by Neil Powell
A few months later, he was asked by Donald Mitchell whether he felt ‘that this is a time of acute change in music’. His reply has a touching awkwardness, as he attempts to balance tolerance with firmness:
Yes, I do. And I don’t always follow the new directions, and nor do I always approve of them, but that is only purely personal to me. I mean, that there should be new directions is obvious. Any new thought, in whatever language it’s couched, has got to have this new element. But I sometimes feel that seeking after a new language has become more important than saying what you mean. I mean, I always believe that language is a means and not an end.58
But towards the end of that interview, Britten couldn’t resist mentioning ‘a young composer who had a first performance of an opera not far from here’ at a time when ‘there were other operas being performed in the neighbourhood’. Britten thought it strange that the young composer ‘didn’t want to go and see how Mozart solved his problems’; for him, studying the work of other composers in order to construct his own was as natural as using a map to navigate one’s way through an unfamiliar journey. The young composer was Birtwistle, the opera Punch and Judy.
The Maltings had to pay its way. After the 1968 festival, it began seriously to earn its keep, hosting a range of events which were listed in the introduction – optimistically headed ‘The First Phase’ – to the following year’s programme book. These included ‘a Bach week-end, an Antique-Dealers’ Fair, some summer orchestral and band concerts, a highly successful series of “Jazz at the Maltings” for B.B.C. Television, a number of Decca recordings … and a fund-raising concert for the Aldeburgh Parish Church tower at Christmas’.59 In December, Decca recorded Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra in three contrasting projects: English Music for Strings, including works by Bridge, Delius, Elgar and Purcell; Salute to Percy Grainger, with Pears, John Shirley-Quirk and the Ambrosian Singers; and the greatly admired double LP set of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. However, the ‘most ambitious and strenuous operation yet undertaken’ at the Maltings was the filming for television of Peter Grimes.
Britten had no more enthusiasm for television than he had for records and radio, but in the autumn of 1966 Basil Coleman had directed a BBC production of Billy Budd, conducted by Charles Mackerras and with Pears reprising his original role of Captain Vere. This led to him ‘thinking a lot about me and T.V. (!)’ – the exclamation mark is his own – and to two specific proposals: one would be an opera to be composed specially for television, while the other and more urgent one was a film of Peter Grimes. In April 1967, he wrote to Coleman: ‘I think that with Peter’s performance, your understanding of the piece, & me not yet too old to conduct, we ought to do a really authoritative record of how we like it to go, & what it is all about.’60 This is tactful to the point of evasiveness: Britten being too old to conduct was a more remote danger than Pears, approaching sixty, being too old to sing the part of Grimes. His intention, and Coleman’s, was to pre-record the music, to which the cast would then mime during filming; but the BBC were committed to having orchestra and conductor in a separate studio, as they had for Budd. Britten, who wanted direct contact with the cast, then withdrew from the project and handed the baton to Meredith Davies.
It was at this point that John Culshaw moved from Decca to become head of music at BBC Television. Alert to the ‘authoritative record’ aspect of Britten’s proposal (which a Davies-conducted version, whatever its merits, could not possess), Culshaw proposed to use his beloved Maltings as a single studio, even though this would mean cramming orchestra and conductor into the highest and hottest part of the building. Now it was Coleman’s turn to withdraw: he felt, not entirely without cause, that filming in the Maltings, though it would please Britten and produce decent sound, wouldn’t make the best television. Instead, Brian Large directed the production, which was filmed at Snape during the last week of February 1969. At the back of the hall, Britten sustained himself with an enormous jar of peppermints while communicating his comments and instructions via a loudhailer; at the front, after a slate-dislodging blizzard, snow fell on Auntie and her ‘nieces’ as they huddled round the fire in the ‘Boar’. ‘It was a very great experience,’ he said afterwards, adding that ‘the people I was working with were so musical and understood the musical side of the work so well that my task was made much easier’.61 The resulting film achieved precisely what Britten had intended; yet it’s hard not to feel a little wistful about Coleman’s original plan, for Grimes, unlike many operas and plays, does lend itself to filmic opening-out. The Suffolk seascape and the town itself are so crucial to the work that a production shot on location might have been fascinating, despite the inevitable snags which can arise when singers mime. As it was, Peter Grimes was transmitted on BBC2 in November 1969.
