Benjamin Britten Read online

  By late 1933, when Britten’s time as a student was nearing its end, he had produced successful works in the major genres of orchestral, chamber and vocal music: his achievements were widely recognised, except at the RCM. This wasn’t entirely the college’s fault. One of the many paradoxes about Britten is that while his ‘ordinary’ middle-class background in Lowestoft had equipped him to be a clear-headed and methodical businessman (as colleagues who assumed they were dealing with a scatterbrained composer sometimes discovered to their cost), his shyness and insecurity, his perfectionism and his readiness to take offence made his relationships with institutions edgy and tense: he rubbed some people up the wrong way at the RCM, just as he had at Gresham’s, and just as would occasionally happen in the future with colleagues, concert promoters, festival organisers, publishers, record companies and the BBC. That, we might smugly say, is the price of creative genius, except that there’s really nothing smug about it: it’s simply true. And it would be a mistake to assume that creative genius isn’t as capable of being delighted by quite simple things as anyone else. On 13 December 1933, Britten addressed to Mr & Mrs R. V. Britten of Lowestoft a plain postcard, on the reverse of which was written: ‘BENJAMIN BRITTEN A.R.C.M. Much love.’130 It was, as it said, for both his parents, but perhaps especially for his ailing father, to whom there must have been an implied, kindly meant subtext: ‘There. Told you so.’

  On New Year’s Eve, after a last drive in the family car – a Humber Snipe which Mr Britten had bought only a year earlier but was now too ill to use – Britten told his diary that he was ‘not sorry’ to see the back of 1933. Although both he and his siblings had made good progress in their various careers during the year, ‘the slur on the whole has been Pop’s dreadful illness’. ‘Mum’s nursing & pluck has been the only bright spot in the whole dreadful time,’ he added. She was indeed exemplary in this respect, despite a developing interest in Christian Science which led her to disapprove of her husband’s medical treatment: ‘You know all this is contrary to my C.S.,’ she told Beth early in 1934, ‘but I am only doing as the family wants and Pop himself!’131 As for Ben, he ended his diary entry with an unfeasible wish: ‘Let us see whether 1934 can give us back what seems to us the impossible – Pop’s health.132 He knew he was whistling in the dark.

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  ‘I only started enjoying myself as a human being after I left college and got down to some real work,’ said Britten in 1959.133 This simple-looking statement is a little more subtle than it seems and precisely right: ‘enjoying myself’ and ‘real work’ were always synonymous for him; moreover, he had an intuitive sense that ‘work’, when destined for a college’s examinations or awards, wasn’t quite ‘real’. This new sort of work, a freelance composer’s attempt to eke out a living, involved making the best of whatever was available, a process he grumblingly enjoyed. ‘I cannot write a single note of anything respectable at the moment,’ he told Grace Williams on 3 January 1934, ‘and so – on the off chance of making some money – I am dishing up some very old stuff (written, some of it, over ten years ago) as a dear little school suite for strings – You see what I have come to…’134 This ‘school suite’ was the Simple Symphony, Op. 4: it recycled material from his childhood into four movements which are wonderfully assured in everything but their coyly alliterative titles: ‘Boisterous Bourrée’, ‘Playful Pizzicato’, ‘Sentimental Sarabande’ and ‘Frolicsome Finale’. It was first performed on 6 March at the Stuart Hall, Norwich, by the Norwich String Orchestra conducted by the composer.

  The venue and the performers are significant: he had come home. Although Britten would live in cities again, and even for a while in America, Suffolk was the place to which he would always return. He had business cards printed and seems to have been perfectly content to publish his address, 21 Kirkley Cliff Road, Lowestoft. This was a matter partly of choice – he knew that a room in London would have kept him more closely in touch with the musical world and its opportunities – and partly of duty: ‘Pop’ was ‘really pretty bad now’. Beneath both these factors lay a solid core of instinct: this was where he belonged and this was where his music came from. As it turned out, there might have been little point in paying for digs in London for he was to spend two periods of 1934 travelling in Europe: on 10 January, he learned from Hubert Foss at OUP that ‘my Oboe Quart. has been accepted by international jury for Contemporary Music Festival’.135 By the end of March, he would be on his way to Florence.

  Before this, there was to be the fraught process of the rehearsal and broadcast first performance of A Boy Was Born: although a date in late February had been mooted, Britten had heard nothing from the BBC since the preceding September. When he wrote on 24 January to Edwin Benbow of the Wireless Singers (later the BBC Singers), it was with understandable anxiety – ‘the time for preparation is getting very short, & I am rather worried’136 – and with a request that Frank Bridge should conduct; in the event, the conductor was Leslie Woodgate, who earned the composer’s warm praise and thus began a long association with his work. Britten’s main worry concerned the boys of St Mark’s, North Audley Street: their part, though not difficult, was probably ‘not much like what they are accustomed to sing’, and he was anxious to avoid the excessive smoothness of the English cathedral tradition. When he heard them at St Mark’s, however, he was delighted – ‘They sing like angels’137 – but when they were transplanted to the BBC, their ‘intonation, after being impeccable in their own hall, is very bad’;138 there was a lesson here for the future. Nevertheless, the performance on 23 February at the concert hall of Broadcasting House, which Britten attended with the Bridges, was a great success: ‘My “Boy was Born” goes infinitely better than rehearsals, some of it really going well. It goes down pretty well.’139 He sounds as if he could hardly believe his ears. To the same day’s diary entry, above the date, he added a two-word postscript: ‘Elgar dies.’

