by Neil Powell
That summer, Owen Wingrave was finished, and in November it was filmed at Snape for transmission on BBC2 the following year. Despite some marvellous music, it’s a work full of problems, many of them self-inflicted by its composer, and it hasn’t been much loved. Henry James’s short story had long fascinated Britten, who saw it – his first mistake – as a companion piece to The Turn of the Screw: ‘By the way,’ he wrote to Eric Walter White on 5 November 1954, ‘do you know another story of James’ called “Owen Wingrave” with much the same quality as the Screw?’71 Owen, the scion of the Wingraves, is a Sandhurst cadet who rejects military life and returns home to the family mansion, suggestively called Paramore, where he eventually dies in an ancestor-haunted room. Pacifism and ghosts were, of course, both subjects which Britten had treated before, and his wish to revisit the anti-military theme had been sharpened both by the war in Vietnam and by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; he refused, when invited, to take a public stand on the latter, fearing that this might complicate matters for his Russian musical friends, but promised to make private representations, doubtless via Madame Furtseva. His second mistake was to assume that the timeliness of the opera’s message would compensate for its lack of dramatic interest, and his third was to write for specific singers who would feel uncomfortable with, or simply too old for, their roles.
Some of these weaknesses might have been disguised or mitigated if only the filming itself had been a happier affair, but the pleasure Britten had taken in working on the television version of Grimes wasn’t to be repeated. Basil Coleman, who would have been perfectly happy to direct a chamber-scale opera at the Maltings, was passed over; Colin Graham was drafted in to co-direct alongside Brian Large, a television rather than an opera man, and there was tension between the two factions. The concert hall, which had proved curiously amenable to the earlier opera’s clutter, almost as if it didn’t mind being put out by something so coastal and Suffolky, looked ridiculous when converted into the elaborate set of a stately home interior, which also happened to ruin its famous acoustics. Britten, exhausted by the fire and the fund-raising, and recuperating from a recent hernia operation, hated the whole business: he began to wonder whether Owen Wingrave wouldn’t after all work better when, two years later, it was staged at Covent Garden. He donated his fee of £10,000 from the BBC to the rebuilding fund for the Maltings: his unlikely love affair with television was over. When the opera was broadcast on 16 May 1971, it was praised by William Mann in The Times (‘the most impressive piece of ambitious TV drama I have seen’) and by Martin Cooper in the Daily Telegraph (‘one of the composer’s most powerful utterances’).72 However, Britten himself was having none of it: ‘But o, what a terrible medium,’ he wrote to William Plomer; ‘between ourselves it looked pretty awful…’73 By then, he and Myfanwy Piper were already deep into ‘a big new piece for Peter, which cannot be delayed’;74 Pears, he added, wasn’t getting any younger.
In that long and revealing 1969 interview with Donald Mitchell, Britten explained why, in spite of being in many ways admirably suited to the role, he had never seen himself as a teacher. ‘I don’t exactly know why I’m so shy about teaching,’ he begins, before appearing to contradict this modest assertion:
I know that when young people come to me with their works it gives me great pleasure to go through them – these works – with the young composers. I think I’m frightened of imposing my own solutions on their problems. Although I do believe strongly that even the personality of the teacher can be absorbed without much detriment to the scholar. Because if the personality of the scholar is strong enough it can absorb it easily, and perhaps get richer from it. But I have seen so many cases in my life where the tricks, the mannerisms of the teacher have been picked up by the scholar … I think that the great composer, the great writer, painter, will survive almost any kind of treatment. But the great composers can look after themselves. It’s the minor composers, the people who can make our lives so much richer in small ways, that I want to preserve and to help.75
The last point is interesting and slightly surprising, though made of the same stuff as Britten’s frequently reiterated insistence on the musician’s social responsibility; for the rest, however, he seems to be playing a ferocious game of tennis against himself. He then veers to a slightly different point: ‘I do think that at this moment of acute change in music that I perhaps am not the right person to guide young composers. My methods, which are entirely personal to me, are founded on a time when the language was not so broken as it is now.’ And from there he proceeds to the subject of the contemporary composer’s relationship with musical tradition, thus perhaps preventing Mitchell from interjecting the two words which might have challenged the preceding argument: Frank Bridge. For Bridge had been both a powerful musical personality and a composer out of fashion at the time when Britten was his pupil: mightn’t Britten himself have been just such an invigorating teacher? There was, of course, a further implicit reason for his reluctance: the emotional entanglement which might develop from an intense one-to-one relationship with a young student.
