by Neil Powell
The concerto which he had originally hoped to perform with Rostropovich during his Moscow visit remained unfinished: it was evolving into a four-movement symphony-shaped work which for a while he tentatively called a ‘Sinfonia Concertante’. He completed the composition draft of what would in fact be the Cello Symphony – or, more properly, the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 68 – on 11 April and the full score on 3 May. Rostropovich, recovering from his illness in a Moscow hospital, found it ‘miraculous’ and ‘a work of genius’; recalling the terms in which he had asked Britten to write it, he added that it would be ‘the best medicine for my recuperation’.109 As he wouldn’t be well enough to attend that year’s Aldeburgh Festival, he magnanimously waived his right to give the work’s first performance; Britten naturally declined this offer, and the premiere was postponed until the following spring. Meanwhile, he had another deadline to meet, another commission to finish: this was the Cantata Misericordium, Op. 69, for the centenary of the Red Cross. His original intention had been to set a medieval Latin text on the theme of the Good Samaritan, although there was some concern that a Christian text might be inappropriate for a firmly non-denominational organisation. He then enlisted the help of Patrick Wilkinson, Professor of Latin at Cambridge, and by the end of 1962 he was able to assure Frédéric Siordet of the Red Cross that they were ‘going ahead with a purely humanitarian version of the Good Samaritan story’. He also – in a move clearly intended to impress Siordet as a coup and to silence any further grumbling about the text – secured the participation of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the baritone soloist for the work’s first performance, which was to take place at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva on 1 September; the other participants were Pears as tenor soloist, Le Motet de Genève and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, conducted by Ernest Ansermet.
The Cantata Misericordium is a more substantial work than the Cantata Academica; it is also another of Britten’s pendants, in this case to the War Requiem. He was slightly disingenuous in describing it as ‘purely humanitarian’, for within the first few minutes the chorus issues the invitation, ‘Iesu parabola iam nobis fiat fabula’ (‘Let us enact a parable of Jesus’). Yet the chorus’s conclusion is impeccably tuned to the occasion: ‘Morbus gliscit, Mars incedit, / fames late superat; / sed mortales, alter quando alterum sic sublevat, / e dolore procreata caritas consociat’ (‘Disease is spreading, war is stalking, / famine reigns far and wide; / but when one mortal relieves another like this, / charity springing from pain unites them’). To which the two soloists add their assent: ‘Quis sit proximus tuus iam scis’ (‘Who your neighbour is, now you know’). Donald Mitchell, writing in the Daily Telegraph, thought the work ‘quite exceptionally beautiful’ and ‘an incomparably gentle masterpiece’.110 He should perhaps have declared his interest: since the beginning of the year, he had been working for Boosey & Hawkes with special responsibility for Britten and for encouraging younger composers. He was also compiling a definitive catalogue of Britten’s work, to be published by Boosey & Hawkes to mark the composer’s fiftieth birthday: he proudly reported that he had ‘managed to persuade Roth to let Faber’s design the typography – quite a triumph’,111 not yet guessing how closely he, Britten and the designer Berthold Wolpe would soon become associated.
That fiftieth birthday was always going to be a torment for Britten. The Sunday Times, having been defeated over the earlier ‘Profile’, wouldn’t let the occasion pass: on 17 November, they published an article and interview by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, in the course of which Britten imprudently mentioned his never to be realised plan for an opera based on King Lear. The paper headlined the piece ‘Benjamin Britten at Fifty: A King Lear in prospect’, rather neatly confirming his point about Pravda’s lack of uniqueness. The same day’s Observer carried Michael Tippett’s ‘Britten at Fifty’ – ‘Of all the musicians I have met, Britten is the most sheerly musical’ – while to the Sunday Telegraph the composer himself contributed ‘Britten Looking Back’, an affectionate tribute to his friend and teacher Frank Bridge. There were celebratory musical events, beginning with an Albert Hall Prom on 12 September at which Britten himself conducted his Sinfonia da Requiem, Spring Symphony and, in its first London performance, Cantata Misericordium. Then, on the birthday itself, 22 November, there was a concert performance of Gloriana at the Festival Hall, followed by a party at the Harewoods’ London house in Orme Square. The performance, in which Pears reprised the role of Essex and the part of Queen Elizabeth I was sung by Sylvia Fisher, ‘went surprisingly well, & was rather interesting’,112 but during the interval the news from Dallas, of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, began to circulate among the audience and cast an inescapable shadow over the remainder of the evening.
