by Neil Powell
By Christmas, it was beginning to look as if Galina Vishnevskaya’s participation in the War Requiem would prove a concession too far for the Soviet authorities; however, knowing that his and Rostropovich’s combined charm had already worked small miracles, Britten hoped they might yet be persuaded. He finished the War Requiem by the end of January and then he set Goethe’s poem ‘Um Mitternacht’ for voice and piano, a pendant to the night-worlds of the Nocturne and the Dream, before joining Pears on a three-week tour of Canada. When they returned, he learned that Moscow definitely wouldn’t allow Vishnevskaya to sing at Coventry: ‘the combination of “Cathedral” & Reconciliation with W. Germany … was too much for them’,81 he told Forster, writing on Easter Saturday from Ipswich Nursing Home, where he was being treated for haemorrhoids. Vishnevskaya herself recalled an interview with the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, in which she was asked: ‘But how can you, a Soviet woman, stand next to a German and an Englishman and perform a political work? Perhaps on the issue in question our government isn’t in complete agreement with them.’82 Heather Harper was drafted in, despite a busy schedule (including, as it happens, A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and she learned the part in ten days. Meanwhile, Britten, who had been assured that Coventry’s new cathedral would be magnificent and blessed with perfect acoustics, visited the place, detested the building and found the acoustics ‘lunatic’. (Did he perhaps make a mental note that if he were ever to have anything to do with a new concert hall for the Aldeburgh Festival, they would at least have to get that right?) Scarcely less lunatic was the behaviour of some Coventry clergy, who appeared determined to wage war on his requiem: there were ‘really Trollopian clerical battles, but with modern weapons’.83 Although the original plan had been for Britten to conduct the first performance and Meredith Davies the second, the combination of acoustic problems and the cathedral authorities’ refusal to allow a stage to be erected in front of the altar meant that each performance would require two conductors; Britten, whose arm was again troublesome, chose the secondary role of conducting the chamber orchestra (the Melos Ensemble), leaving the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Davies’s hands. There were moments when Coventry seemed as obstructive as Moscow.
The War Requiem was first performed on 30 May 1962 and broadcast live on the BBC Third Programme. The cathedral, determined to resemble Barchester to the last, had decreed that the audience should be admitted through only one doorway and, although other doors were eventually opened, it was obvious that the performance couldn’t start on time. The BBC announcer came to the end of his script and, as the producer Richard Butt later recalled, there was a long pause ‘during which the radio audience heard nothing but the sound of a large, silent congregation waiting for something to happen’;84 unusually, this prompted messages of thanks from listeners who felt that the preliminary silence was suitable for the occasion and the work. Very few people who were in the cathedral that evening or who heard the broadcast were in any doubt that something extraordinary was taking place. Writing in the weekly Time & Tide, the playwright Peter Shaffer thought it ‘the most impressive and moving piece of sacred music ever to be composed in this country, and one of the greatest musical compositions of the twentieth century’, and the normally more cautious professional music critics largely agreed. ‘Britten’s inspiration throughout is at its highest; never before has he invented at so sustained and elevated a level,’ wrote Andrew Porter in the Musical Times. William Mann, in The Times, wished that ‘everyone in the world might hear, inwardly digest, and outwardly acknowledge the great and cogent call to a sane, Christian life proclaimed in this Requiem’ which was ‘so superbly proportioned and calculated, so humiliating and disturbing in effect, in fact so tremendous, that every performance it is given ought to be a momentous occasion’. ‘It is surely a masterpiece of our time,’ agreed Desmond Shawe-Taylor in the Sunday Times.85 Colleagues and friends sent Britten letters of congratulation, among which was one from Harold Owen, the poet’s brother, who found the War Requiem ‘magnificent’ and ‘superb’ as well as ‘most disturbing’, adding that it was ‘a wonderful thought … that Wilfred’s poetry will for ever be a part of this great work’.86
