Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  Returning to England in mid-March was ‘Lovely in many ways, but, oh, oh, the problems…!’25 Yet he added that ‘one settles into’ the various crises, as if acknowledging the extent to which problems were necessary, almost comforting parts of his life’s familiar fabric. The most pressing, apart from the matter of a largely unwritten ballet scheduled for September, concerned the festival and the English Opera Group. The former was going through a period of organisational change following the departure of its general manager, Elizabeth Sweeting: she had left the previous summer, ostensibly because the festival could no longer afford this full-time post but essentially because she and Imogen Holst simply couldn’t get on; her friend Tommy Cullum – treasurer, local bank manager and father of Britten’s secretary – resigned from the festival committee in protest. Although Elizabeth Sweeting was hurt by the manner of her dismissal (she found a letter waiting for her when she returned from London one day), she was given ‘“a marvellous send-off” – a benefit concert in which Britten and Pears took part’.26 She was replaced as general manager by the art historian and dealer Stephen Reiss, who had lived in Aldeburgh since 1949, advising Pears on pictures and curating an exhibition at the 1953 festival; he was at first tactfully described as ‘Hon. Secretary’. Imogen Holst, meanwhile, joined Britten and Pears as an artistic director of the festival from 1956, an appointment made necessary as well as desirable by their absence abroad for so many months. The crisis at the English Opera Group took a little longer to reach its conclusion. It began in December 1955, when Basil Douglas suggested that Britten might want to ‘find someone stronger than myself who can manage the Group’s fortunes more independently’. Britten replied from Delhi: ‘I feel you’ve given nearly five years of your time & energy to it [the EOG], & that if you feel you want a change that is only natural. You must decide that, & we can only grin (?) & bear it!’27 Douglas stayed, turning down a job with the BBC to do so, but during the following two years the relationship between him and Britten would become frayed until it reached its untidy breaking point.

  ‘I have been plunged into a whirlpool of hectic work, & been made quite dizzy by it – the Ballet for Cranko has got to be ready for the Autumn and is only ½ written – and so on,’ Britten told William Plomer in May.28 He had that very day added to the ‘and so on’ by proposing to Edith Sitwell that he should compose a prologue and an epilogue, setting some of her lines, for the reading she was to give at the forthcoming festival, which was also to include a performance of Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain; the programme, entitled ‘The Heart of the Matter’, was given in the parish church on 21 June. The mutually adoring creative relationship between Britten and Sitwell is a little surprising, given the apparent mismatch of his sparse and her florid style, but by far its oddest consequence was his attempt to enlist her help in persuading Marilyn Monroe – whom she knew – to open a grand fund-raising garden party in aid of the Aldeburgh Festival (and its briefly revived dream of building a theatre) in September. Sitwell replied at once that ‘there isn’t a hope that we can get Miss Monroe’, thus destroying any chance that Aldeburgh’s most improbable guest appearance would take place. But the proposal is evidence of Britten’s slightly wayward canniness: although neither taken in by Marilyn Monroe’s pretended interest in high culture nor greatly impressed by her as a sex symbol, he knew good box office when he saw it.

