Benjamin Britten Read online

  Britten’s compositional block remained: 1934 was an alarmingly unproductive year for the prolific young composer. In July he completed, without much enthusiasm, a Te Deum in C which he thought ‘libelous’; he meant ‘plagiaristic’, feeling it owed too much to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. It was for the boys of St Mark’s, North Audley Street, who had so impressed him in A Boy Was Born, as was the Jubilate Deo in E flat which he wrote in August. In October he finished Holiday Tales, which was played by George Loughlin to the Mendelssohn Scholarship committee (who found it ‘incomprehensible’) on 5 November: in keeping with the spirit of this outdoor summer, its four movements were entitled ‘Early Morning Bathe’, ‘Sailing’, ‘Fun-fair’ and ‘Night’. The work was dedicated to Arthur Benjamin who seems, in the composer’s absence, to have supplied the overall title. By this time, Britten was once more in Europe, using the still unspent funds from his Octavia Travelling Scholarship and accompanied by his mother.

  The devotion and kindness Britten showed towards this increasingly tiresome lady were beyond reproach; nevertheless, some of his diary entries, as he records their travels together in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, show signs of gritted teeth. While Mrs Britten went to what her son called ‘a Christian Science show’, he took himself off for ‘a long walk round old Basel, seeing everything’; in Vienna, she had ‘a very nasty fall in her room while washing’, which left her ‘wobbly’ for days; meanwhile, ‘a Mrs Koller’, who was ‘a Christ. Science friend of Mum’s’, turned up and he found himself obliged to accompany ‘this Mrs Koller’ to the opera – ‘Cav’ and ‘Pag’ – about which ‘I couldn’t make myself thrilled’.164 He had been hearing more exciting things than that, including ‘a very lovely show of Zauberflöte’ in Basel and a superb Fledermaus (‘never have I heard an orchestra play like that … the singers too … inspired from the beginning to the end’) which was ‘A marvellous introduction to the Winer Oper’.165 On a picture postcard of the Vienna Opera House which he sent to Grace Williams (‘just to make you jealous’), he succumbed to Wagnerian delirium: ‘I’m coming back – soon & oft. Meistersinger, Siegfried, last week & Götterdämerung to-night!!!’166 But the most significant event during his visit to Vienna was his meeting, on 10 November, with the ‘very nice & interesting’ Erwin Stein of Universal Edition: both Stein, Britten’s future publisher at Boosey & Hawkes, and his daughter Marion (later Harewood and, later still, Thorpe) were to become close friends of the composer.

  Mother and son arrived back in London, where they were to spend a further week at Burleigh House before returning to Lowestoft, on 29 November: ‘I can’t say I’m pleased to be back,’ Britten grumbled, but there’s an unmistakable sense that re-engagement with the practicalities of musical life was necessary and overdue. He spent the very next day first listening to the pianist Betty Humby play through his Holiday Tales, then attending a rehearsal of A Boy Was Born, and finally dashing to Wigmore Hall ‘to hear Betty H. play my pieces well, but the audience doesn’t like them much’.167 He celebrated his twenty-first birthday on Saturday 1 December – having been in Munich on the actual day, 22 November – before setting off for a brief visit to the Bridges in Sussex, partly to seek help in drafting his reply to J. F. R. Stainer of the Mendelssohn Foundation, who had offered him an insulting £50: ‘I do feel,’ he wrote, ‘that the title “Mendelssohn Scholar” should only go to the recipient of the full award of £150 a year … I am afraid that I must respectfully refuse it.’ He couldn’t resist mentioning his ‘regret’ that Stainer had found ‘my pieces outside your comprehension’, adding somewhat disingenuously that ‘when they were played at the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the audience seemed appreciative’.168 That isn’t quite what he had told his diary. The performance of A Boy Was Born on 17 December, conducted by Iris Lemare at the Mercury Theatre, was so poor that he had to leave, ‘not being able to stand the strain’, after the second variation, although the boys of St Alban the Martyr were ‘very, very good and beautiful’.169 Earlier the same day, he had heard the ‘brilliant fiddler’ Henri Temianka with Betty Humby play ‘my 3 pieces … excellently’ at Wigmore Hall: these were three movements of the incomplete suite (Op. 6), which was not to be heard in full until 1936; the fact that Britten, usually so reliable in meeting compositional deadlines, failed to complete this work on time says much about his inability to work in the months following his father’s death.