‘My subject is War, and the pity of War,’ wrote Owen in his brief preface. ‘The Poetry is in the pity.’87 That second sentence – which ought to remain surprising, despite its familiarity, since on the page the pity is more obviously in the poetry – seems here at last to make transcendent sense. Although it isn’t quite fair to describe the War Requiem as the culmination of everything towards which Britten was striving, it is the work in which one major aspect of his musical life achieves its finest expression: he hints as much when he audaciously quotes from his own Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac in setting ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, before it reaches Owen’s appallingly different conclusion. All the complex elements of this creative strand – the pacifist, the devotional and the inwardly personal – come together in the Libera me, which sets Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ as a dialogue for English tenor and German baritone: the poem, which envisages two soldiers from opposing armies meeting after death, ends with the words ‘Let us sleep now…’ and leads into the War Requiem’s intensely moving (if harmonically compromised) invocation of eternal peace. Yet, in this context, the poem gains new resonances: this, surely, is where we will again recall Britten’s remark that his visit to Belsen changed everything he wrote thereafter; while, on a differently personal level, mourning ‘the undone years / The hopelessness’ will remind us of the work’s dedication and especially of Piers Dunkerley. The second part of the poem, which is also the baritone’s last solo, proved too much for Fischer-Dieskau who, as Britten reported almost proudly to Plomer, ‘was so upset at the end that Peter couldn’t get him out of the choir-stalls’.88 ‘The first performance created an atmosphere of such intensity that by the end I was completely undone,’ the singer himself wrote. ‘I did not know where to hide my face.’89
When, on 1 June, the War Requiem was performed for the second time in Coventry, the BBC producer Richard Butt was able to experience it as a member of the audience. He sat next to the conductor Arnold Goldsbrough who, as ‘the long, intense silence after the music began to dissolve’, turned to him and said: ‘Yes – that’s what Ben had to do.’90 He would do nothing remotely like it ever again.
5
Rostropovich, who had been unwell early in 1962 (though without enduring the ‘heart attack’ created by rumour and mistranslation), wrote to Britten in March: ‘If you want me to recover completely I ask you to see the doctor whose address is: The Red House, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Only he can bring me to life by composing a brilliant violoncello concerto.’91 Britten confirmed his determination to write such a work, while refusing to set himself a deadline. This was just as well, because his progress would be delayed by commitments and ill health: in July, he warned his ‘beloved Slava’ to ‘be patient about the Concerto’ which he wanted to be ‘worthy of my favourite ’Cellist’.92 The following month, the Rostropoviches spent a short holiday in Aldeburgh, after which they were all scheduled to go on to the Edinburgh Festival; but Britten, suffering from a frozen shoulder, had to cancel his appearances there with Rostropovich and with Pears, who was instead accompanied by Julian Bream. However, this didn’t deter Britten from fulfilling an important engagement closer to home, the first of a series of Bach weekends at Long Melford, held on 15–16 September: there was a programme of concertos given by George Malcolm and the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Britten, with the D minor Cello Suite performed by the previously unannounced Rostropovich; a late-night recital by Malcolm, Pears and Rostropovich; and a concert of cantatas with Janet Baker, Pears and John Shirley-Quirk, with the ECO conducted by Imogen Holst, to which Rostropovich added two of the suites.