  For a while, The Prince of the Pagodas went ‘swimmingly’, but it was increasingly clear that the September deadline couldn’t be met; an official announcement from Covent Garden on 9 August confirmed that the first night had been postponed because of Britten’s illness and exhaustion. Another reason for the delay was the lack of a conductor: the first choice, Ernest Ansermet, was unavailable and, although there were other possibilities, Britten had gloomily remarked to David Webster in late May that it would be ‘difficult to find anyone of this calibre who can fit in exactly with our dates’.29 During the summer, Britten retreated to the Hesses’ ‘mountain fastness’, Schloss Tarasp in Switzerland, to try and get the job finished. He made good progress, although in October, back in Suffolk, he was still ‘madly busy’ with a hundred pages of full score to go. It wasn’t until 7 November that he could write to Prince Ludwig: ‘That b. ballet is FINISHED, & I feel as if I’ve just been let out of prison after 18 months hard labour.’30 Even then, his troubles with it were far from over. With a kind of dreadful inevitability, the only conductor ‘of this calibre’ available for the premiere was himself; and so, despite a recurrence of bursitis in his right arm and shoulder (the pain was too severe for him even to carry his own music case), he was soon immersed in rehearsals. ‘It wasn’t only that his arm was bad,’ as Imogen Holst, his devoted amenuensis and music-case carrier, recalled, ‘but in those days he’d no experience of conducting a huge orchestra in a very long work in an orchestral pit.’31 Worst of all, she thought, was the indifference of Pears, because there was nothing for him to sing. She remembered the ‘climax of that lack of interest’ in the last full rehearsal, ‘when Peter, having blown in for a little while, in the coffee break, halfway through, said to Ben, “Well, I’m going now; I’m going to have a haircut.” And walked out of the theatre, leaving Ben bewildered and in pain and trying to fix up [a] doctor; no one to get him a taxi, no one but me to carry the bag or anything…’32

  Britten conducted the first performance of The Prince of the Pagodas at Covent Garden on 1 January 1957; he also managed to conduct on the following two days before ‘an extremely fierce doctor’ forbade him (the remaining performances were conducted by Kenneth Alwyn and Robert Irving). The ballet – which starred David Blair and Svetlana Beriosova as the Prince and Princess, with wonderfullly evocative sets by John Piper – was much enjoyed by audiences, but critics tended to find Cranko’s fairy-tale subject matter too conventional: Martin Cooper in the Daily Telegraph thought the work ‘an infinitely superior pantomime’ while for the anonymous critic in The Times it was ‘a ballet for the young … a cake too full of plums for summary accounting; everyone must be his own Jack Horner’. Felix Aprahamian in the Sunday Times rather oddly complained that ‘Britten’s latest major work breaks no new ground’ before going on to comment on the self-evidently groundbreaking ‘quasi-Balinese sounds in the second act’. This aspect of the work was altogether too much for Donald Mitchell who, in a piece for the Musical Times which he later judged ‘inept’ but nobly quoted in Letters from a Life, thought it ‘a major musical error: once the ensemble’s tinkling has been savoured, its motivic stagnation becomes painfully tedious’; it was ‘an indiscretion not only inappropriate but boring’. Mitchell points out that his original affronted reaction illustrates just how novel and unsettling the Balinese influence seemed at the time.33

  The following month, The Prince of the Pagodas, conducted by the composer, was recorded by Decca, who evidently judged a brand-new ballet score to be more viable than the still unrecorded Peter Grimes and Billy Budd; this ‘complete’ version was in fact shortened by some forty cuts, amounting to twenty minutes, so that it would fit onto four LP sides. Over the next two years, the ballet was successfully staged in Milan, New York and Munich; it also had three brief revivals at Covent Garden before being dropped from the repertoire in 1960. By this time, Britten himself had come to dislike the work, which was seldom performed thereafter either as a ballet or as a concert piece. However, in 1989 it was staged at Covent Garden with new choreography by Kenneth MacMillan and in the same year recorded – for the first time in full – by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen. The work has the limitation (which is also the charm) of all ballet scores: it consists of numerous short episodes and so lacks symphonic development. But Britten delights in limitation and he matches the narrative’s journey from Middle Kingdom to Pagoda Land with his own musical journey from respectfully Tchaikovsky-like numbers to an eerier sound-world in which conventional Western percussion instruments exactly replicate gamelan sonorities. Although some remain to be convinced, for this l
istener Knussen’s fine recording belatedly established The Prince of the Pagodas firmly among Britten’s major compositions.