By the time Grimes was filmed, Britten had already started to plan his television opera, Owen Wingrave, with Myfanwy Piper; but, as so often, he also had an unfulfilled commission to get out of the way. This was The Children’s Crusade, Op. 82, a version of Brecht’s Kinderkreuzzug, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Save the Children Fund. Michael Kennedy thought this the ‘least appealing’62 among Britten’s choral works of the 1960s, and few would disagree. ‘Britten was never so grim as in this piece,’ says John Bridcut, before wondering rhetorically ‘whether it has won many hearts’.63 Even the composer himself described it as ‘a very grisly piece’.64 It received its first performance from the Wandsworth School Choir at St Paul’s Cathedral on 19 May 1969; Adrian Thompson, who was among the boy singers, later recalled that they had at first found the work terrifying, not least in its brutally percussive opening, but that Britten’s kindness and care during rehearsal had won them round. By way of contrast, and perhaps simply to cheer himself up, Britten then wrote the charming, almost eighteenth-century Suite for Harp, Op. 83, for Ossian Ellis, whose nationality is deftly acknowledged by the closing variations on the Welsh hymn tune ‘St Denio’.
Although the programme for the 1969 festival, now extended to three weeks, was full of confident ambition, it still retained at its core the feeling of a ‘modest’ event with ‘a few friends’. So, alongside a new production of Idomeneo and a revival of The Prodigal Son, there were to be recitals by Pears and Britten, George Malcolm (playing the ‘Goldberg’ Variations), Julian Bream, Ossian Ellis and Alfred Brendel; Britten was to conduct the hard-working ECO in the Brandenburgs, in Elgar and, remarkably, in Mahler’s Fourth, a work he had loved since his student days, with Elly Ameling as soloist in the last movement. Philip Ledger had joined Britten, Pears and Holst as the fourth artistic director, notably strengthening the baroque element of the programme. As so often in the past, the festival’s musician friends reappeared in assorted combinations and wearing different hats, among them the stately ones of a mock-Victorian evening celebrating the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s births in, of course, the Jubilee Hall. The opening afternoon concert, on Saturday 7 June, was given at the Maltings by the Amadeus Quartet, augmented by Cecil Aronowitz (viola), Adrian Beers (double bass) and Britten himself, playing his own Steinway concert grand, whose usual home was the library-cum-music room at The Red House, in Purcell, Mozart and Schubert. That evening, in the Jubilee Hall, there was the first performance of an operatic double bill by Gordon Crosse, Purgatory and The Grace of God, whose misfortune it is to be remembered mainly for what else happened that night. The performance began at 8.30 p.m.; by the time it ended, at around eleven o’clock, Snape Maltings was on fire.
At first, because the concert hall itself was obviously windowless, the only signs of trouble were the glowing roof ventilators; then, a customer leaving the Crown at closing time noticed a redness in the sky above the building. When the fire brigade from Saxmundham arrived, the roof was ablaze and about to collapse: it didn’t take the walls with it, because Derek Sugden had providentially allowed for the roof structure to move freely during gales. Stephen Reiss, when he heard and disbelieved the rumour
, drove straight over from Aldeburgh: the flames, he said, were visible from Snape crossroads, a mile away, and when he reached the Maltings, ‘it was just devastation’.65 He went back to The Red House to break the news. Britten, about to go to bed, was ‘amazing’: together with Pears and Reiss, he immediately started to sort out the practical business of how the festival – everything, including Idomeneo – could go on. There were nineteen events scheduled at the Maltings, almost all of which would be transferred to Blythburgh Church, although the concert by the New Philharmonia conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini had to be transplanted more distantly to Ely Cathedral. The only casualty was the next day’s choral and orchestral concert: this was to have opened with Britten conducting The Building of the House, a work which had become quite obviously unperformable in the circumstances. On the Sunday morning, the Bishop of St Edmundsbury offered them the use of any church in his diocese and the Queen telephoned personally. Britten, who had lost not only his concert hall but his Steinway (‘the nicest piano I have ever played on’), was calm, clear-headed and impossible to argue with: when Sugden arrived from his Hertfordshire home to assess the damage, he had already decided that they were going to rebuild in time for the following year’s festival. The treasurer, Charles Gifford, had checked with the building’s insurers that they were fully covered: so, Britten told the astonished but impressed Sugden, they might as well start work straight away. Perhaps they’d even make one or two modest improvements.