Coincidentally or not, a few months after that interview, Britten did accept a pupil: a fifteen-year-old Irish boy named Ronan Magill. His mother, the wife of a Dublin doctor, had written three years earlier, asking Britten to take on her son as a live-in pupil for a week now and then; this bold proposal was rejected, although Britten can’t have failed to notice how it echoed the suggestion that he, when not much older than Ronan, should live and study with Harold Samuel, although on that occasion the veto had come from the opposite direction. In September 1969, Ronan, now a pupil at Ampleforth, called by appointment at the Britten–Pears London house in Offord Road, Islington, and was told that Britten could spare him fifteen minutes or, at most, half an hour. What actually happened, as Ronan Magill told John Bridcut, was rather different:
He took a look at some pieces I had composed, and I played for him – and before I knew where we were three hours had passed. Then I joined them for lunch. I kept thinking I ought to be going, but he made no attempt at that. I played him one piece which I had written, which I am pleased to say he liked. I then played Beethoven [the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata] and some Brahms for him – I didn’t know about his hang-ups about those composers at that time. I just played, and we talked and talked and that was that.76
Britten’s disregard of the time is exactly like Frank Bridge’s, while his tolerance of Beethoven and Brahms recalls his indulgence of David Spenser’s similarly aberrant musical taste. He told Mrs Magill that they were all – he, Pears, Sue and Jack Phipps – ‘enchanted’ by Ronan: ‘I was amazed at his general musicality and intelligence, and his is a remarkable pianistic gift.’ Britten would ‘see him as often as possible, help him with his composition, make arrangements here for him to have general theory tuition, and discuss his piano playing too’.77 It can’t have detracted from Britten’s enchantment that Ronan was good-looking in a slightly wild, dark-haired way; but he was clearly, and significantly, a young man, not a child. When her marriage broke up, Mrs Magill and the rest of her family moved to Suffolk; Ronan became a regular visitor at The Red House and even at Horham. Britten rewarded him with the affectionately Blakeian nickname ‘Tyger’.
By now, Britten was surrounded by colleagues – sometimes unkindly described, as by John Lucas in his Observer profile of 1970, as his ‘courtiers’ – who tended towards overprotectiveness. But he was experienced in self-protection: there’s every reason to suspect that when he grumbled ‘Oh God, Ronan again’ it was mainly for their benefit and that he enormously enjoyed having a fiery young man about the place. Their lessons, which were to continue until Britten’s final illness, inspired an obsessive devotion on the part of his pupil, who wrote him passionate love letters which rivalled the equally heterosexual Wulff Scherchen’s. But Magill, subsequently a professional pianist, was much more than just an emotional teenager: he was learning and observing, and he has striking memories of Britten’s ow
n extraordinary pianism. ‘You could see his long, spindly fingers slightly shaking as they played, as if his body was carrying a sort of live wire of feeling through it,’ he says. And of Britten’s performance in the Schumann Piano Quartet: ‘I will never forget a colour he got in the Scherzo where he made a sort of shimmer of sound. It was just like a shudder of electricity through the body.’78 Even Britten himself didn’t know how he did it. He told Imogen Holst about an occasion when, after playing Mozart’s D major Sonata for Two Pianos with Clifford Curzon, ‘Clifford had been thrilled and had insisted on taking his chair & sitting by Ben’s piano and asking him how he’d done certain phrases, and when he asked how he’d fingered something Ben not only didn’t know but was physically incapable of playing the passage in order to find out!’79
Ronan Magill wasn’t the only boy in his late teens to attract Britten’s attention at the turn of the decade. After the Maltings fire, a full-time caretaker had been appointed and given the grander title of ‘Maltings Concert Hall Warden’; his name was George Hardy, and his seventeen-year-old son Alistair helped out with practical chores – it was he who collected holly and ivy to deck the Owen Wingrave set – and, having recently passed his test, with driving. According to Stephen Reiss, Alistair was ‘very, very beautiful’ and ‘more or less the prototype for the boy in Death in Venice’: ‘Ben and Peter were crazy about him.’80 But Reiss, as we’re about to discover, was a far from dispassionate witness of events at this time, while the fact that Britten and Pears were likely to be attracted by a beautiful young man seems hardly worth remarking. By early 1971, it was clear to those who worked with him at Snape that George Hardy wasn’t doing an adequate job and, since a flat for the warden was nearing completion, a decision on his future had to be taken soon: it clearly wouldn’t do to install a man with his family in a new home and then almost at once to dismiss him. Immediately after the end of the festival, Reiss told the warden of the general dissatisfaction and the report he must make of it, whereupon Hardy resigned. Britten and Pears had retreated to Horham for a post-festival break; when they returned to Aldeburgh, they unleashed a furious attack on Reiss for his ‘sacking’ of George Hardy. Reiss, finding that he had lost the confidence of the founding artistic directors, felt he had no alternative but to hand in his own resignation. Fidelity Cranbrook seriously considered resigning as chairman in protest at Reiss’s treatment. And Britten drafted letters in which he proposed, while retaining his artistic role, to take no further part in the management of the festival. On 8 July, he wrote to Rosamund Strode: ‘I have decided to cut out of all Management concerns now – P.P. will go on, but generally the Red House will do much less, & let ’m stew in their own juice!’81 Had all these departures actually taken place, there might have been some difficulty in finding anyone in a position to accept anyone else’s resignation. But they didn’t: the Countess of Cranbrook and Britten both stayed put, while the entirely innocent party – the young Alistair Hardy – found himself invited to The Red House for dinner and offered financial help in setting up some sort of business: he had been a favourite, certainly, and Britten enjoyed helping his favourites, but that was all. Or almost all.
The fall from favour of Stephen Reiss, a man liked and admired by nearly everyone connected with Aldeburgh, was not prompted merely by an unsatisfactory caretaker and his beautiful son. It had begun on the night of the Maltings fire – on such occasions, the messenger is seldom wholly forgiven – and it gathered pace during subsequent discussions about the future at Snape. This was when the idea of a ‘creative campus’ really began to take shape, with the preparation by Arup Associates of a twenty-five-year plan which envisaged facilities for dance and drama as well as for music and opera, together with ‘rehearsal rooms, a music library, an art gallery, artists’ studios, permanent exhibition space and scenery workshops’.82 Lurking somewhere, and perhaps not quite compatibly, in this grand scheme were Britten’s fond memories of the composers’ colony in Armenia, together with a notional music school of which he had once said that Imogen Holst must be the director. Although Reiss had reservations about this kind of thinking, he accompanied Britten to the Arts Council, whose expansive and expansionist chairman Lord Goodman was predictably impressed by it: Goodman’s suggestion was that Britten should make over his copyrights and royalties to the nation, rather as Henry Moore had done, in return for substantial state funding. Britten, having no dependants, wanted to find a constructive use for his creative assets; he was (in Reiss’s words) ‘absolutely bowled over’ by the proposal and correspondingly affronted by Reiss’s caution. When, early in 1971, Arup Associates produced a more detailed plan for a year-round arts centre, Reiss remained unconvinced. The ground had thus been thoroughly prepared for that summer’s final falling-out, of which almost the saddest aspect was the change of style and tone it signalled: Reiss had been a hands-on improviser, an enthusiastic amateur in the spirit of the earlier Aldeburgh Festivals who cheerfully manned the bar at the Festival Club when needed. If the future was necessarily to be more professional, it might also turn out to be rather less fun.
But was Alistair Hardy, as Reiss suggested, ‘the prototype for the boy in Death in Venice’? Or was Ronan Magill? Neither and both. Death in Venice had certainly been in Britten’s mind, as Donald Mitchell has pointed out, long before he met either of them; yet that doesn’t at all rule them out as influences, for they both coincide with the period when Britten, having completed Owen Wingrave, was turning his full attention to his last opera. What they had in common with each other, and with Wulff Scherchen, is that they were not children but young men. And as Wulff is to Young Apollo, so Ronan and Alistair are to Tadzio.