  The family Christmas in Lowestoft ‘wasn’t so bad considering the circs., but none of us felt particularly merry!’170 Similarly unconducive to merriment was a broadcast concert on 28 December, conducted ‘atrociously’ by Vaughan Williams and including ‘dreadful’ works by Elizabeth Maconchy, R. O. Morris, Robin Milford and Vaughan Williams himself: ‘It is concerts like this which make me absolutely despair of English Music and its critics.’171 He neither attempted a summing-up of the old year nor made resolutions for the new one. He didn’t need to. It was obvious that something had to change.

  CHAPTER 3

  MOST SURPRISING DAYS

  1935–39

  1

  It came without warning. Throughout the early months of 1935, Britten sounds unaccountably cheerful for someone without a dependable source of income who was stuck mostly in Lowestoft and making weekly journeys along the Waveney Valley to Bungay to conduct an amateur orchestra, which he called the BBBB or ‘Benj. Britten Bungay Band, alias the “Hag’s Band”’, an unkind reference to its founder, Mrs Kersty Chamberlain. One dreadful foggy evening in January, he grumpily decided: ‘It is no use trying to rehearse them – the only advice worth giving them is “Go away & learn to play your instruments”.’ On the way back to Lowestoft, the car broke down, having run dry, in the dense fog. Even so, ‘a good dinner, and the Mahler gram. records (Kindertodtenlieder) restores my faith in life’.1 He was seeing old friends such as John Pounder and Francis Barton – whom he re-encountered while staying with the Bridges in Sussex – and, whenever he was in London, he had developed the slightly eccentric habit of nipping into news cinemas, even on the busiest days, to catch the Disney shorts: he was especially partial to a Silly Symphony. But a living had to be earned, and by April it seemed as if he would have to settle for a routine job with the BBC, a prospect which he didn’t at all relish. Then, on Saturday 27 April:

  A most surprising day. Edward Clark’s secretary ’phones at breakfast saying would I get in touch with a certain film impressario, M. Cavalcanti, which I do, with the result that I lunch with him (and another director Mr Coldstream) at Blackheath – where the G.P.O. Film studio is – and that I am booked to do the music to a film on the new Jubilee Stamp – only half-serious luckily. Talk much about this – go to Lewisham for 2 hrs (see a good Mickey Mouse) then back to the studio to see some ‘shooting’ – but I can’t get definite instructions enough out of them to start work yet.2

  ‘O brave new world…’: yet every Miranda needs her Prospero, and in this case it seems that the idea of introducing Britten to the GPO Film Unit had come from none other than Frank Bridge. It was a brilliant idea in every way. Not only was the task of writing precisely timed scores to tight deadlines the perfect medicine for Britten’s creative inertia; it was also exactly suited to the orderly ways of one who so embodied the virtues, as well as some of the vices, of a traditional prep- and public-school education. And, in one move, it transplanted an outsider who had been on the edge of 1930s cultural life into its very centre.

  The GPO Film Unit had been an almost accidental invention: it had grown out of the defunct Empire Marketing Board, whose founders can scarcely have imagined or intended to leave a legacy of such radical creativity. Among those involved with it were the documentary film-makers John Grierson and Basil Wright; the sound recordist, producer and director Alberto Cavalcanti; the painter William Coldstream; and, from 1935, Britten and W. H. Auden. Shortly after Britten began working for the Unit, Cavalcanti treated him to a private screening of some recent productions: Weather Forecast and Spring on the Farm, both dire
cted by Evelyn Spice; The Song of Ceylon, directed by Basil Wright; and Mr Pit and Mr Pot, directed by Cavalcanti himself. Britten, who loved funny short films, was especially taken with the last of these, a ‘work of genius – which the charming English Distributors won’t buy! – it being too silly’.3 Their current project, The King’s Stamp, was about the design and printing of a stamp to commemorate George V’s Silver Jubilee.