  2

  The painter Mary Potter, for whom Britten had composed his Alpine Suite during their skiing holiday in 1955, lived in a handsome double-gabled brick house at the end of a narrow lane off the Aldeburgh–Leiston road: it was called The Red House. Her marriage to the writer and humorist Stephen Potter had broken up: she was now on her own in a home which was too big for her. Britten, meanwhile, found that his and the festival’s ever increasing fame had turned him into a tourist exhibit: his large-windowed rooms overlooking the beach were also inescapably overlooked from the beach and, since the other side of his house abutted directly onto Crabbe Street, there was nowhere to hide; strangers would even wander in through open doors on summer days, as if the place were open to the public. The obvious if unconventional solution to Potter’s and Britten’s predicaments was a house swap: this was tortuously negotiated during 1957 and the two-way move took place in November. The Red House had particular attractions for Britten, besides privacy and quiet: a tennis court on which he could practise his lethal skills away from the public courts in Park Road, and secluded gardens for Clytie, his miniature dachshund.

  Yet Britten sacrificed so much in moving to The Red House: the sight and sound of the sea, his childhood companion, which had brought him back to Aldeburgh; the company of fishermen such as Billy Burrell; the sense that he was in and of the town itself. While he lived in Crabbe Street, an inevitable tendency towards remoteness and cliquishness could always be checked by the bracing reality outside the door; at The Red House, his garden backed onto the placid expanses of the Aldeburgh Golf Club (the second line of the address, which Britten never used, is Golf Lane). The lurking sense that there was now something a bit grand and courtly about him had acquired an exact physical reality: visitors arriving at the house, through the five-bar gate and over the large circular sweep of gravel with its central lawn, could be in no doubt that they were entering a private and privileged world which was very different from 4 Crabbe Street. Britten’s elder brother Robert, on first seeing the place, asked: ‘But Ben, do you think you really deserve all this?’34 His move to The Red House separated him irrevocably from the ordinary life of Aldeburgh; in due course, the failure of the theatre plan and the conversion of Snape Maltings would do the same for the festival.

  Britten accepted these changes as the price of fame and middle age, just as he accepted his transformation into a reluctant symbol of establishment respectability. When in April he was asked by Anthony Gishford at Boosey & Hawkes to list ‘the various curious honours that I have received in the last few years’, he found ten: an award from the Music Critics Circle of New York for Choral Music; Freedom of the Borough of Lowestoft; ‘Accademico Effettivo Corrispondente’ of Accademia Nazionale Cherubini; Honorary Member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres, et des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Mus. Doc. from Belfast University; Associate of the Royal Academy of Belgium; an award from the Catholic Stage Guild of Dublin (‘A perfectly hideous statuette of a deformed St Cecilia’); ‘a large certificate and a drawing of a bit of a suit I am supposed to wear as a Tonsättare’ from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and ‘something’ from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome).35 In July, he went to lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace; a few days later, at the American Embassy, he received his honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The citation informed him that his compositions had ‘been received with delight in many lands’, that he had ‘recaptured the great English tradition of word, song, and instrument’ and that his operas were ‘in the world repertory’: ‘They do honour to your country and to you.’36 He couldn’t fail to be touched by the generosity, nor to be embarrassed by the sententiousness. As if to illustrate the point about his operas, he travelled in August and September to Canada, where the English Opera Group performed The Turn of the Screw at the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival.