The most ill-judged of the birthday celebrations – which was apparently instigated by Decca’s chairman, Edward Lewis, and organised by John Culshaw, who should have known better – was the presentation to Britten of a specially pressed LP, bearing the number BB 50 and containing secretly taped rehearsal material from the War Requiem sessions; it took him a month to summon the courage to play it once (and to thank Culshaw), after which it was consigned to a cupboard at The Red House and not heard again during the composer’s lifetime. By contrast, the most perfectly judged was a Festschrift, A Tribute to Benjamin Britten on his Fiftieth Birthday, edited by Anthony Gishford and published by Faber. The contributors to this astonishing book, of whose existence its dedicatee managed to remain unaware until 22 November, were Julian Bream, Kenneth Clark, Aaron Copland, the Earl of Cranbrook, Joan Cross, Clifford Curzon, Ronald Duncan, E. M. Forster, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, Anthony Gishford, Carlo Maria Giulini, Lord Harewood, Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine, Imogen Holst, Hans Keller, George Malcolm, Elizabeth Mayer, Yehudi Menuhin, Donald Mitchell, Peter Pears, Myfanwy Piper, William Plomer, Francis Poulenc, Mstislav Rostropovich, Edith Sitwell and Eric Walter White; plates reproduced works of art or manuscript pages of compositions by Georg Ehrlich, Kenneth Green, Hans Werner Henze, Edward Hicks, Henry Moore, John Nash, John Piper, Mary Potter, Reynolds Stone and Michael Tippett. A notable absentee appears to be Eric Crozier, who did in fact offer a pungent sequel to Albert Herring, ‘Albert in Later Life’, which Gishford greatly enjoyed but regretfully declined on the grounds that ‘blackmail, pederasty, pornography and arson’ were not quite the subjects for the occasion. ‘I am very proud of that book, by the way,’113 Britten told George Malcolm.
William Walton wrote him a splendid letter on 23 November, saying that he had celebrated the previous day ‘in my own way by playing my favourite works – Spring Symphony – Nocturne and War Requiem – each in its different way a masterwork’. ‘In the last years,’ he continued, ‘your music has come to mean more and more to me…’114 Of all the birthday cards and letters Britten received, none can have been more touching than the one from T. J. E. Sewell which concluded: ‘This letter requires no answer: it is really a note of thanks to yourself and an expression of my pride that I was once your headmaster.’115 Britten, who in May 1962 had composed a setting of Psalm 150 for the centenary of what was now Old Buckenham Hall School, obviously did reply, with his usual well-judged courtesy and friendliness. But it was to William Plomer that he had already expressed his frank opinion of this whole birthday business: ‘I feel that my age at the moment is centenarian, rather than demi-c., & that these concerts are memorial rather than celebratory, & these nice things being written are really obituaries. I know what it’s like to be dead, now.’116
6
In the course of a birthday interview with Britten published in the London Magazine, Charles Osborne began to ask an unfinished question: ‘I think of you as primarily an opera composer, and –’ Osborne wasn’t and isn’t alone: the reader of Richard Taruskin’s enormous Oxford History of Western Music will find Britten unequivocally described as ‘a specialist in opera’.117 But his interruption of Osborne’s question was impatient and revealing: ‘Well, I don’t know that I do. Certainly I respond v
ery deeply to words, but not necessarily only opera. At the moment, I think the finest thing I’ve written is my work for ’cello and orchestra which hasn’t yet been performed.’118 He would in fact only write two more operas, of which one – Owen Wingrave, composed for television in 1970 – is a special and somewhat unsatisfactory case. In the meantime, there were to be the three vocal and dramatic, but not operatic, works he would call his ‘church parables’; and if the first of these, Curlew River, Op. 71, was to be premiered as planned during the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, it was high time it got written.
