by Neil Powell
The Turn of the Screw was first performed in England in October that year, as part of a remarkable English Opera Group season at Sadler’s Wells which also included two other Britten works – The Rape of Lucretia and his realisation of The Beggar’s Opera – as well as a double bill (already presented in Aldeburgh and Devon) of Love in a Village by his pupil Arthur Oldham and A Dinner Engagement by his friend Lennox Berkeley. This prompted further reviews, including a characteristically long and thoughtful New Statesman piece by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, to whom Britten wrote: ‘I am so glad you liked the “Screw” so much. It does work as an opera, I feel, & I think in many ways you are right about the subject being, as it were, the nearest to me of any I have yet chosen (although what that indicates about my own character I shouldn’t like to say!).’135 He also told Edward Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor’s friend and co-author with him of The Record Guide, that he wanted ‘Decca to record it as soon as possible – before, at any rate, David’s voice breaks! Isn’t he a stunning little performer?’136 Decca obliged: The Turn of the Screw was recorded with the original cast during the first week of January 1955, becoming the first complete Britten opera on LP. It was released too late for inclusion in the revised edition of Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor’s magisterial volume, published later that year, but it was included in their ‘Supplement’ of 1956: ‘The libretto is extremely skilful – indeed the best yet set by the composer – and it has elicited from Britten the most completely successful expression of his constant preoccupation with the betrayal of innocence.’137 They liked everything about the records, which they awarded their maximum two stars, though they wisely resisted the temptation to call Hemmings ‘a stunning little performer’.
A leaflet published at the time of the 1954 Aldeburgh Festival had claimed, slightly disingenuously, that The Turn of the Screw was being premiered in Venice rather than in the Jubilee Hall because the latter was ‘inadequate for the necessary lighting effects’. This leaflet was headed ‘A New Theatre in Aldeburgh’: the proposal was for a theatre ‘of the utmost simplicity in structure and decoration, and entirely in keeping with the character of the Festival’, to be built ‘on an excellent site behind Aldeburgh Lodge, on high ground, with an uninterrupted view over the marshes, and near enough to the sea for interval-promenading’. The Arts Council and the English Opera Group had given their approval; so, subject to planning consents, had the Borough Council; members of the public were invited to register their interest in ‘one of the books which are placed in the Festival Office and the Festival Club for this purpose’.138 A model of the proposed building – a squat, functional 1950s affair with a barely pitched roof – was on display at the White Lion Hotel. The project came to nothing: the notional theatre was later moved to a site off Alde Lane which was eventually bought by the architect H. T. Cadbury-Brown, who built a house for himself and, in the grounds, a bungalow for Imogen Holst. Very few of those who have enjoyed the concert hall and studios at Snape Maltings would want to exchange them for the Festival Theatre that might have been. And yet ‘near enough to the sea for interval-promenading’ is a phrase to tug briefly at the heartstrings: the delightful thought of audiences on summer evenings wandering down the Town Steps to the pubs and the restaurants and the beach. The plans for a theatre in Aldeburgh during the mid-1950s were the last realistic chance for the festival to remain permanently based in Aldeburgh itself: without such a building, the festival would inescapably outgrow the town. And at that point, a distinctive part of the local and community spirit which had formed this ‘modest festival’ would be lost for ever.
