Benjamin Britten

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Britten Minor (1913–30)

  Chapter 2: Some College (1930–34)

  Chapter 3: Most Surprising Days (1935–39)

  Chapter 4: American Overtures (1939–42)

  Chapter 5: Where I Belong (1942–47)

  Chapter 6: A Modest Festival (1947–55)

  Chapter 7: The Poetry in the Pity (1955–64)

  Chapter 8: The Building of the House (1965–71)

  Chapter 9: As It Is, Plenty (1971–76)

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photos

  Illustration Credits

  Also by Neil Powell

  About the Author

  Copyright

  In memory of Adam Johnson

  1965–1993

  You great composer, I little composer.

  DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

  I want to say, here and now, that Britten has been for me the most purely musical person I have ever met and I have ever known.

  SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Edith Britten with her four children, 1914

  2. Benjamin and his father, 1921

  3. Cast of The Water Babies, 1918

  4. Benjamin with multiple scores, c. 1921

  5. Britten with Francis Barton, 1928

  6. Britten reading by a river, c. 1929

  7. Britten with Ethel and Frank Bridge, c. 1930

  8. Wulff Scherchen, Britten and John Alston, c. 1938–9

  9. Britten and Beth, 1938

  10. Peggy Brosa, Antonio Brosa, Victor Kraft, Britten and Aaron Copland, c. 1939–40

  11. Peter Pears and Britten, 1940

  12. W. H. Auden and Britten, 1941

  13. Pears and Britten with Beth and his niece and nephew, 1943

  14. Britten at the Old Mill, 1946

  15. Britten and Eric Crozier, 1945

  16. Peter Grimes, 1945

  17. The English Opera Group, 1947

  18. Britten, Pears, Joan Cross, Otakar Kraus, Lesley Duff and Anna Pollak, 1947

  19. Britten with children from the cast of Let’s Make an Opera, 1949

  20. Pears, E. M. Forster, Robin Long (‘The Nipper’), Britten and Billy Burrell, 1948

  21. Pears and Britten, 1948

  22. Britten leaving the Concertgebouw, 1949

  23. E. M. Forster, Britten and Eric Crozier, 1949

  24. Imogen Holst conducting the Aldeburgh Music Club, 1954

  25. Noye’s Fludde, 1958

  26. Pears, Prince Ludwig, Princess Margaret and Britten, 1956

  27. Britten, Pears, Princess Margaret and Prince Ludwig, 1957

  28. Britten accepting the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh, 1962

  29. Leaving The Red House, 1964

  30. Rehearsals for the War Requiem, 1962

  31. Britten and Galina Vishnevskaya, 1963

  32. Britten and Cecil Aronowitz, 1967

  33. Britten and Mstislav Rostropovich, 1964

  34. Rehearsals for Peter Grimes, 1969

  35. Death in Venice, 1973

  36. Britten and Pears, 1975

  PREFACE

  In writing this book, I’ve proceeded from assumptions which may not be universally shared but which I hope will be vindicated in the following pages. The first is that Benjamin Britten was the greatest of English composers—rivalled only by Henry Purcell and Edward Elgar—and one of the most extraordinarily gifted musicians ever to have been born in this country: these are slightly different things, of which the latter is perhaps the more clearly incontrovertible, and they certainly don’t suggest that he was infallible. The second is that he was specifically a man of the East Anglian coast, which is inclined to foster (as those of us who have lived by it know) a particular cast of mind, in whose life and work we should expect to discover kinships with Suffolk artists and poets such as Constable and Crabbe. The third is that his fondness for adolescent boys and his devotion to his partner, Peter Pears, represent distinct and complementary aspects of his sexual nature; his conduct in both cases was exemplary and is therefore the occasion for neither prurience nor evasiveness. And the fourth is that in two phases of his career—the periods of his involvement with the ‘Auden Generation’ in the 1930s and of his formative work with the Aldeburgh Festival from 1948 onwards—he contributed to cultural life in ways which go beyond those to be expected of any composer and performer, however great.