Immediately after their Bach weekend, Britten and Pears set off on holiday to Venice. ‘I am really very glad we came here – I am sure the complete break from Aldeburgh routine & pr
oblems … has done us good,’ Britten told the Hesses. ‘I am determined now,’ he recklessly added, ‘to snap out of all these stupid minor ailments, & even if they can’t be cured, to ignore them.’93 While in Venice, they dined with the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono and his wife Nuria (Schoenberg’s daughter), with whom they seem to have got on splendidly, despite their musical differences. But although they had a ‘lovely’ fortnight in Venice, Britten ‘picked up a germ there (a most rare one which has had even the Hosp. for Tropical Diseases guessing!)’94 and on his return to England was ‘absolutely laid out’ for four weeks: it was a savagely ironic end to a holiday which had begun with his resolve to ‘snap out of’ his ailments, quite apart from the troubling echoes (and pre-echoes) of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach, Britten’s own last opera and, for that matter, his own final visit to Venice in 1975. The more robust Pears found Britten’s procession of illnesses immensely tiresome and wasn’t invariably sympathetic, especially when the composer had to pull out of their joint tours. He was fulfilling a singing engagement in Liverpool when Britten wrote to him in late October:
My honey darling,
I am so dreadfully sorry I’m being such a broken reed at the moment – it is the bloodiest nuisance from every point of view. But I promise you that it is only a bad patch this, & I’ll get it all coped with & promise to be a worthy companion for you from now on! I suppose one can’t help having weak spots, and being a jumpy neurotic type – but at least I’m determined now not to be such an infernal nuisance to everyone – including myself, because it isn’t fun to feel like the wrong end of a broken down bus for most of the time; I don’t like spending most of my life sitting on a lavatory seat, because it isn’t comfy, nor pretty. But from now on you’ll see a new me, – I hope –, & one that’s not a drag on you, a worry for you, & a bit more worthy of my beloved P.95
Some may dislike the childish, wheedling note in that; but more will be moved by the greatest living English composer’s humility and vulnerability. Pears touches on this in his reply:
My darling Ben –
Your letter makes me go hot with shame. That you should be asking me to forgive you for being ill, when it is I that should be looking after you & loving you, should long ago have thrown my silly career out of the window & come & tried to protect you a bit from worry and tension, instead of adding to them with my own worries and tetchinesses. God! I think singers over the age of 14 should be wiped out …
My honey, you mustn’t worry about me & my affairs – & if you don’t feel like coming to Switzerland on Sunday we jolly well won’t go.96
So shy and private a man as Britten often found it difficult to cope with the consequences of his own reputation. Sometimes, his anxiety could be diffused by an appeal to his perennially youthful sense of humour, as when an unknown admirer sent him a collection of schoolboy howlers including one about himself: ‘B.B. is our most famous contemporary composer. It is difficult to be contemporary because a composer isn’t alive until he’s dead.’ But when Ronald Duncan was commissioned to write a ‘profile’ of him for the Sunday Times, he was horrified, asking Duncan not to do it and enlisting the help of Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the paper’s music critic, in his effort to prevent it: ‘I don’t like this kind of thing – especially the (entre nous) rather chatty, gossipy things that he writes. I wrote and said I didn’t want it done – don’t want publicity (just want to write better music!).’97 Britten did, however, enjoy one very special ceremony of public acknowledgement that autumn. On 22 October, in the council chamber of the Moot Hall – the room in which Peter Grimes had stood before the court – he was presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh. ‘It was done with great simplicity – only lasting half an hour, but really touching & impressive.’98
In his speech of thanks, Britten returns to the points about the artist and society which he had made on the similar occasion at Lowestoft over a decade earlier, but this time he adds a deeply felt personal note: ‘As I understand it, this honour is not given because of a reputation, because of a chance acquaintance, it is – dare I say it? – because you really do know me, and accept me as one of yourselves, as a useful part of the Borough – and this is, I think, the highest possible compliment for an artist.’99 Especially and extraordinarily, in 1962, for a homosexual artist. Towards the end of his speech – blowing, as he says, ‘Aldeburgh’s own small trumpet’ – he reprises the theme of the artist and his community: ‘It is a considerable achievement, in this small Borough in England, that we run year after year, a first-class Festival of the Arts, and we make a huge success of it. And when I say “we” I mean “we”.’ He was, he concludes, deeply grateful to be honoured ‘as a symbol’, ‘but I can’t help feeling that it is all of us, all of you who deserve it’. The only way in which he could make his achievements tolerable and manageable to himself was to feel they were shared with the community. Yet an inescapable sense of distance creeps in: twice in his speech he refers to visitors being ‘charmed’ (which is not a word much used by locals) by the town and in praising it he invokes the example of ‘a very choosy friend from abroad who regularly re-stocks her wardrobe here, and buys most of her Christmas presents too, I believe’.100 Were the mayor, town clerk, aldermen, councillors and people of Aldeburgh ‘charmed’ by the thought of Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine doing her shopping among them or did they ever so slightly wince? A bit of each, surely.
