It was like handling a dead snake.’68 By contrast, Melville describes Billy’s execution in prose of extraordinary rhapsodic power: ‘At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in a mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended, and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.’69 Other changes are simply practical. In Melville, Claggart’s ominous ‘Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it too!’70 is prompted by Billy spilling soup over a newly scrubbed deck; spilled soup, however, is hard to manage onstage and so the fight with Squeak has to provide a more logical, though less ironically menacing, pretext for Claggart’s remark.
