Benjamin Britten Read online

  The film which made by far the strongest impression on Britten during his student years was Emil und die Detektive, which he saw for the first time in March 1933. He thought it ‘the most perfect & satisfying film I have ever seen or ever hope to see. Acting as natural & fine as possible – magnificent & subtle photography – plot very amusing & imaginative – a collosal achievement.’57 Three days later he bought Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel on which the film was based, which was going to be ‘very interesting – when I can understand it’; and within a week he was contemplating ‘a Suite on “Emil”’. Quite apart from its inherent qualities, Emil und die Detektive was precisely the film to engage an imagination already captivated by David Copperfield and The Turn of the Screw. Its hero is a blond young boy – a journeying boy, indeed – who sets off on a train journey to Berlin. The compartment, which has no corridor, is crowded at first, but after the departure of other passengers Emil finds himself alone with the bowler-hatted villain, Grundeis, who robs him. On arrival in Berlin, Emil resolves to track down Grundeis with the help of some street children, the ‘detectives’, in order to retrieve his stolen wallet: the crucial scene takes place in a hotel bedroom with Grundeis in the bed, Emil concealed beneath it, and the vital wallet (which turns out to be empty) trapped under the mattress between them. Both the train and hotel scenes obviously place the boy in physical and, implicitly, sexual danger; yet it’s also clear that Emil must be a fairly unusual sort of boy to pursue successfully such an outlandish scheme. In other words, the transaction is two-way: Emil, like the almost anagrammatical Miles in The Turn of the Screw, is something more strange and complicated than a mere innocent. A few months later, Britten was almost equally struck by Poil de Carotte, a film based on the novel (1894) by Jules Renard about a boy driven to contemplate suicide by an unloving mother: ‘I was thoroughly harrowed, intensely amused, & thrilled beyond measure, the whole time,’ he wrote.58

  Britten seems only gradually to have recognised what his taste in books and films implied about him. In June 1931, he went to the Royal Tournament at nearby Olympia and ‘enjoyed every minute of it. The P.T. Squads were superb, & the musical drives. It quite makes me long to be a soldier!’59 It would be a mistake to hear the voice of a modern camp comedian (and to assume that ‘be’ means ‘have’) in that last sentence; Britten at seventeen saw only the laughable incongruity of the idea, although he may have been influenced by a nostalgic memory of the Grenadier Guards’ band on the pier at Lowestoft. The conventions of his education and his genuine enthusiasm for sport combined to cloak any vestige of sexual interest in an ironic heartiness which made it invisible even to himself, especially when he returned (as he rather often did) to South Lodge. In April 1932, for instance, he went to the school’s gymnasium display and noted, with an air of schoolmasterly connoisseurship, ‘There are some very good boys here.’60 He captained the old boys’ cricket team, and when he described their matches it was with precisely the tone and vocabulary of those old-fashioned school stories he so enjoyed: ‘I go & play cricket with South Lodge boys, up on their field. Great fun: have a glorious knock, making 33 & eventually retiring with a bust bat!’61 And he was more than happy to spend a very physical August day with his Lowestoft neighbours’ young nephew and a friend, ‘the two Davids’: ‘Bathe before lunch & before tea. Great fun, v. rough. Rounders in aft. back by 7.0. Great fun. David (alias “Jerry”) Gill is a nice boy.’62 For the most part, this was as innocent as the jaunty style suggests, yet as the diary proceeds there’s an increasingly transparent preoccupation with a single subject, or indeed a single word: boys. He must have been aware of this by the time he visited the Tate in September 1932, where he saw ‘a marvellous picture of a “Dead Boy”, by Alfred Stevens’.63 The emphasis became both comical and a bit confusing in the summer of 1933: he had been working on his song setting of Graves’s ‘Song: Lift Boy’ and on A Boy Was Born (which he calls, without quotation marks, ‘my Boy’) when in July he met and formed a lasting friendship with the music critic Henry Boys. He recorded this coincidence without a hint of amusement, which suggests that by now he understood precisely why he shouldn’t be amused.