  In the meantime, Basil Douglas’s term as manager of the EOG was drawing to its conclusion; as often happens in small organisations, especially those in the arts, a matter of policy became hopelessly entangled with a personal falling-out. In January, Britten wrote a carefully argued letter to the Group’s chairman, James Lawrie, in which he suggested a scaling-down. Although the EOG had done well at festivals and in ‘countries where opera is part of the daily bread’, a recent season at the Scala Theatre had been financially disastrous: he therefore proposed that the EOG ‘should move its office, staff and storage to Aldeburgh’ where he and Stephen Reiss thought its administration could be absorbed by the Festival Office ‘without much extra expense’; at this point he still assumed, incorrectly, that his projected Aldeburgh Theatre would provide new operas with rehearsal and performance space and serve as a launching pad for tours. A fortnight later, reporting to his fellow artistic directors on a meeting of the EOG’s executive, he noted the ‘feeling of deep regret that such a scheme would not include the services of Basil Douglas, who has worked so hard and loyally these six years, but I have felt that the extreme worry of the recurring financial crises, especially in the last few years, have been really bad for him’. It was possible, he added a bit half-heartedly, that Douglas might become operatic manager of a new venture at the Lyric, Hammersmith, or that he should act as a London booking manager for Aldeburgh ‘in some form or other’.37 He was trying hard to convince himself, and others, that dismissing Basil Douglas would be in Douglas’s best interests: ‘the financial aspect honestly hasn’t been well handled, poor old B.D. has been laid low by worry – his health makes him a fine-weather sailor, I’m afraid’, he told Basil Coleman.38 To Douglas himself, who in March was about to take a holiday, he wrote: ‘Go off, forget all about Groupy & Festivally problems, & come back strong. Remember you have many good friends (Peter & me included) who wish you so very well, & who will really do everything they can to help straighten out the future … so don’t worry over much, will you?’39

  When in the autumn Douglas finally learned that there would be no more work for him, even on a part-time basis, with Aldeburgh and the EOG, he did so indirectly: either from Stephen Reiss – who, according to Douglas, ‘seemed surprised that I did not know’ – or from Imogen Holst, who visited him at the EOG office to say, ‘Basil, I want you to know that, whatever happens, I’ll always love you’ – which was, according to Christopher Grogan, ‘the first Douglas had heard of his impending dismissal’.40 Either way, the news evidently wasn’t relayed by Britten, with whom there followed an embittered exchange of letters with a characteristic conclusion: ‘Please stop “getting at” Peter and me, and try to realise we do not wish you ill; and have tried to do everything possible to help you. You have good friends in us, unless, of course, you are determined to call us enemies. The situation is in your hands.’41 The trouble is not so much that Britten sounds insincere (although he does a little) but that he sounds more than ever like a prep-school master: it’s a tone which came too easily to him and which might be effectively directed at a twelve-year-old boy, yet it is far less helpful when the recipient is an unhappy adult. This is perhaps not his most likeable aspect. His failure to talk personally to Douglas may be easier to understand and at least partly to forgive; he simply couldn’t manage such occasions, which made him physically ill.

  The first work to be finished by Britten at The Red House was the little set of Songs from the Chinese, Op. 58, using Arthur Waley’s translations, for Pears and his new recital partner, the guitarist Julian Bream: they were first performed at Great Glemham House during the following year’s Aldeburgh Festival. But the first major composition to be written there might almost have been intended as an antidote to Britten’s self-imposed privacy, with its enormous non-professional cast of children and audience or ‘congregation’: this was his setting of the Chester miracle play, Noye’s Fludde, Op.
59. The piece had its origins in an educational commission, from the London commercial television station Associated-Rediffusion, which ended in acrimony and confusion with the dismissal of the company’s Head of Schools Broadcasting, Boris Ford (although it would eventually be broadcast by Birmingham-based ATV, which held the London weekend franchise, on a Sunday morning). The medieval text – with its quirkily vivid language, talking animals, avuncular God and cantankerous Mrs Noye – was ideal for Britten’s purpose, while his memories of gamelan informed the piece’s adventurous and eccentric percussive effects. There were to be only three professional adult singers (for the Voice of God, Noye and Mrs Noye), nine musicians of the English Opera Group Players and half a dozen trained and experienced child singers. Colin Graham later recalled:

  Some of the forces required by the opera are now legendary: the handbells from Leiston Modern School, which heralded the appearance of the rainbow; the percussion group from Woolverstone Hall, with its set of slung mugs for the raindrops which start and end the storm; the recorders from Framlingham College which vie with the wind; the bugles from the Royal Hospital School, Holbrook, which play the Animals in and out of the Ark and end the opera so poignantly. And the animals themselves, of course, who were auditioned (coincidentally in the presence of Aaron Copland) from schools right across the County of Suffolk.42