Everyone who was there remembers the rest of the 1969 festival as a series of miracles. Imogen Holst’s unscheduled but superb conducting of the ECO in her father’s A Fugal Concerto – replacing Elgar’s For the Fallen, which required forces too large for Blythburgh – was indisputably one of them. But by some distance the most extraordinary was the performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo, conducted by Britten, in Blythburgh Church on Tuesday 10 June, just three days after the fire. Carpenters from Reade’s of Aldeburgh worked day and night to create a stage in the church and seats were borrowed from anyone who would lend them; a marquee on the lawn provided dressing rooms for the cast. Britten conducted from a cramped corner of the stage, snapping off pieces of his baton: a recurring habit which on this occasion enabled him to avoid poking orchestra members in the eye. Robert Tear, singing Arbace, recalled that ‘it had the feel of an improvisation, as if it were literally a first performance. I can’t begin to tell you how wonderfully Ben conducted.’66 Joyce Grenfell, a regular festival attender, noted in her diary that it was ‘an impeccable performance’ and ‘found the whole occasion a triumph of spirit’.67 Because the church couldn’t contain the entire audience, local people were asked to surrender their tickets so that more distant visitors needn’t be disappointed, with the promise that Idomeneo would be restaged the following year at a rebuilt Maltings; as, of course, it was.
Just what happened in Snape on that Saturday night remains a mystery. No electrical fault was ever discovered and, because the evening’s performance was at the Jubilee Hall, there was no particular reason why anyone should still have been on the premises. The fire may have started in the costume store beneath the stage, where a trapdoor may have been left open, and some of the festival’s volunteer helpers, present earlier in the evening, may have been smoking. All that is perfectly possible; but so, it must be said, is arson. There were some local people – there still are – who passionately detested Britten and his festival. As he grew older, their dislike seemed to become more intense: paradoxically, he caused offence by having so completely failed to be offensive. His detractors would have found an outrageously camp or bohemian character easy to mock and to dismiss; what infuriated them beyond measure was his unimpeachable quiet respectability. I once met a man in a Suffolk pub who claimed to know who started the Maltings fire: he wouldn’t say any more, but I didn’t disbelieve him.
4
During the summer of 1969, Britten wrote the final song cycle in which he would accompany Pears, Who Are These Children?, Op. 84, setting poems and riddles by the Scots poet William Soutar (1898–1943): several are in English, but in others the dialect acts as a gauze or a veil which, while more readily penetrable than those earlier supplied by Rimbaud or Michelangelo or Hölderlin, has much the same distancing effect. At the heart of the cycle are two poems about children in wartime: one, on an air raid (‘Death came out of the sky / In the bright afternoon’), leads to a reversal, which is also a corollary, of Britten’s recurring corruption-of-innocence theme (‘The blood of children corrupts the hearts of men’); the other, juxtaposing a ‘world at war’ with a fox hunt, takes us back to Our Hunting Fathers or even to that essay with which Britten ended his South Lodge schooldays. And perhaps South Lodge is a memory in two poems which deal with the naughtiness rather than the vulnerability of children: ‘Black Day’ – where the boy receives a ‘skelp’ (that is, a beating) from, successively, his teacher, mother, brother and father – and ‘The Larky Lad’, whose larks are jauntily admired by poet and composer alike. ‘Nightmare’, another recurrent preoccupation, has a tree which cries out and whose branches flower ‘with children’s eyes’; while the bleak simplicity of the last song, ‘The Auld Aik’, about an oak tree which is ‘doun, doun’, perhaps suggests a metaphor for the temporarily felled Maltings. In its pared-down reflexiveness, Who Are These Children? is a notable instance of ‘late style’.