  The date of the Jubilee was 6 May, a ‘heavenly day’ according to Britten, who otherwise didn’t think much of the occasion. He was in Lowestoft and, on 4 May, ‘having fights about decorating our house for Jubilee’ which he thought ‘too nationalistic’;4 by the following morning, he had capitulated and was ‘helping Beth decorate house a bit with flags – (under duress)’,5 but the disagreement was symptomatic of his increasing resistance to his mother’s views. As for his work on the film score itself, he had something to mutter about and also, far more importantly, something to do: ‘I spend the whole blessed day slogging at the film music in my room – with a watch in one hand and a pencil in the other – trying to make what little ideas I have (& they are precious few on this God-forsaken subject) syncronize with the Seconds … I slog away until abt. 11.0 at night – trying to concoct some rubish about a Jubilee Stamp.’6 Beneath the grumbling, there’s the unmistakable voice of someone rather enjoying himself; the more he worked at it the more he became delighted by this fiendishly tricky low-budget job. The available instrumentation was restricted and odd: two pianos (played by Britten himself and Howard Ferguson), flute, clarinet and percussion. On 17 May they recorded the music: ‘It goes quite well – & is good fun to do … Considering the hurry of everything, I think it is quite effective & suits the film.’ It still sounded ‘quite good’ when he heard the playback next morning. ‘Then watch Cavalcanti & Stocks synchronising it … It is a marvellously clever work.’7 In this respect, it differed from other celebrations of the Jubilee: a week later, there was ‘the incredible Jubilee Concert at Albert Hall, arr. by dear Walford Davies. Needless to say, no serious musicians go.’8 Needless to say: one effect of the Jubilee, as tends to be the case with royal occasions, was to emphasise the gulf between the conservative establishment and the intellectual-creative left, which was where Britten now found himself.

  Remembering his time with the GPO Film Unit a decade later, he concentrated on the practicalities. ‘I had to work quickly, to force myself to work when I didn’t want to, and to get used to working in all kinds of circumstances,’ he told a BBC schools audience, before describing the difficulty (which was also the fun) of creating sounds to accompany shots of an unloading ship: ‘We had pails of water which we slopped everywhere, drain pipes wth coal slipping down them, model railways, whistles and every kind of paraphernalia we could think of.’9 But the work also had a more personal revelation in store for him. After spending much of June on Cavalcanti’s next documentary, a film about miners eventually called Coal Face, on 5 July he travelled with Basil Wright to the Worcestershire village of Colwall – where, coincidentally, his brother Bobby had taught at the Elms School – to ‘talk over matters for films with Wystan Auden (who is a master at the Downs School here…)’: ‘Auden is the most amazing man, a very brilliant & attractive personality – he was at Farfield, Greshams, but before my time.’10 They spent two days there, staying overnight at the Park Hotel in Tewkesbury. At this point, with his rather more orthodox prep-school experience, Britten was principally struck by the relaxed atmosphere at the Downs: ‘they are a remarkably nice lot of boys – very free with the masters, but yet discipline is maintained’; their paintings were ‘some of the most vital & thrilling things I have ever seen in modern art’; and, to complete a ‘heavenly’ Saturday, there was a cricket match in which ‘One lad (David) makes a very fine century’.11 Britten’s observant and generous appreciation of all kinds of youthful creativity was, of course, a lifelong characteristic. The diary entry doesn’t say, though he must surely have noticed, that the boys called their English master ‘Uncle Wiz’.