  At first, when he returned to Lowestoft for vacations, life seemed to carry on much as usual, with visits to friends, tea parties, games of tennis, bathing in the sea and walking with Caesar the family dog or into town to Morlings music shop. Tennis, indeed, remained a passion to be treated with the serious commitment he otherwise reserved for music: so, on winning the Ernest Farrar Composition Prize in July 1931, he went straight to the sports shop in Lowestoft and bought ‘a new tennis racquet with prize money – Austin – 75/- (paying 70/-) a superb one’;64 the following spring, awarded the Cobbett Prize, he bought himself a new suit. However, during the late summer of 1931, Mr Britten became seriously ill with what was at first assumed to be bronchitis: he consequently missed his elder son Bobby’s wedding, which took place on 3 September in West Hartlepool. During his career as a dentist, Mr Britten had grown suspicious of doctors, whom he thought more likely to cause trouble than to cure it, and he was reluctant to consult one. The following May, back in Lowestoft for the Whitsun weekend, Britten noted in his diary: ‘Pop isn’t so well & is in bed all day.’65 That somewhat elderly and euphemistic style is the one in which he would continue to record the progress of his father’s illness, which was eventually diagnosed as lymphadenoma; it carries genuine affection and concern, but almost no warmth. This he continued to reserve for his adored mother who, over the Christmas and New Year period of 1931–2, organised two characteristic if unusually ambitious social functions, perhaps sensing that these might be among the last such occasions to be held at Kirkley Cliff Road. On 29 December, there was a dance in the dining room which ‘abt. 33 people’ attended (Britten, who was no dancer, observed cautiously: ‘I think it goes pretty well’); Mr Britten hired records and a radiogram from Morlings, although it wasn’t until the following Christmas that he finally bought one of his own. And on 9 January, the Saturday before Britten’s return to college, there was a grand edition of Mrs Britten’s musical evenings, loyally documented by her son:

  Besides ourselves 3 Colemans, Mrs & John Nicholson Mr & Mrs Back (who both sing) Mr & Mrs Owles. Mrs & Miss Phillips. 2 Miss Boyds. 2 Miss Astles (Miss Ethel plays.) Miss Banks. Miss Goldsmith. Sing alot of Part Songs including My variations – quite good! I play Ravel ‘Jeux d’eau’ & Debussy ‘Reflets’ & Franck. Symp. Variations. Mum sings Ireland ‘12 Oxen’ & Armstrong Gibbs ‘to one who passed Whistling’. Quite a success. They go about 11.45.66

  Quite a success! One wonders how he put up with it, on two counts: the level of the others’ musicianship was surely irksome to someone of his ability and taste (on one occasion, while accompanying a Mrs Taylor in Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata, he did indeed slam down the piano lid and walk out); while all those middle-aged spinsters, eerily recreating the milieu of his London boarding houses, can hardly have made exciting company for an eighteen-year-old student. Home was indeed ‘so beastly nice’.

  3

  Yet in one sense – and it was the one that mattered most – Britten’s life during his student years was extraordinarily rich. He may have found the RCM disappointing, but London itself was full of music, and he immersed himself in it with all the urgent enthusiasm of a boy from East Anglia whose childhood home had lacked even a radio and a gramophone. His diaries describe his visits to concerts, as well as noting those he heard (sometimes with difficulty) on the ‘wireless’ and the records he began to buy, and in every case he adds appreciative or critical comments: the entries thus chart in unusual detail the development of a great composer’s musical taste during his formative years. It was a complicated and at times contradictory process.

  Aimez-vous Brahms…? To Françoise Sagan’s famous question, the young Britten would have responded with an unequivocal ‘Oui’. ‘Ben was absolutely mad about Brahms,’ said his Lowestoft friend Basil Reeve, who remembered him arranging the last movement of the fo
urth symphony for two pianos in the summer of 1930, just before he left for London. ‘We used to go up and play that at Morlings.’67 He heard Mengelberg (‘superb, magnificent, great’) conduct the ‘thrilling’ third symphony in October and, a month later, Rubinstein in the second piano concerto: ‘His playing & the heavenly music makes me feel absolutely hopeless.’68 A few months after that, in the same work, Walter Gieseking was ‘simply magnificent … I’ve never heard a Concerto played so well’, while Lauri Kennedy’s cello solo in the slow movement was ‘too gorgeous’.69 He was almost as keen on the first concerto. ‘What a marvel that first movement is,’70 he wrote in February 1931, after hearing it played by Wilhelm Backhaus, but he was merciless about a broadcast performance, with Ernö Dohnanyi as soloist, towards the end of the same month: ‘Horrible scramble it sounded; anyway the strength of the first movement was there; but oh! the third movement.’71 This was the time at which Britten’s admiration for Brahms reached its peak, for on 9 February he ‘went to get my Brahms picture framed after tea’ before noticing in the Radio Times that a performance of the third quartet by the Hungarian String Quartet was to be broadcast that evening: ‘So I borrow Miss Prior’s Wireless, & have marvellous 1/2 hour listening to the purest music in the purest of possible forms. What a marvellous craze for the viola Brahms had! What a humorous theme the last movement has!’72 That diary entry is doubly interesting, both for its prescient insistence on the supremacy of chamber over symphonic music and for its focus on the viola – Britten’s instrument, and Bridge’s – which, as we shall discover, was often a determining factor in his judgement of other composers’ works. He was fully aware of this: listening to a broadcast of Brahms’s horn trio on 28 May, he had to admit that he preferred ‘our Philistine viola version, to this overswamped horn business. Horn – Horn – nothing else.’73 (He sounds exactly like Mrs Organ Morgan in Under Milk Wood.)

