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Benjamin Britten 1913–1976

by Stanley Sadie

Lord Britten died in Aldeburgh on December 4, at the age of 63 (as was briefly noted in our last issue).

Edward Benjamin Britten was born at Lowestoft on St Cecilia’s Day 1913. He started composing at the age of five; when he was 11 he became a pupil of Frank Bridge, who gave him a solid, broadly based and economical technique and helped him widen his horizons beyond the traditional English limits. He readily owned his debt to Bridge in later life, and tried to repay it with revivals. In 1930 he went to the RCM, as a pupil of Ireland; later, his hopes of studying under Berg in Vienna were frustrated by opposition by the RCM authorities. His views, on life and on music, were progressive, anti-authoritarian, and actuated by strong humane feelings. During the 1930s he began to make his mark as a forward-looking composer, in – for example – the op. 1 Sinfonietta (1932), with its unfashionable (in England) debt to Schoenberg; in the Frank Bridge Variations (given at Salzburg in 1937), a work of breathtaking technique, brilliance and wit, where he can be heard to be stretching his musical muscles and, moreover, giving new hints of expressive power; and in the Rimbaud cycle Les illuminations (1939), whose textures, key treatment, range of mood and sensitivity to words and meanings first decisively disclosed the direction his genius was moving.

Britten was a pacifist, and in 1939 he went, with Peter Pears, to the USA – following W. H. Auden, whom he had met and who had befriended him when they were working together on a film unit, and two of whose texts he had set. In the USA he composed, to an Auden text, the folk opera Paul Bunyan. But feeling rootless there, particularly on reading about the Suffolk poet Crabbe, he left for home, composing on the way – as is a rapprochement with England and its choral tradition – one of his most enduringly popular works, The Ceremony of Carols, and the Hymn to St Cecilia, showing a command of choral textures and indeed an originality within them comparable to his recent achievement in his concertos (for piano and violin) and the Sinfonia da requiem, indeed perhaps even more individual and securely grounded. In the war he and Peter Pears gave many concerts for CEMA. Another important wartime piece was the Serenade (1943) for tenor, horn (Dennis Brain) and strings, a drawing-together of styles and influences (among them Mahler’s) to produce a work of haunting beauty, displaying an incomparable sensitivity to English poetry and its imagery. This of course was written for Peter Pears, with whom his deep and marvellously productive friendship was by now established: also for Pears were the Michelangelo Sonnets of 1940, Italian-coloured, rounding off (for the time being) the range of European influences to be absorbed. It was Pears’ voice and personality, along with a lively response to Purcellian declamation and line, that inspired Britten’s special mode of writing for (but not exclusively for) the tenor voice, with widely ranging melisma and staccato ‘hocket’ effects, of a peculiar power and poetry, especially depths of pain and isolation.

Pain and isolation: these are themes that ran through Britten’s life, and through his art. That he was desperately unhappy at school, to the point of running away, is only a part of it: but clearly his early experiences left deep scars. His almost obsessive fondness for boys’ voices (preferably in a natural, untutored timbre rather then the English cathedral manner), and indeed his manifest love for children, as seen in his many works for and about them, are surely aspects of the same thing; such works range from the purely entertaining yet didactic Purcell Variations (Young Person’s Guide, 1946), through Let’s Make an Opera (1949, with its theme of suffering in ‘The Little Sweep’), Noyes Fludde (1957) and the Missa Brevis (1959, for Westminster Cathedral) to the Golden Vanity (1966, for the Vienna Boys) and the harrowing tale of the Children’s Crusade (1968, for Wandsworth School). Britten’s prototypical operatic ‘hero’ seems to be a suffering, lonely, violated boy. In his greatest opera, Peter Grimes, which in 1945 inaugurated not only his superb succession of dramatic works – unrivalled, as a series, since Strauss and Puccini – but also a new era in English opera, Britten drew on Crabbe, The Borough (Aldeburgh) and the sea for a story about a fisherman cast out from the community and hounded to his death by conventional, intolerant, over-excitable people. Whether our sympathies are handled fairly is a difficult question: but certainly they are handled powerfully; and the opera’s evocations of sea and shore and the people that inhabit them remain without peer. Then came in quick succession the chamber operas The Rape of Lucretia, a work of great subtlety and power in its percipient treatment of the defiled victim, and Albert Herring, a comedy faintly streaked with seriousness and with just a hint of Mozartian ambivalence. Next was Billy Budd, the richest and most deeply composed of Britten’s big opera scores, implying the complex layers of motivation within the all-male community – involving love and hate, sadism and masochism – that lead to the terrible scene of the hero’s execution. Budd was not very successful in 1951, but later re-cast into two acts it assumed its proper stature. Nor was Gloriana (1953) a success, for reasons that had little to do with its merits; on rehabilitation in 1963 the pageant-like vigour of the opera’s big scenes and the loneliness of Elizabeth emerged as characteristic qualities. 1954 saw one of Britten’s supreme theatrical achievements in the Henry James chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, a frightening evocation of evil forces – ambiguously defined ones – corrupting the young, innocent charges of the Governess (herself drawn with some ambiguity). Instrumental and tonal means strongly support the sense of the drama.