  This is not a book by a musician, by which I mean that although I can struggle with a score I don’t read it fluently nor do I hear it accurately in my head; if I take the score to the piano, a further lengthy struggle ensues, from which I usually retire in defeat. For people such as myself, notated music examples in biographies are a form of reproachful torment, so I haven’t included any. I write about music as I hear and understand it, in very much the same way as I’ve written about poems and novels in books about authors: the reader who is used to literary biographies will, I hope, feel perfectly at home here. And because I approach Britten’s work from this direction, I’ve been particularly interested in the relationship between his music and its literary sources, in some of his song settings and in operas such as Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice. For the musicologist, there are other studies of Britten by people whose scholarly and technical expertise astonishes me and to whom (as the Bibliography and Notes will testify) I remain greatly indebted.

  Both the Britten Estate and the Britten–Pears Foundation kindly gave their approval to this project at the outset, although they obviously bear no responsibility for the finished book. My agent, Natasha Fairweather, has been an unfailing source of encouragement and support, while Sarah Rigby, my editor at Hutchinson, read and annotated my draft text with exemplary care: I’ve acted on far more of her suggestions than is habitual for an obstinate author and it’s been a pleasure to work with her. I’m also deeply grateful to the following people, whom I’ve listed in alphabetically democratic style, for their help and advice at various stages of my work on Britten: John Amis, Amanda Arnold, Alan Britten, Nick Clark, Paul Driver, Roger Eno, Maurice Feldman, Caroline Gascoigne, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, John Greening, Jocasta Hamilton, Rex Harley, Ray Herring, David and Mary Osborn, Philip Reed, Jonathan Reekie, Peter Scupham, Margaret Steward, David Stoll, Malcolm Walker, Martin Wright. Extracts from the letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten and from the travel diaries of Peter Pears are © The Trustees of the Britten–Pears Foundation and are not to be further reproduced without prior permission.

  The best of all companions to the music of Britten, whether in the concert hall or on record, was my friend Adam Johnson. I have constantly wished that I could try out ideas and phrases on him while writing this book, which he would certainly have improved. It is dedicated, with love, to his memory.

  N. P.

  Orford, 2012

  CHAPTER 1

  BRITTEN MINOR

  1913–30

  1

  The Suffolk coastal resort of Lowestoft, where Benjamin Britten was born in 1913, was described in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘a handsome and improving market town, bathing-place, and sea port’ which, ‘when viewed from the sea, has the most picturesque and beautiful appearance of
any town on the eastern coast’.1 This was just before the arrival of the railway in 1847 and the massive development of South Lowestoft, between Lake Lothing and the previously separate villages of Kirkley and Pakefield, by Sir Morton Peto of Somerleyton Hall. Thirty years later, Anthony Trollope would choose Lowestoft as the setting for a pivotal chapter in his novel The Way We Live Now, transporting three characters – Paul Montague, Winifred Hurtle and Roger Carbury – to the town: Paul rashly meets Mrs Hurtle there and bumps into Roger, who has been his rival for the hand of another woman. At that time, South Lowestoft’s principal building was the Royal Hotel of 1849: though unnamed by Trollope, it is evidently the scene of Paul Montague and Winifred Hurtle’s meeting. In one filmed version of The Way We Live Now, part of the episode takes place on a hotel balcony, from which the former lovers watch the sun set over the sea; but this is something they couldn’t have done in Lowestoft, since it is the most easterly point on the English coastline, although on a clear morning you might see the sun rise. What is just as likely to greet you, if you look out from the Victorian houses of Kirkley Cliff Road, across the slender green space of the bowls club towards the beach and sea, is an easterly onshore breeze and sleet in the wind.