  Britten’s liking for Brahms continued, if less fulsomely, throughout his time at the RCM, but it was emphatically over soon after he graduated: by then, ‘most of Brahms’ was ‘music which repulses me’, to which he added, as an explanatory parenthesis, ‘(solid, dull)’.74 Those two words really do say it all; even committed Brahmsians might grudgingly admit that their man had been in every respect the wrong sort of composer for Britten, with his instincts for clarity and restraint, to admire. And indeed there’d been a hint of this perception in his final year when, playing through Howard Ferguson’s violin sonata with the composer, he found the ‘hand of Brahms heavy over it’;75 he knew that the influence of a heavy hand was just what he didn’t need. Discovering this for himself was an educational process as important as anything he could learn from his teachers; meanwhile, he was making equally significant discoveries of a more positive and enduring sort. Mahler, despite what Britten at first thought to be the inordinate length of the fourth symphony – at that time he had yet to hear the really long ones – taught him the great and astonishing lesson that it is possible to write lucidly for individual parts while using enormous orchestral forces and also made him think afresh about ways of using song in a symphonic work. The fourth was to remain his favourite among Mahler’s symphonies and by April 1933, when he listened to a broadcast of Webern conducting it, he had grasped exactly what it was all about: ‘This work seems a mix up of everything that one has ever heard, but it is definitely Mahler. Like a lovely spring day.’76 It seems an especially astute comment from one who in due course would write his own Spring Symphony.

  The music of Stravinsky prompted a parallel journey from wariness to enthusiasm. An all-Stravinsky programme conducted by Ernest Ansermet in January 1931 was ‘Remarkable, puzzling’. He ‘quite enjoyed’ the piano concerto but found Le sacre du printemps (though much earlier and, of course, another spring work) ‘bewildering and terrifying. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I think it’s incredibly marvellous and arresting.’77 Honest puzzlement was often a positive sign with him. A year later, at the Queen’s Hall, he heard Ansermet again conduct; Stravinsky himself was the soloist in the Capriccio for piano and orchestra of 1929 (‘Amusing but not much more’) and this was followed by the still more recent ‘Marvellous Symphony of Psalms … Bits of it laboured I thought but the end was truly inspired.’78 As with the Mahler, Britten had latched on to a work which was to be instructive and useful to him, and it was one which, by the summer of 1932, he was determined to know from all angles. On 20 July he bought the newly released Columbia records of ‘Stravinsky’s great Psalm Symphony’,79 conducted by the composer, while, back in Lowestoft ten days later, he had the ‘vocal score of Stravinsky’s great Psalm Symph, sent from Chesters’;80 there was nothing equivocal about his judgement of it now. A week after that, he summoned Basil Reeve to listen to the records, which he had evidently brought home with him to Suffolk, perhaps for that very purpose.

  With contemporary British composers, as with conductors, Britten’s opinions were more likely to be coloured by extra-musical matters: he had a young man’s fads and fancies as well as a young man’s instinctive dislike of anything which smelt too mustily of the establishment. So, for quite some time, he couldn’t abide Elgar. We may feel he protests too much: ‘Elgar 2nd Symphony, (dreadful nobilmente sempre) – I come out after 3rd movement – so bored. He [Elgar] conducts – ovation beforehand (!!!!!!!!!).’81 That’s from his first term at the RCM, when it would have been unthinkable for him to admire so stuffy a figure, and it hasn’t much to do with the music, in which a more mature ear might have detected some surprising kinships with Mahler. By the following spring, he had learned to sound more calmly analytical: ‘I listened with an open mind’ – to the Enigma Variations – ‘but cannot say that I was less annoyed with them, than usual.’ He even ventured comments on some of the individual variations before reaching his weary conclusion: ‘I suppose it’s my fault, and there is something lacking in me, that I am absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar, for more than 2 minutes.’82 Again, the tone is too effortful to convince; but he would begin to enjoy Elgar before his college days were over, finding in Falstaff ‘some v. fine stuff – and also some.…!!!!’83 As with Mahler and Stravinsky, the piece to win him over was one which seems to resonate with his own future as a composer, the concert overture In the South: ‘a very beautiful work in parts’;84 that contrast between stormy sections and the tranquil interlude which was separately published as ‘In Moonlight’ would eventually find its echo in the ‘Sea Interludes’ from Peter Grimes.