The next opera was A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), a highly characteristic and individual score, yet arguably too exquisite and too miniature in a very English way to have much long-term impact. The text clearly entranced Britten, but possibly the issues did not involve him; and the hint of a patronizing tone in the mechanicals music suggested to some listeners (for all Britten’s left-wing beliefs) a narrowing social outlook, discernible too elsewhere. Other music of this period, however, moved in different directions. There was the War Requiem (1961), a passionate work which embodied Britten’s deepest convictions about love, peace and mankind (it was to have brought together in the new Coventry Cathedral singers Russian, English and German), and hints at hypocrisy of outdated ritual by setting the Mass words against Owen’s poems, describing the individual’s sacrifice and agony and the appalling things that man does to man. Significantly, it quotes from Abraham and Isaac, the most powerful of his ‘canticles’. There was the first of the cello sonatas (1961) in which he allied his muse to Rostropovich’s remarkable personality, and then (1963) the cello Symphony, his noblest instrumental work (the ebullient Spring Symphony of 1949 is of course a choral cycle), tautly constructed yet spacious, and exploring new kinds of solo-orchestra relationship – perhaps again with overtones of the individual and society. There were, following the magical, fantastic evocation of night in the Nocturne (1958), two sets of songs in 1965, the dark and bitter Blake set for Fischer-Dieskau and the more gently world-weary Pushkin set for Vishnevskaya.

What now emerges as his last period may seem to have begun by that date, and perhaps specifically in 1964 with the first of the three ‘church parables’, Curlew River. Here the paraphernalia of medieval music drama and Japanese No play are dissolved into a new, freer yet highly stylized, and deeply poignant idiom, with overtones of ritual. The two that followed used the same manner but different kinds of subject-matter, producing a complementary trio of works. Something of this manner survived into the television opera Owen Wingrave (1970) which however, with its unchanged theme of empty-headed belligerence and cruel victimization of the individual, seemed to break little new ground and to suggest a simplistic handling of certain of the issues. The only remaining opera, his treatment of Mann’s Death in Venice (1973), with its superb central role for Peter Pears, puts corruption in a more pervasive context. His last work was the Third String Quartet, performed by the Amadeus at Snape in December.

That Britten occupies a place in British music alongside Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and as their successor, is not in question. He has traditional English qualities: a certain pragmatic conservatism of idiom, a deep sensitivity to poetry and especially to its melancholy side, a freshness of melody and lucidity of texture, and a Protestant attitude to pain and redemption. Abroad he is less highly valued, possibly but not entirely because our poetry is less understood. It may be that those early scars were too deep and too painful for him ever to absorb them and then to move on and rise above them; and that could only narrow any composer’s range.

Britten had many honours and awards from learned societies and universities, in Great Britain and elsewhere, notably the Aspen Award (1964) which drew from him a characteristically direct artistic Credo. His national honours were CH (1952), OM (1965) and life peerage (1976).

Britten was a complete musician. He wanted others to share the best with him, and he founded the Aldeburgh Festival, making it, with his devoted helpers, more distinguished than others. Until struck down by heart trouble in 1973, he took an active part in it. He played the piano like an angel, especially in music by composers the gods loved (Mozart, Schubert, Purcell), as soloist and accompanist, with marvellous insights. He conducted Bach, Mahler, Bridge and others, as well as his own music – with a vitality and dedication that many professionals lack; but, of course, he was in fact a professional, in all he touched. He did not like Brahms, and is quoted as saying that he played some each year to verify how bad it was; and he was once, understandably, alleged to have said ‘the rot set in with Beethoven’. He did not like music critics, having been treated with hostility in the early days, then unperceptively (over Budd and Gloriana, for instance) and with suspicion for his un-English technical fluency (Gerald Abraham in MGG called him an English Saint-Saëns); too deeply hurt, he did not much respond to their recent warmth. He was generous in his encouragement of young composers. He had many friends – Hindemith, Poulenc, Henze, Richter, Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, Fischer-Dieskau, Bream, for example, and countless musicians in the ECO and the former English Opera Group, as well as locals, including the Aldeburgh fisherfolk – and his feelings for them ran through his music and his music-making. The pain and the isolation remained, however; and whatever the surface of the music they were never totally concealed.

Musical Times, February 1977