CHAPTER 7
THE POETRY IN THE PITY
1955–64
1
While Britten was fully occupied with Gloriana, and when his bursitis began to restrict his piano-playing, his place as Pears’s accompanist had often been taken by a young and very gifted Australian pianist, Noel Mewton-Wood. On the evening of 6 December 1953, while Britten was hosting a drinks party at 4 Crabbe Street after a ‘Friends of the Festival Brains Trust’, the telephone rang: Mewton-Wood, whose partner Bill Fredricks had recently died after an appendix operation, had killed himself. ‘Ben came back looking distraught,’ wrote Imogen Holst, but he ‘didn’t let everyone know, and carried on being a host’. However, the following day, he ‘talked of the terrifyingly small gap between madness and non-madness, and said why was it that the people one really liked found life so difficult’.1 A memorial concert at Wigmore Hall was scheduled for the first anniversary of Mewton-Wood’s death; but as Pears – who had defied ‘’flu cum trachytis [tracheitis]’ to sing the role of Pandarus in the Covent Garden premiere of Walton’s Troilus and Cressida the previous evening – was unable to perform, the concert was postponed until 28 January 1955. It included works by Britten, Alan Bush, Arthur Bliss, Benjamin Frankel, Michael Tippett and Mewton-Wood himself: the first part began with Britten’s Dowland-based Lachrymae for viola and piano; the second with a new composition, his Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain, Op. 55. The text was by Edith Sitwell, from whom Britten had sought permission to set ‘your very great poem from the war years’, adding: ‘I feel very drawn towards it, & in its courage & light seen through horror & darkness find something very right for the poor boy.’2
The elegiac note, so often present in Britten’s writing for voice or voices, here fulfils the purpose of specific, personal memorialisation; in this sense, Canticle III prefigures the War Requiem. Musically, however, it takes the now familiar form of a pendant to Britten’s most recent opera: again, a twelve-note theme is the basis of the variations, for horn, which introduce each stanza. The poem combines images of the crucifixion with an air raid during the London Blitz and interpolates a pair of lines from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (‘O I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? / See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!’) which Britten treats in a Schoenbergian way as Sprechgesang; but it ends in redemption, with tenor and horn in unison or uneasily close harmony. Michael Kennedy describes the piece as ‘Britten in a hair-shirt, flagellating his soul on behalf of suffering humanity’.3 The first performance – by Pears, Britten and Dennis Brain – so moved Edith Sitwell that she ‘had no sleep at all on the night of the performance. And I can think of nothing else. It was certainly one of the greatest experiences in all my life as an artist.’4
A week after the Mewton-Wood memorial concert, Britten and Pears were off to Belgium and Switzerland, followed by a skiing holiday in Zermatt with Mary Potter and Ronald and Rose-Marie Duncan. On their first day there, Mary Potter injured her leg; to provide her with some amusement, Britten promptly wrote the six brief movements of his Alpine Suite for recorder trio. Both he and Pears had, with Imogen Holst’s guidance, become keen recorder players in the Aldeburgh Music Club, an informal group of local musicians who met regularly at 4 Crabbe Street and whose cardinal rule was that any professional musicians present must not play their first instrument. ‘It is wonderful for the amateurs in Aldeburgh to have those two to play & sing with,’5 Holst had enthused in 1952, shortly after the club’s formation, modestly ignoring her own contribution (but she also saw how Britten’s support of local music contributed to his exhaustion: ‘Must try & persuade him that he already does more than enough for people in Aldeburgh,’6 she rather hopelessly resolved). The Alpine Suite would be performed at Thorpeness as part of a ‘Music on the Meare’ event, by members of the Aldeburgh Music Club, during the 1955 festival.
Meanwhile, Britten’s relationship with the somewhat eccentric Duncans had grown closer after a conversation in Devon the previous summer, in which he had returned to a recurrent theme: his wish somehow to adopt a child. As this seemed unlikely, could he not have a quasi-fatherly ‘share’ in the Duncans’ twelve-year-old son Roger? ‘I want to be as a father to him. But I don’t want to put your nose out of joint,’ he told Ronald Duncan. ‘Will you allow me to give him presents, visit him at school, and let him spend part of his school holidays with me – in other words share h