  Britten’s early enthusiasm for the ‘miraculous’ tone poems of Delius – ‘He is a wizard’85 – looks unlikely at first sight. Although the use of orchestral colour must have appealed to him, he would soon develop reservations about the composer’s formal blurriness: his Song of the High Hills was ‘marvellously beautiful, tho’ meandering & too long’.86 He had a different sort of trouble with Holst’s Planets, which ‘arn’t very much to my taste … too much harp, celesta, Bells etc.’,87 a point which he repeated when next he heard the suite: ‘too sugary (celeste) … I feel no music of that generation can be compared to works like Walton’s Viola Concerto’.88 This indeed was a huge favourite, which Britten thought ‘a work of genius’ – not least, of course, because of the solo instrument for which it was written. Otherwise, his response to recent British music was often lukewarm, ranging from ‘mediocre’ Granville Bantock to ‘pleasant’ Arthur Somerville; as for Bax’s November Woods, he was ‘bored … not much November about it’.89 While Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia was ‘V. beautiful (wonderfully scored), but over long’, his Wasps was ‘apaling’.90 For some time Britten seems to have felt wary about commenting freely on Vaughan Williams, who was not only a different sort of composer but also one of his RCM examiners; it was after his composition exam in July 1931 – described by Britten as an ‘Absolute Farce … they look at the wrong things & make me play the wrong things’ – that Vaughan Williams apparently remarked, ‘Very clever but beastly music.’91 In his final year, however, Britten went with his fellow s
tudent Grace Williams to a performance at the college of Hugh the Drover, on which he commented in thoughtful and revealing detail:

  It needs a larger stage, of course – even so the First Act was very exciting & the rest was a dreadful anticlimax. V.W. has shown in places apt use of chorus, in others dreadful disregard of natural movements. The music was full of folk-song, (if you like that sort of thing) – it was best so – when not (as between Scenes in Act II), it was dreadful.92

  He was thinking very clearly in dramatic as well as musical terms – and about the relationship between the two – but he hadn’t guessed that before long he too would be drawn to folk song.

  He continued to revere Beethoven though was less certain about Schubert, preferences which in time would be reversed. A Bartók concert in March 1932 prompted one of his carefully balanced judgements: ‘I cannot say I love this music but it is amazingly clever & descriptive.’93 His view of the Second Viennese School subsided for a while into bafflement: ‘Schönberg – Heaven only knows!!… his ‘Erwartung’ – I could not make head or tail of it’,94 he wrote after listening to a radio broadcast, although a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces, despite being conducted ‘by that worst of all conductors’ Adrian Boult, contained ‘some quite fine – better than I expected – Colours – no. 3 – marvellous’.95 In Berg’s Lyric Suite, ‘The imagination & intense emotion … certainly amaze me if not altogether pleases me’, while Wozzeck was ‘thoroughly sincere & moving music’:96 cautious rather than ringing endorsements in early 1933 of a composer with whom Britten would shortly hope to study. This was completely in character – a somewhat qualified interest burgeoning, as with Mahler and Stravinsky, into outright admiration – but there may have been another reason for his rapidly accelerating interest in Berg: it was in July 1933 that he got to know Henry Boys, who had met Berg in 1931 and was full of praise for him. Britten had just been awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship which, as the RCM’s Director Sir Hugh Allen encouragingly put it in a postscript to his summer report, would enable him to ‘get some new experience abroad’97 after his graduation; going to Vienna to work with Berg must have seemed just the sort of experience envisaged by the college. But this intelligent proposal was to collapse in a disapproving muddle: someone (probably Allen) told Britten’s mother that Berg was ‘not a good influence’, reflecting what Britten himself later described as ‘an almost moral prejudice against serial music’. He continued: ‘I think also that there was some confusion in my parents’ minds – thinking that “not a good influence” meant morally, not musically.’98 Berg, of course, was morally irreproachable; and he was certainly to be a musical influence on Britten.