  During the early years of the last century, one of these houses, 21 Kirkley Cliff Road, was occupied by a dentist, Robert Victor Britten, his wife Edith Rhoda (née Hockey) and their family. A semi-detached villa with its entrance lobby to the left-hand side, it was to contain a dental practice for most of the twentieth century and is now a small hotel called Britten House; opposite, next to the bowling green, there’s a car park adorned with aluminium seats and cycle racks, flying-saucer lamp posts and a few municipal saplings in little gravelled squares. Robert Britten, whose father ended up running a dairy business in Maidenhead, where he died in 1881, had originally hoped to be a farmer, but this ambition was thwarted by his lack of the necessary capital. Instead, he trained at Charing Cross Hospital before working as an assistant dentist in Ipswich and, in 1905, setting up his own practice at 46 Marine Parade, Lowestoft; three years later, his growing family and increasing prosperity prompted him to move the mile further south to Kirkley Cliff Road. There, every day at eleven o’clock, he would habitually leave his ground-floor surgery for a fortifying mid-morning whisky, ascending to the first-floor sitting room which he called ‘Heaven’; downstairs, he seems to have implied, was the other place. There’s a hint in this habit of that continuous rumbling dissatisfaction, not unlike toothache, with which Graham Greene so memorably burdened his dentist, Mr Tench, in The Power and the Glory. Yet, probably because he didn’t relish his profession, Robert Britten’s patients found him sympathetic and friendly; he was able to share and respond to their feelings to a greater extent than a more enthusiastic practitioner of his craft might have done.

  Robert had met his future wife while studying dentistry at Charing Cross, but there was already a connection between their two families: Edith and her sisters had attended the same school as Robert’s sisters – Miss Hinton’s School for Girls, Maidenhead – where Florence Britten and Sarah Hockey were exact contemporaries. Edith’s father, William Henry Hockey, was a Queen’s Messenger at the Home Office: the family’s staff flat had a misleadingly grand address in Whitehall, and it was from there in September 1901 that the eldest daughter married Robert Britten at St John’s, Smith Square. Edith was a strikingly attractive and talented young woman who might have expected something better than marriage at the age of twenty-eight to a dentist four years her junior, had it not been for her socially compromised background: her father was illegitimate and her mother sufficiently unstable to have spent much of her life in homes. But Robert was young, handsome and something of a challenge, for drink and recklessness had already ruined both of his brothers. Determined to save her husband and children from a similar fate, Edith’s prescription was moderation and music, and it seems to have worked.

  By 1913, Robert was thirty-six and Edith forty years old: they had three children – Barbara (born in Ipswich on 11 June 1902), Robert or Bobby (born in Lowestoft on 28 January 1907) and Elizabeth, known as Beth (born in Lowestoft on 10 June 1909) – and they thought their family complete. So their fourth child was what parents are sometimes apt to describe, with a knowing and self-congratulatory smile, as a ‘mistake’. He was born at 21 Kirkley Cliff Road on 22 November, which is the feast day of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music. As if that were not omen enough, he was given the first name not only of his father’s younger brother but, as Edith at least would have been very well aware, of England’s most eminent living composer, Edward Elgar, who in the preceding five years had produced a flurry of major works including the two completed symphonies (1908, 1911), the violin concerto (1910) and The Music Makers (1912). But the Brittens’ youngest son would always be called by his middle name – Benjamin or ‘Beni’, ‘Benjy’ and finally ‘Ben’ – and, as we shall see, he would grow up to have mixed feelings about Elgar.

  His father had no interest in music: he was, said Britten, ‘almost anti-musical, I’m afraid’.2 The musical ability and ambition was all on his mother’s side: of the seven Hockey children, at least three pursued musical careers, most notably Edith’s brother Willie, who was organist at St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich, conductor of the Ipswich Choral Society and a professional singing teacher. He gave his nephew, for his ninth birthday, a copy of Stainer and Barrett’s A Dictionary of Musical Terms (1889), which in ordinary circumstances might have seemed an overambitious or over-optimistic present. By this time, Benjamin would sometimes stay with his Uncle Willie and Auntie Jane at their home in Berners Street, Ipswich, from where his earliest surviving letter home was written on 25 April 1923: in this, he is more excited by a visit to the railway station and the sight of a new L&NER engine, ‘green with a gold rim round its chimmeny’, than by anything specifically musical. Nevertheless, Marian Walker, a family friend, remembered that when she asked Britten ‘Where did your music come from?’ he replied: ‘I had rather a reprobate old uncle, but he was intensely musical, and I think it was he who originally told me that he preferred to read a score rather than hear anything played.’3