im?’ Acknowledging that he and his wife were not perhaps ideal parents themselves, Duncan agreed to the proposal: ‘Ben was a second father to my son, giving him affection and advice as he grew up.’7 For Britten, as he said, it filled a gap; for Roger, it meant a succession of presents (starting with a bicycle), holidays in Aldeburgh and, while he was away at school, those affectionate, perfectly modulated schoolboy-to-schoolboy letters at which Britten was so adept. As he grew older, Roger began to realise that there was a sexual element in Britten’s love for him. ‘I wasn’t attracted to him physically,’ he told John Bridcut, who asked: ‘But perhaps he was to you?’ ‘Oh I’m sure,’ Roger Duncan replied. ‘That was quite plain. But he respected the fact that I was not.’ Britten, he added, was ‘very proper’ and even ‘strait-laced – he always wore a tie, and changed for dinner’. At the age of twenty, while studying law at Cambridge, Roger Duncan married; after graduation, he emigrated with his wife to Canada. Until then, he was ‘very honoured and privileged to spend so much time across eight years with such an interesting person’.8
During the spring of 1955, Britten began work on a major new commission: a score for Sadler’s Wells Ballet, to be choreographed by John Cranko and eventually called The Prince of the Pagodas, Op. 57. The challenge of writing a substantial work for stage but without words and voices – it would be his longest purely orchestral composition – proved unexpectedly daunting: for once, a deadline, instead of being just about met, was to be completely missed. But the delay would bring benefits, for at the end of October he and Pears set off on their most ambitious tour, beginning with European destinations but then venturing much further east, with momentous consequences for The Prince of the Pagodas. They were to be away until March 1956, a long stretch even for the travel-hardened Pears, while for Britten, now so firmly rooted in Suffolk, it must have seemed an eternity: to Roger Duncan, he confessed that he was already feeling ‘a teeny bit homesick’ in Zurich. He promised to keep Roger informed of their progress through a ‘great series of letters’; their prep-school chumminess was no doubt both an expression of and an antidote to homesickness. Their concert engagements in Europe included Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Zurich and Salzburg. Yugoslavia, Britten told Harewood, ‘nearly killed us, but with kindness, enthusiasm & genuine interest’;9 they performed four concerts and were received by President Tito. By the beginning of December, they were in Turkey, staying at the Istanbul Hilton: ‘It’s really the East now – our room in this incredibly new & expensive hotel faces Asia across the Bosphorus, looking much nearer than Thorp Ness!’10 Britten thought Turkish music – the ‘Oriental stuff’ – ‘pretty poor & boring’ but found there was a young audience hungry for Western music: ‘Our concerts were a wild success, & were just like giving a thirsty person a long drink of champagne!’11 While there, he composed, and sent to Imogen Holst, ‘a silly little piece’ for the timpanist, percussionist and member of the English Opera Group Orchestra James Blades, Timpani Piece for Jimmy, which is unquestionably the coolest title in his entire oeuvre.
On 11 December, they flew to India; though mostly based in Delhi, they spent Christmas ‘at Agra, looking at the Taj Mahal’. They were ‘bowled over’ by the landscape, by the ‘relaxed & calm’ people they met – including Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, with whom they had lunch – and by Indian music: ‘We had the luck to hear one of the best living performers (composer too), & he played in a small room to us alone – which is how it should be, not in concerts.’12 The musician was Ravi Shankar and the ‘small room’ a studio at All-India Radio, where they afterwards attended a broadcast. Pears’s appreciative account of the occasion in his travel diary is also a reminder that Shankar’s work was at this time unfamiliar even to such experienced and sophisticated Western musicians as Britten, who as a student had attended a performance by Shankar’s father Uday in 1933, and himself: ‘Brilliant, fascinating, stimulating, wonderfully played – first on a full orchestra of about 20 musicians, then solo on a sort of zither [sitar]. Starting solo (with a plucked drone background of 2 instruments always) & then joined halfway through by a man playing two drums; unbelievable skill and invention.’13 Their own engagements in India included recitals in Bombay, Delhi – broadcast under slightly surreal conditions involving a Bösendorfer and two rival piano tuners – and Calcutta, where Pears was so hot that he ‘imagined that the great drops of sweat splashing off me were clearly audible and visible from the gallery’.14 Despite this, there were aspects of Calcutta they were sorry to leave, such as the whispering pimp who invariably waylaid them outside the Grand Hotel: ‘At first his words were quite unintelligible, (possibly Hindi or German?) then after a day or two “You like girl?” was audible, which grew into “schoolgirls?” (con espressione) and then “English schoolgirl?” (ah! that’s got him); finally, in despair, to a quite unresponsive Ben, “FRENCH SCHOOLGIRLS?!!” We got rather fond of him.’15 Then they were off to Singapore, which Britten said was ‘like living in a Turkish bath’. For Pears, the humidity was even more troublesome: ‘In one minute all one’s stuffing was gone; in half an hour one was sweaty and cross.’16 Nevertheless, they had to give two recitals, including Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, ‘in a vast bath-like hall’: ‘I sang like a pig at both concerts,’ wrote Pears.17