  That the first meeting between the greatest poet and greatest composer born in England during the twentieth century – as they might quite sensibly be described – should have taken place in such circumstances, though slightly comical, is less anachronistic than it may at first appear. School-related coincidences are a recurring feature in English creative life and prep-school teaching was a convenient way for young writers to make ends meet: it was, after all, how John Betjeman came to be taught briefly by T. S. Eliot. Moreover, Auden and Britten were both men whose creative personalities owed much to the oddities of their education. Yet there the similarity ends. The most vivid portrait of Auden as a schoolboy remains the one supplied by Isherwood in his early autobiography Lions and Shadows, where he appears as ‘a stodgy, podgy little boy’ called Hugh Weston:

  He was precociously clever, untidy, lazy and, with the masters, inclined to be insolent. His ambition was to become a mining engineer; and his playbox was full of thick scientific books on geology and metals and machines, borrowed from his father’s library. His father was a doctor … I remember him chiefly for his naughtiness, his insolence, his smirking tantalizing air of knowing disreputable and exciting secrets. With his hinted forbidden knowledge and stock of mispronounced scientific words, portentously uttered, he enjoyed among us, his semi-savage credulous schoolfellows, the status of a kind of witch-doctor.12

  Nothing could be less like the competitive, meticulous, athletic young composer. And that may go some way towards explaining why Wystan Auden, despite his formidable intelligence, so completely failed to understand Benjamin Britten.

  For the time being, this wouldn’t matter: both men were in mutual awe of something they did have in common, an astonishing ability to work with speed and brilliance at their chosen art. Their first, somewhat semi-detached, collaboration was on Coal Face, for which each had written his contribution before they met in July; the prose commentary was by Montague Slater, subsequently the librettist for Peter Grimes; the film received its first screening in London on 27 October. In July, Britten was working on H.P.O. or 6d Telegram – ‘it is a brute, fourteen small sections of about 8–20 sec. each’13 – although this was eventually released without his music and, during the late summer, he provided scores for three short films – Gas Abstract, Dinner Hour, Men Behind the Meters – made for the British Commercial Gas Association. Then, in the autumn, he collaborated with Auden on a film to be called Negroes, an intractible and eventually (in this form) abandoned project. On 17 September, having spent a day working on it with Auden and Coldstream, he lamented: ‘I always feel very young & stupid when with these brains – I mostly sit silent when they hold forth about subjects in general. What brains!’14 As if to rub it in, he and Auden then went off to the Westminster Theatre ‘where the Group theatre are doing some of his plays’ (The Dance of Death and The Dog Beneath the Skin), but he didn’t stay to watch the rehearsal. For the next month or so, he struggled on with Negroes – even visiting the jazz specialists, Levy’s of Whitechapel, to ‘hear more Negro records’, though he doesn’t seem to have bought any – while at the same time continuing to cope with the GPO Film Unit’s weirdly miscellaneous demands: ‘percussion, piano (Howard Ferguson) & two extra perc. from Blackheath Conservatoire (to play chains, rewinders, sandpaper, whistles, carts, water etc.)’;15 ‘telephone apparatus noises & after lunch title musics & 2 sequences for 5 documentary G.P.O. Films (Fl, Ob., Cl., Fg., Perc., Pft…)’;16 and ‘new recording of Telegram Abstract film (Fl, Ob, Cl, Xyl. & Glock, Perc. & Pft)’.17 By this time, he had met Rupert Doone and Robert Medley of the Group Theatre, for whose production of Timon of Athens he was to write the music. And there was yet another GPO Film Unit project to work on with Auden.

  This was ‘a new film T.P.O (Railway Post) with Cavalcanti & [Harry] Watt’;18 we know it as Night Mail, the most celebrated short documentary of its time. It involved not only the by now familiar combination of finicky detail and apparently endless meetings but an ex
pedition ‘to listen to trains themselves – in pouring rain & very wet grass’.19 Meanwhile, Auden worked on his poem in a narrow corridor at the back of the GPO Film Unit in Soho Square, accompanied by whistling and card-playing messenger boys, and delivering it in instalments to the production office where anything that didn’t fit was unceremoniously binned: ‘He’d say, “Alright. That’s quite all right. Just roll it up and throw it away.”’20 The surviving poem occupies only the closing few minutes of Night Mail, from the moment the night mail crosses the border into Scotland, and it is accompanied by the most ambitious music Britten had yet composed for film. When the time came to record it, on 15 January 1936, he made an unusually detailed diary entry: