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Beyond Britten

Twenty-five years after Benjamin Britten’s death, on 4 December 1976, his place in musical life seems secure: his operas remain the principal post-Strauss/Puccini/Janácek repertory pieces, world-wide, while many other vocal and instrumental works are regularly played, recorded — and discussed by musicologists. Cynics will claim that Britten’s survival has more to do with clever promotion by a mafia comprising Boosey & Hawkes, Faber Music, the Britten-Pears Foundation, the Britten Estate, and Aldeburgh Productions, than with inherent musical worth. But that jaundiced view fails to acknowledge the strong feelings and subtle tensions that pervade Britten’s work: it also discounts the extent to which the lively pluralism of the contemporary music scene since the mid-1970s has worked to Britten’s advantage in the way a more monolithic evolutionary process might not have done.

In his Guest Editorial for Autumn 2001 Ivan Hewett argued as follows: ‘surely music is as much to do with the expression of rootedness in a certain place, and the assertion of belonging to a community’ as with aspirations to dissolve all difference in a ‘universal language’? Hewett’s mention of Debussy, in ‘Pagodes’, translating a ‘perception of something unutterably alien into something completely personal and thoroughly Western’ inevitably brings Britten’s use of orientalisms to mind, and the vexed question of the connection between national and international in his compositions. But an even more crucial determinant of his music’s continuing appeal and value is the profound conflict it enshrines between engagement and alienation, as psychological, social forces which have direct equivalents in his compositional practice.

In the speech he made on accepting the first Aspen Award in July 1964, given to honour ‘the individual anywhere in the world judged to have made the greatest contribution to the advancement of the humanities’, Britten came up with some appropriately humanistic declarations. ‘I certainly write music for human beings [...] I also take note of the human circumstances of music, of its environment and conventions’. It was, he proclaimed, ‘the composer’s duty, as a member of society, to speak to or for his fellow human beings’. He nevertheless acknowledged that ‘finding one's place in society as a composer is not a straightforward job’: and his fervent hymn to rootedness — ‘I belong at home — there — in Aldeburgh. I have tried to bring music to it in the shape of our local Festival; and all the music I write comes from it’ — understandably says nothing about the nature of the personal relationships that mattered most to him, and gave no hint that feelings of alienation and guilt might underpin the homilies about belonging and social responsibility. The Aspen song of praise to local sweetness and light was very far from the whole story.

More than twenty years before the Aspen speech, in a 1941 article for the American journal Modern Music called ‘England and the folk-art problem’, Britten offered a rather different perspective. ‘Since the Roman Empire, all culture, folk or sophisticated, has been under international influence’, and it follows that attempting to base national styles on national folk-music is ‘bound to have a weakening effect’. Writing in America, and with an assurance that betrays the help (admitted in a letter) of both WH Auden and Peter Pears, Britten praises those English composers, including Maconchy, Berkeley, Lutyens and Rawsthorne, who ‘are avoiding the pitfalls that some of their musical fathers and uncles have dug for them’: and he ends — after quoting an Auden poem — with the sonorous assertion that ‘it is only those who accept their loneliness and refuse all the refuges, whether of tribal nationalism or airtight intellectual systems, who will carry on the human heritage’.

It’s easy to see how such topics might not just impinge on Britten’s own music, but also help to determine the value that has continued to be attached to it since his death. In 1941, Britten observed that Elgar, the composer ‘many Americans [...] have come to regard [...] as synonymous with England’, was, in fact ‘a most eclectic composer, his most obvious influences being Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Franck’: and he saw the particular success of Walton’s Façade and Lambert’s The Rio Grande as evidence that ‘the Elgarian approach, with its direct admission of continental contemporary influence, has asserted itself’. Modesty forbade him from relating this approach to his own music, but the presence and significance of ‘continental contemporary influence’ was obvious from a very early stage, and continued to be obvious, even when the ‘continent’ in question shifted from Europe to Asia. Yet it was in the early 1940s that Britten chose to spend valuable time arranging folk-songs, those ‘concise and finished little works of art’, in ways which pointed up their adaptability, as well as his own. If ‘tribal nationalism’ was taboo, a personal kind of Englishness that acknowledged national elements, using them to highlight rather than conceal a personal manner, was positively welcome. According to Britten, the real problem with English music (Vaughan Williams was not named) had been ‘not in the influences but in the lack of talent and inability to assimilate them’. Britten himself had the talent to forge a style as eclectic and as individual as Elgar’s (or Vaughan Williams’s, for that matter).

In the 1941 article we read that ‘perhaps the piece of music that brings tears most easily to the eyes of an expatriate Englishman is Delius’ On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, which is founded on a Norwegian tune and written by a man who spent most of his life out of England, who responded most to the influences of Grieg and Liszt, and whose publishers were Viennese’. Delius clearly represented something of an ideal to an ‘expatriate Englishman’, and even after Britten’s return to England, and Aldeburgh, the impulse to work with wider perspectives than the narrowly national remained. Britten’s local success, especially after 1945, was balanced by an international acclaim that few if any subsequent British composers have managed to match. But did Britten’s return from America in 1942 help to create a composer who, in Paul Griffiths’s assessment (1991), was ‘lamed’ by the need for secrecy and caution in his personal life, and therefore failed to develop into the ‘father-figure who could have revolutionised British music in the 1940s and 1950s’? Did British music need revolution, or did it benefit more from the kind of evolution defined by Britten’s own ‘Elgar’ formula, and no less relevant to many later composers, from Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies onwards, who have found inspiration among continental radicals for the forging of a personal idiom while not neglecting more local associations? In these respects, Britten himself has been a model to younger composers who styles could hardly be more different. How appropriate, then, that his own music should continue to survive and prosper: and there’s still more than a decade to go before the centenary of his birth...

Arnold Whittall’s books include The music of Britten and Tippett (2nd edition, Cambridge UP, 1990)