Most uncharacteristically, Britten decided to go away for six weeks to work on it: from mid-January until late February, he and Pears were in Venice, where they stayed in ‘a rambling flat in a crazy old Palazzo on the Grand Canal’;119 Byron had lived in it, an unsettling companion to the city’s more familiar literary ghosts, such as Henry James and Thomas Mann. Since returning from America in 1942, Britten had seldom composed away from his own study, but there’s a hint here that he was finding The Red House, for all its peace and space, a less creative environment than Crabbe Street. He also needed a break from niggling English difficulties: chief among these was the rapidly unravelling situation at Boosey & Hawkes. For a while, following Donald Mitchell’s appointment, he had been optimistic: ‘things are looking up at B & H quite a bit’,120 he had told Nicholas Maw in October, while a month later he was enthusiastically welcoming Peter Maxwell Davies ‘into the Boosey & Hawkes fold’.121 But in December, Mitchell was asked to resign, following a series of disagreements with Ernst Roth; while Roth himself was to be succeeded on his retirement in 1964 by David Adams, until then president of Boosey & Hawkes Inc. in New York, who seemed to have little interest in contemporary music. In a letter to Mitchell from Venice, Britten (who by now couldn’t even bring himself to write the initials ‘B’ and ‘H’) concluded with an apparently throwaway line: ‘Love to you all, & don’t worry too much about – & –; I’m sure there’ll be some future. I occasionally dream of Faber + Faber – music publishers!’122 Mitchell, who already advised Faber on music books, replied: ‘You say you dream of F & F Music Publishers! Perhaps we ought to try & make the dream come true!’123 He took the suggestion to Peter du Sautoy at Faber and he in turn discussed it with his chairman, Richard de la Mare, whose response was: ‘I have no idea how this can be done, but clearly we have to do it.’124
Curlew River was making good progress in Venice: so much so that Britten wrote to Plomer on 15 February, asking him to spend a few days in Aldeburgh at the end of the month, when he could hear it played through. This duly happened on 27 February; afterwards, back in Sussex, Plomer wrote to say that he thought it ‘a work of extraordinary originality, unity, force, and vitality’.125 A few days later, Britten was ‘off Eastwards in a whirl of music, visas, warm clothes (warm enough?), & unfinished projects’:126 he was flying to Moscow to conduct the first performance of ‘the finest thing I’ve written’, the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, with Rostropovich as soloist and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 12 March. Unlike the other composers represented in the previous year’s Festival of British Music, Britten had already become something of a musical hero in Russia: his music was available in Soviet editions and he had a huge student following. John Warrack, who attended the rehearsal, where Britten was ‘in his element among friendly musicians’, as well as the concert itself, reported that at the end of the performance ‘the students in the gallery were overjoyed, stamping and hand-clapping until they got the finale encored’.127 In his review for the Daily Telegraph, Warrack precisely echoed the composer’s own feelings about the piece: it was, he said, ‘Britten’s finest instrumental work to date’ and it would ‘nail the dying view that Britten needs words for his music’.128 On 16 March, Rostropovich, Britten and the Orchestra of the RSFSR – which, as Yulian Vainkop remarked with justifiable pride in Leningradskaya Pravda, ‘mastered Britten’s very difficult score in an exceptionally short time’ – performed the work in the Great Hall of the Philharmonia in Leningrad, where the finale was again encored; during the composer’s three days in the city, admiring students at the conservatory astonished and delighted him with an impromptu performance of extracts from his War Requiem.