  So where did his music come from? Uncle Willie, supplying the crucial distinction between the practitioner’s pleasure in the score and the listener’s in the performance, is clearly part of the answer. But little Benjamin showed conspicuous ability, or so his doting mother supposed, from the moment his infant hand touched the piano in the upstairs drawing room: ‘Dear pay pano,’ he would demand at the age of two, liking to think ‘Dear’ was his name because that’s what people called him.4 Edith was particularly keen that he should be a musical genius, since her two daughters were as unmusical as their father while Bobby, her elder son, preferred to play ragtime; she convinced herself that her younger son would one day be ranked as the ‘fourth B’, alongside Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – although, as things turned out, a more relevant trinity of Bs would be Bridge, Berg and Berkeley. There is a peculiar photograph, taken when he was about seven years old, of the small boy seated at the piano, upon which half a dozen open scores have been ingeniously displayed: whether they are parts to be played simultaneously or pieces to be performed in rapid succession isn’t clear; but the photograph is evidently intended as a joke, since another taken at about the same time shows him tackling a single piece in the ordinary way while, seated on the sofa, his mother listens politely and an unmusical sister reads a book. The point of the first photograph, of course, is that this is a child of prodigious virtuosity; yet virtuosity isn’t the same as creativity. ‘Where did his musical skills come from?’ isn’t the same question as ‘Where did his music come from?’ The latter may prove the more difficult and interesting of the two.

  Benjamin received his first semi-formal musical instruction from his mother at the age of five or six; two years later, he began piano lessons with Miss Ethel Astle ARCM, the younger of two sisters who ran the nearby pre-preparatory school called Southolme, at 52 Kirkley Cl
iff Road. Although he would later praise Miss Astle’s ‘impeccable’ teaching, adding that those with whom he subsequently studied at the Royal College of Music ‘commented on the really first-rate ground-work that I had received’,5 there is no reason to suppose that she was anything much more than a perfectly decent and unexceptional provincial piano teacher. She used the ‘Seppings Music Method’, a rather cumbersome contraption consisting of blocks and cards to be fitted on to wooden staves: like many another ‘progressive’ educational invention of the era, it looks to the uninstructed eye to be more trouble than the conventional grind, although her pupil would remember his ‘early musical days’ with Miss Astle as ‘always interesting and entertaining’.6 She was also a regular participant at Mrs Britten’s fearsome musical soirées where, according to a fellow performer, there was ‘one piece that she always played, and played quite well … and it absolutely horrified me, the whole performance’.7 These soirées, though partly designed to show off the musical talents of her younger son, were equally an expression of Edith’s social ambition: the status of dentistry as a profession was ambiguous, so that the Brittens belonged neither to the gentry nor to the tradespeople, and musical parties were one way of joining, or even creating, a cultured social circle. Visitors to the Britten household noticed how, on other occasions, Bobby would have been instructed to play something light and welcoming as the guests arrived; while if Benjamin were playing the square piano in the attic on a warm day with the windows open, a crowd would gather on the pavement beneath to listen. Edith’s apparently fantastic expectations of Benjamin’s musical ability were thus complicated by something altogether more local and pragmatic: music as a means of social advancement. Robert Britten was less bothered than his wife about his status; as for the illustrious prospect of his younger son’s musical career, he thought the whole idea was absurd. His cautious scepticism, it should be added in his defence, sprang less from his hostility to music than from his own experience of disappointed ambitions. Nevertheless, the combination of an obsessively pushy mother and a sternly unconvinced father might have been enough to put a less committed child than Benjamin off music for life.