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Britten’s ‘Lyrics and ballads of Thomas Hardy’

Sad tales for winter

In the 25th anniversary year since Benjamin Britten’s death, Wilfrid Mellers revisits in the Winter 2001 print edition of MT the composer’s classic English song cycle

In 1953 Benjamin Britten composed — only a few years after his Spring symphony of 1949 — his wintry masterpiece, under the title of Winter words. The work is a cycle of settings for tenor and piano of poems by Thomas Hardy who, superficially, may seem the least likely of Britten’s many poetic masks, who include Auden, Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Blake, and William Soutar. We’re apt to think of Hardy — especially Hardy the poet — as old, sere, retrospective, living in a past he’d not only lost but thought he’d humanly failed in; whereas we think of Britten as perennially young, if not for that reason lacking in wisdom. Over the years, however, I’ve come to think that the Hardy cycle, Winter words, is the finest and most deeply characteristic of the cycles dedicated to a single poet, and to voice and piano.

In between the Spring symphony and Winter words Britten composed his second grand, and tragic, opera, Billy Budd, and since most of Britten’s chamber works are in some sense chippings from his operatic workshop, it may be helpful to approach the song-cycle by way of the opera. It has often been said that all Britten’s operas gravitate around the same theme; and the limitation of range is part of the evidence of his genius. In dealing with innocence and persecution Britten knew what he knew, and that the theme of the sacrificial scapegoat is relevant to our time is patent enough. We are obsessed with innocence because we have lost it; and for the same reason we resent and persecute those who haven’t. Britten couldn’t have dealt with this theme so powerfully if it hadn’t been deeply personal to him. What matters is that his art creates, from personal conflicts that don’t concern us, myths that prove to be deeply and disturbingly pertinent. And — at least before Death in Venice — Billy Budd must count as Britten’s most obsessionally personal opera: so much so that, at the time of the original performances, I momently wondered whether the personal interests weren’t too strong to be mythologised. One can put the point simply by saying that Melville’s womenless man-of-war cannot be an adequate image for the Ship of Life. Grimes, though an unhero, is genuinely a tragic character, the Sauvage Man who, given different circumstances, might have grown to civilised consciousness. Billy is not a tragic figure because we aren’t aware that he has potentiality for growth. He is a child destroyed by his childishness, by a stammer that we cannot accept as mea culpa — as a, let alone as the, ‘tragic flaw’. For this reason, the crucifixion analogy, so stridently emphasised in the first production, seemed illegitimate. Billy cannot be equated with Christ, who did grow up, the hard way.

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