Among the audience at the latter concert were Prince Ludwig and Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine, who had that day arrived in Singapore and were to accompany Britten and Pears on the remainder of their journey, which next took them on to Java and Bali, ‘where musical sounds are as part of the atmosphere as the palm trees, the spicy smells, & the charming beautiful people’. Britten continued, in a letter to Imogen Holst: ‘The music is fantastically rich – melodicly, rhythmicly, texture (such orchestration!!) & above all formally.’18 His journey east had entailed a gradual surrender to unfamiliar cultures, and he was completely smitten by Bali. It had taken time and distance for him to relax from his buttoned-up or, as Roger Duncan put it, ‘strait-laced’ English ways; so it was symbolically apt, as well as ludicrous, that he and Pears, together with their friends Lu and Peg, should have been photographed in traditional Balinese dress on 20 January. Britten, the princess commented, ‘looked like a governess at a fancy dress’ and Pears ‘like a Rhine maiden’. ‘We laughed so much we could hardly be photographed,’ she wrote. ‘We four laugh and fool about so much we are a sort of travelling circus.’19 This was a different Benjamin Britten from the one who always wore a tie. He described the music of the gamelan orchestra, not quite accurately but with wonderful enthusiasm, in one of the regular dispatches to his young friend Roger:
It’s mostly played on metal xylophones (sometimes wooden, bamboo), of all sizes, with gongs of tremendous size, long thin drums, and occasionally a curious one [in fact, two] string fiddle, & instruments like our treble recorders. They have bands of 20–30, always men, sometimes including quite tiny boys. But although it is quite unlike our music, it is worked out technically & rhythmically, so that one can scarcely follow it. It isn’t ‘primitive’ at all, & neither are the people.20
To his percussive colleague James Blades, he sent a picture postcard of gongs: ‘I’ve heard Gongs of all shapes, sizes, and metals here – producing fantastic notes – you’d be very interested. I hope to bring back some tapes of the music here.’21 And to Ninette de Valois he sent an optimistic telegram: ‘CONFIDENT BALLET READY FOR MIDSEPTEMBER LOVE BRITTEN’.22 For he had discovered the musical language of Pagoda Land.
Britten had always been fascinated by tuned percussion; moreover, he had some previous experience of Balinese music. While in America, he met the composer Colin McPhee, who had lived for seven years on Bali and whose two-piano transcriptions of Balinese Ceremonial Music he performed with McPhee in 1941 (later he played them with Clifford Curzon). Britten’s copy of the published score was inscribed by McPhee ‘To Ben – hoping he will find something in this music, after all’; and, fifteen years later, he had. Nor was this the onl
y momentous discovery he would make on his ‘world tour’. After Bali, the party returned to Java (‘where everything went wrong, & I got ill & had to cancel a concert’);23 then they went on to Hong Kong, with four concerts in five days; and on 8 February they flew to Japan. Britten, whose only previous dealing with the Japanese had involved their commissioning and subsequent rejection of his Sinfonia da Requiem, wasn’t keen. It was, he reported to Roger Duncan, ‘the strangest country’ they had yet visited, as if it were ‘inhabited by a very intelligent kind of insect’: ‘They have very good manners, they bow & scrape all the time; they have most beautiful small things, all their houses, their flowers, the things they eat & drink out of, are wonderfully pretty, but all their big things, their cities, their way of thinking, and behaving, have all somehow got wrong.’ But he ‘unreservedly loved’ their theatre, in particular the Noh, which was ‘very severe, classical – very traditional, without any scenery to speak of, or lighting and there are very few characters – one main one, who wears a mask, & two or three supporting ones & usually a small boy too’.24 It seems, as he describes it, already to suggest the scale and texture of a work he might write himself; although the ‘small boy’, not usual in Noh drama, was perhaps a touch of wishful thinking.