The Cello Symphony is the last and the finest of Britten’s regrettably small group of major orchestral works. Its sound-world and grammar have a good deal in common with the Sinfonia da Requiem, with which it shares the ‘tragic key’ of D minor, but it is more audacious and substantial. The opening allegro maestoso is by turns thunderous and brooding: it is, David Matthews notes, among Britten’s darkest movements, ‘the music struggling upwards from the murky opening sounds of tuba, contrabassoon and basses, but continually being beaten down by timpani strokes’.129 It is followed by a neurotic, panicky scherzo which ends in a plaintive catlike mewing. The linked third and fourth movements are an adagio, which contrives to be both majestic and wistful, and an overwhelmingly wonderful passacaglia. This is a characteristic quest for redemption, whose final moments of precariously achieved resolution are as intensely moving as anything in Britten. As Michael Kennedy says, ‘In terms of novel instrumental colouring, absorbing interplay of motifs and the emotional eloquence of the spiritual drama being enacted, this is Britten’s orchestral apogee.’130 Steven Isserlis, who at first disliked the work but found himself invited to record it in the late 1980s, remembers the ‘epiphany’ in which he fell in love with it, ‘because it is a masterpiece’: ‘I happened to be playing at around that time at Snape Maltings, and decided to take a walk across the marshes before the concert. At one point I stood still and listened to the haunting silence; suddenly the thought came to me: “This is it. This is where Britten’s music comes from!”’131
Britten’s popularity in the USSR had usefully practical consequences. He told Madame Furtseva that he would extend Rostropovich’s exclusive right to perform as soloist in the Cello Symphony until the end of 1965, whereupon she granted permission for the cellist to record the work with Britten and the English Chamber Orchestra for Decca; the sessions took place at Kingsway Hall in London during July. Concert performances of Peter Grimes in Leningrad in late March resulted in three separate proposals for staged productions, and the Bolshoi expressed interest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While in Moscow, Britten was paid four hundred roubles in royalties for an edition of his ‘selected vocal music’ which had been published there: this he had to leave in a Russian bank account (cheerfully enough, since he rightly anticipated further visits), although he realised that some of it belonged to Boosey & Hawkes and mentioned this to Ernst Roth. Roth’s response, no doubt coloured by Britten’s reluctance to assign publication rights for Curlew River to B&H, was discouraging: he strongly advised Britten against making his music freely available in the USSR, a country from which it was impossible to extract payment, and tetchily added that ‘Roubles in a Russian bank are no use to us’.132 He entirely failed to understand Britten’s enthusiasm for Russia, which was founded not only on his creative partnership with Rostropovich but also on the rapport he had established with predominantly young audiences. With them, he seemed to achieve the directness of communication and response for which he had always hoped and which in England had often eluded him; perhaps, after all, he hadn’t been so badly misrepresented in that Pravda interview.
Pears had not been in Russia with Britten – he had engagements in Oxford, Edinburgh, Rotterdam and Amsterdam during March – but the following month both men were ‘off East’ again, this time to Budapest and Prague, where they performed Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets and Hölderlin-Fragmente and Schubert’s Winterreise. In Budapest, they met Zoltán Kodály, another important musical friendship and (naturally) a recruit for the Aldeburgh Festival, and a pair of twelve-year-old twin musical prodigies, Zoltán and Gábor Jeney, for whom Britten was to compose his Gemini Variations, Op. 73. Meanwhile, in England, Faber Music – at first a division of the publishing house,
later a separate company with Britten on its board – was swiftly becoming a reality. Richard de la Mare, having asked himself what they would have done if Mozart had approached them and asked them to publish his music, had only one answer: in May, Britten signed a five-year contract which committed him to writing ‘four new major works and six new minor works if possible’. Curlew River was to be the first, and it would appear with one of Berthold Wolpe’s distinctively calligraphed covers, exactly as if it were a Faber book of poetry. Britten was delighted; so was the firm’s most distinguished poet and former editorial director, T. S. Eliot.
Curlew River marked an ending as well as a beginning: when her work on it was complete, Imogen Holst retired as Britten’s music assistant. She had originally intended to stay another three years, until her sixtieth birthday, before devoting herself to the promotion of her father’s music in the approach to his centenary in 1974; but a resurgence of interest in Holst’s music was already under way, stimulated in part by her own recording of his Choral Fantasia and Psalm 86 for EMI in 1964. Moreover, she was soon to embark on the huge task of cataloguing his manuscripts and, with the help of Britten’s solicitor and accountant, Isador Caplan and Leslie Periton, of reorganising the management of his estate. In any case, after a decade of working so intensely with Britten, it was time for a break: although she has often been portrayed as cranky and unworldly, in choosing that moment for herself she showed far shrewder judgement than many of her Aldeburgh colleagues. Consequently, she remained close to Britten – and involved with the Aldeburgh Festival – for the rest of his life. She was succeeded as his amanuensis by Rosamund Strode.