Britten and Myfanwy Piper had also been getting on with Owen Wingrave. The successful filming of Grimes had given Britten a rather surprising new enthusiasm for television: ‘We’re using the camera consciously throughout … I’m being very careful to think throughout of the television medium and not of the stage.’ He was clear that the television audience needed ‘the lyricism of the aria and the ensemble’ and so, he told Donald Mitchell in February 1969, he and Piper had been ‘adding arias galore’.68 But, by the summer, the Maltings fire had reshuffled his priorities: when he and Pears visited America in October, their pre-planned recital tour had become at least partly a fund-raising exercise. Interviewed by John Tusa for BBC2’s The Money Programme – not a show on which composers usually appeared – Britten admitted that he was ‘depressed’ to be raising money for the second time in five years; it did mean, however, that various improvements to the hall would be made now rather than later, since they could hardly put out the begging bowl for a third time. In the new year, he resumed work on Owen Wingrave while staying with Peg Hesse at Wolfsgarten, before setting off with Pears for an extended trip to Australia, where the EOG were performing the church parables at the Adelaide Festival. Despite all this travelling and hard work, he had also found time to buy another house in Suffolk.
There was, as he explained to Mitchell, a straightforward reason for this uncharacteristic extravagance: ‘Silence, of course, these days, becomes a rarer and rarer presence, particularly in this house where we’re sitting now, where the aeroplanes land with unfailing regularity close to the house.’69 That was The Red House, which would remain Britten’s permanent home until his death, and the planes were those from the nearby airbase at Bentwaters. So, although Aldeburgh itself seemed a retreat to their metropolitan friends, he and Pears sought a retreat from their retreat, where Britten could compose in peace and they could both escape from festival business. At first, they considered the west coast of Ireland, perhaps with a fleeting memory of Jack Moeran, who had ended his days there; but they eventually settled for Chapel Cottage at Horham, a village in inland Suffolk, not far from Chandos Lodge, Frederick Ashton’s country home at Eye. This they would enlarge – it became Chapel House – and Britten would have a simple small studio in the garden. Although it may have seemed a perfectly sensible idea, it would before long cause, or at any rate contribute to, trouble.
When the rebuilt Maltings opened for the 1970 festival, audiences perceived that the superb acoustics were even better than before although, as Derek Sugden noted, they were in fact exactly the same. But there had been changes. As the introduction to the programme book, headed (with mild
irony) ‘The Present Phase’, remarked: ‘The Next Phase is indeed on us, but rather more forced on us than we wished.’70 There was a proper chorus room, an improved lighting box, a new downstairs kitchen for the restaurant and relocated facilities for two ‘principal patrons’, Decca and the BBC. For the audience, the most perceptible difference was the construction of a new corridor – later known as the Marland Gallery – from the upper level of the auditorium to the bar and restaurant: the introduction’s author optimistically thought that the ‘interval bottle-neck should be substantially cleared’ (instead of merely being moved closer to the bar). It was to be hoped that the ‘expensive sprinklers’ which had been installed would never be put to the test, but since the fire a new hazard had appeared: the river wall had been breached, the Alde had invaded the marshes on its south side and the grass terrace had been ‘extended and fortified against it’. Once again, the Queen and Prince Philip attended the opening concert, on Friday 5 June: called ‘Music for a Royal Occasion’, it opened with Britten’s arrangement of the National Anthem and closed with three extracts from Gloriana, but fate was not to be tempted by a reprise of The Building of the House. The following evening, Colin Graham’s production of Idomeneo – with, thanks to the cooperation of the BBC and Covent Garden, new costumes and a slightly different set – finally reached the Maltings.