CHAPTER 9
AS IT IS, PLENTY
1971–76
1
‘I wrote this suite in the early spring of 1971 and took it as a present to Slava Rostropovich when Peter Pears and I visited Moscow and Leningrad in April of that year,’1 said Britten of his Third Suite for Cello, Op. 87. It was their last trip together to Russia, and it wasn’t without complications. They were participating in a festival of British music, which included Britten conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in his Piano Concerto (with Richter as soloist) and Cello Symphony (with Rostropovich). But although Madame Furtseva, the Soviet Minister of Culture, was happy to promote Britten’s music and Rostropovich’s playing of it, she wasn’t at all happy with Rostropovich himself, who was in disgrace for his support of the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The official celebratory lunch at the British Embassy, at which Madame Furtseva was the principal Russian guest, while other visitors from England included William and Susana Walton and André Previn, was ‘greatly delayed by the non-appearance of Slavas Rostropovich and Richter’, noted Pears in his diary. He was puzzled by this: ‘Will the riddle ever be solved? Did they or did they not ever receive their cards of invitation? They were sent with the rest to the Ministry, the usual thing, to be distributed thence. They were not, or were they? Phone invitations were also made, but. Diplomacy, umbrage, tact, obedience?’2 Displeasure had been expressed in a typically Soviet style.
Britten played through the Third Suite for Cello on the piano at the Rostropoviches’ flat to a select audience including Dmitri and Irina Shostakovich. It is the most attractive of the three suites, and the most Russian: its themes are three Russian folk songs as well as ‘Kontakion’, the Russian Orthodox Hymn for the Dead, on which the opening Lento is based. The work thus carries from the start an unmistakable air of gravitas, though not of gloom, which may signal Britten’s concern for his cellist friend in troubled times. An innocent ear might easily mistake some of the inner movements for the work of Shostakovich, yet the substantial last movement could only be by Britten: it is, of course, a passacaglia, which finally resolves into a subdued statement of the ‘Kontakion’ theme, in a manner familiar from the Dowland-based Lachrymae and Nocturnal. As an elegant quid pro quo, Britten and Pears were invited to a private rehearsal performance in Shostak
ovich’s flat of his thirteenth String Quartet; they were so moved that they asked to hear it a second time. ‘I think Dmitri was pleased and touched by our emotion,’ wrote Pears. ‘He has not so many listeners whom he can so wholeheartedly respect as Ben.’3
Because of his continuing disfavour with the Soviet authorities, Rostropovich wouldn’t be permitted to perform the Third Suite for Cello in England until 1973; instead, the somewhat surprising Britten premiere at the 1971 Aldeburgh Festival was Canticle IV: Journey of the Magi, Op. 86. It had been over fifteen years since Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain, and many listeners would have assumed the sequence to have petered out; moreover, the new work was almost disarmingly straightforward. One way of looking at it is as a sort of pre-pendant to Death in Venice, since it was written for the three singers who were to feature most prominently in that opera: Pears, the baritone John Shirley-Quirk and the countertenor James Bowman. Britten harmonises the three voices in ways which range from an aptly magi-like exoticism to a rather charming approach to barbershop and, in the main, treats Eliot’s poem with respect. The one uncharacteristic lapse comes with the phrase ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’, where Eliot surely intends ironic understatement; Britten, however, caresses and repeats the word ‘satisfactory’ no fewer than nine times. The conclusion is troublingly unresolved, but then so is the poem’s.
The Third Suite for Cello ends with a Song of the Dead and Journey of the Magi ends with the words, ‘I should be glad of another death.’ Both point us inexorably towards Death in Venice. We might suspect Britten of wilful valetudinarianism, had his sense of failing health been less well founded. Although 1971 proved to be one of his relatively illness-free years – some difficult dental extractions aside – it would have been entirely like him to suppress any worries about his worsening heart condition while he got on with the opera. At the end of January, he and Pears, together with John and Myfanwy Piper, spent a fortnight in southern France: ‘Ben and Myfanwy,’ Pears noted, ‘are working hard & well on Tod in V.’4 Frederick Ashton was to be the choreographer and the original intention was that Death in Venice should be staged at Snape the following autumn; but on 20 September 1971 Britten told Ashton that he couldn’t ‘guarantee to have the opera ready’ by then and that he therefore proposed the premiere should take place at the 1973 festival. ‘I am desperately keen to make it the best thing I have ever done,’5 he added: he seems to have known intuitively that it would be his final major work. In October, he visited Venice, with Pears and the Pipers, absorbing the atmosphere and researching details such as the cries of gondoliers, and in March 1972 he put in a spell of concentrated work on the opera at Wolfsgarten. Then, during a routine check-up that summer, his doctor, Ian Tait, found signs of cardiac deterioration: Britten’s obstinate and honourable response was that he must finish Death in Venice before there could be any thought of second opinions and possible surgery. At the end of the year, after he’d completed the composition draft, he wondered, as so often, whether it was the best or the worst music he’d ever written. Both these views have been expressed by listeners over the years since then.