The demands made by the War Requiem on Britten’s time, and on his health, had not ceased with the first performance. There was a planned recording for Decca, for which he had to negotiate with Ekaterina Furtseva to secure the participation of Vishnevskaya and with EMI to release Fischer-Dieskau from his exclusive contract with them; tenacious and tactful, he succeeded on both counts. On 18 November, there was the work’s West German premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, in which he shared the conducting with Colin Davis. Three weeks later, the War Requiem was performed for the first time in London at Westminster Abbey, ‘during one of the thickest, coldest, longest-lasting, freezing smogs the capital had known for years’, according to Rosamund Strode, who was there; she added that ‘Heather Harper, singing from the pulpit, couldn’t even see down to the west end of the nave’.101 Pears, who was suffering from a throat infection, missed the dress rehearsal although he sang in the performance, which was given in the presence of the Queen Mother and the Princess Royal and broadcast live on the BBC Third Programme. William Plomer, who with his German-born partner Charles Erdmann listened to it on the radio (‘with tears running down our faces’), told Britten that he now grasped ‘more fully the extraordinary boldness and skill with which the work is constructed, and appreciate all the more what is most Ben-like in this phrase and that’.102 And then, between 3 and 10 January 1963, the War Requiem was recorded at Kingsway Hall, with Decca’s senior producer John Culshaw and engineer Kenneth Wilkinson in charge; in between the sessions, the work was performed at the Albert Hall on 8 January.
Afterwards, Culshaw told Britten that he thought the recording ‘a document of very great musical importance’ and thanked him for his ‘co-operation and understanding’, while the composer responded with thanks to the producer for his ‘tact, kindness, & skill & endless (necessary!) encouragement’.103 This was very far from mere conventional politeness on either side, for the whole project had almost collapsed on the first day of recording. Vishnevskaya, who had never previously performed the work and who understood her Latin text but not Owen’s English, objected to being placed on the balcony with the chorus, rather than with the other two soloists; according to Culshaw, she ‘lost her head, and lay down on the floor of the vestry … and shrieked at the top of her voice’,104 a performance of such intensity and duration that it was impossible to record anything at all in the building while it was going on. The following day, however, she took her place cheerfully and sang brilliantly – evidently, her interpreter had at last succeeded in explaining the work’s construction to her – and the project w
as actually completed ahead of schedule. Culshaw had been right about its importance, although he can hardly have foreseen the extent of its commercial success: released in May as a sombre black box of two premium-priced LPs, the War Requiem nevertheless sold an unprecedented 200,000 copies within a few months. When he left Decca, five years later, Culshaw wrote of his recordings with Britten: ‘He seems to inspire everyone around him with a different sort of single-mindedness, which is simply that of doing justice … to the music at hand.’105
‘I gave out a great deal of myself in the War Requiem, & my body has taken revenge!’106 Britten told Paul Sacher – who had wanted to commission a work to mark the composer’s forthcoming fiftieth birthday – within days of completing the recording. Undeterred by the effects of their most recent holiday, he and Pears were about to leave for two weeks in Greece, followed by a fortnight with the Hesses at Schloss Tarasp. But in Greece they were snowed in and unable to explore; then, in Switzerland, he immediately fell while skiing and was laid up for the rest of their stay, preventing the rest of the party from doing much. On their return to England, he had to spend some weeks hobbling around on crutches with his injured foot in plaster, when he should have been touring in Germany with Pears – which was ‘quite maddening & frustrating for him, I fear, tho’ not so bad for me who have been sitting, leg up, working on my new Concerto for Slava’.107 All the same, he remained determined to travel to Moscow in early March, with or without crutches, for the British Council’s ‘Festival of British Musical Art’: among the other musicians taking part in the fourteen concerts (seven each in Moscow and Leningrad) were the Amadeus Quartet, Norman Del Mar, George Malcolm, Barry Tuckwell and, from the host nation, Rostropovich, who was still in poor health. The visit was a huge success not only with audiences but also with the Minister of Culture, Madame Furtseva: Britten, who knew how to charm, established an immediate and valuable degree of personal rapport with her. The only dissenting note came from the English press where he was quoted as having said, in an interview for Pravda, ‘One of the main social duties of an artist lies in the formation, education and development of the artistic tastes of the people.’ There was some debate about whether or not he had appreciated the significance which a communist readership would attach to the definite article before ‘people’: he later told William Plomer that he had meant to give Pravda ‘a sympathetic tactful talk, which of course the blighters got deliberately wrong’. ‘However,’ he added, ‘that isn’t unique to the USSR, is it?’108