  ‘I am going to Italy,’ he wrote to Grace Williams, three days later.140 It was quite an adventure, and he sensibly decided to take with him John Pounder, his loyal and trustworthy friend since their days together at South Lodge. They left Lowestoft on the morning of 27 March and were to stay overnight in London at the Wilton Hotel; during the day, Britten typically fitted in lunch with his sister Barbara, the collection of tickets from Italian State Railways, a rehearsal of his piece with the members of the Griller Quartet who were to perform it with Goossens in Florence, tea with Mrs Bridge, an early supper with Beth and a visit to the Lyric Theatre to see Reunion in Vienna by Robert Sherwood. The following morning, they caught the boat train from Victoria and after a rough crossing (‘many people succumb’) reached Paris in the early evening before taking an overnight train to Turin. By the time they got to Florence at 7.45 the next evening, they were ‘pretty exhausted’. Britten’s diary records somewhat dutiful-sounding visits to galleries and concerts and, as was his way, is businesslike rather than evocative. Much livelier is his letter home of 30 March, which has not only a character who clearly belongs in A Room with a View – ‘one Miss Cherry, a schoolmistress – rather prim, but very amusing’ – but also a foredoomed attempt at descriptive prose: ‘Snow everywhere – lakes, mountains galore, I never seen anything like it. The light was so superb – very sunny, with occasional clouds – and it made the colouring very brilliant. As you notice, I cannot describe it.’141 They had met a couple called Pearce – the husband had been, like Pounder, at Charterhouse; both men were to become solicitors – and there’s a charming authenticity, as Forsterian as it is Brittenesque, to J. Allan Pearce’s recollection of the Pension Balestri’s staircase, ‘down which John Pounder came tripping, very nimbly for such a tall man, watched by Ben at the elderly upright piano in the hall, who vividly described his descent on the keys’.142 The knack of turning almost anything into musical language both recalls the party-piece imitations of Britten’s childhood and anticipates his work as a composer for documentary films, particularly the ‘running downstairs music’ for The
King’s Stamp in 1935. Also staying at the Pension Balestri were Hermann Scherchen, who the previous summer had been scheduled to conduct the Sinfonietta’s European premiere, and his fourteen-year-old son Wulff.

  On Thursday 5 April, Goossens and the Grillers performed Britten’s quartet ‘very beautifully & it’s quite well received’: ‘Its colloquies between the oboe and the strings stamp it as music which belongs inherently to the instruments for which it is scored,’143 the reviewer in The Times perceptively noted. The following day, Scherchen organised a grand excursion to Siena – the party filled five omnibuses and was given lunch by the mayor – but it poured with rain. ‘Young Wulff Scherchen (son of Hermann) attaches himself to me, & I spend all the time with him,’144 wrote Britten, and there’s no reason to think him disingenuous. Wulff Scherchen’s own memories happily acknowledge his pleasure at discovering a friend who seemed barely older than himself: ‘I didn’t feel he was seven years older than me. I thought we were much closer in age than that. We were boys together.’145 The spirit of being ‘boys together’ was, of course, one into which Britten could always unselfconsciously enter. Neither Wulff’s English nor Ben’s German was up to much, but this didn’t bother them: ‘That is the beautiful thing about friendship – languages don’t matter, you make signs, you can nudge one another with your elbow…’146 Perhaps they managed a prototype of the ‘Aldeburgh Deutsch’ later invented by Britten and Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist and conductor. Anyway, the young Englishman’s Englishness was in itself hugely amusing, not the least comical of his quirks being the cautious way in which he, alone of the party, had provided himself with a waterproof raincoat, just in case. When drizzle turned to deluge, he offered to share this useful garment with the shorts-and-sandals-clad Wulff: ‘He opened it out, stuck his right arm into the right sleeve and got me to put my left arm in the left sleeve … We thought that was hilariously funny but then we had to walk along with our middle legs together, and then the outer legs, doing a three-legged march which increased general hilarity. Oh, it was wonderful!’147 Britten’s raincoat had suddenly become as magical a prop as Gene Kelly’s umbrella, and if they could have managed to twirl round a lamp post together they surely would have done. Lowestoft must have seemed a world away.

  Back in Florence, the new friends went for a walk on Saturday morning, but at lunchtime Britten received ‘a telegram from home – come to-day, Pop not so well’. The excellent John Pounder insisted on accompanying him. They bought English newspapers on the journey, but their interests luckily didn’t extend to the ‘Deaths’ column. When they reached Lowestoft on Monday, Britten discovered that his father had in fact died of a cerebral haemorrhage on Friday: ‘A great man – with one of the finest brains I have ever come across, & what a father!’148 That sense of awkward, bitten-off emotion remained until the end. For his part, Robert Victor Britten had left an equally stilted (and equally sincere) note for ‘the 4 B’s’, Barbara, Bobby, Beth and Benjamin: ‘Goodbye my four! My love to you all Its grand to have known you and have your love – – Comfort Mum’.149 To his diary for the preceding Friday, when he had walked in the rain with Wulff, Britten added a postscript: ‘Pop dies – see Monday.’ It appears in exactly the same place, above the date, that he had recorded the death of Elgar on 23 February. Though the coincidence wouldn’t have been so apparent at the time, he may have had some inkling that on both those two days, in art and in life, the death of the old had been accompanied by the arrival of the new.

  The funeral took place at St John’s, the ‘low’ church favoured by Mrs Britten, on Wednesday 11 April: it was ‘a very simple and lovely service’, conducted by Basil Reeve’s father (the Reverend Cyril Reeve) and Britten’s uncle, the Reverend Sheldon Painter. The music included ‘In Tears of Grief’ from the end of the St Matthew Passion and ‘Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour’, the third variation from Britten’s A Boy Was Born: the local paper made much of this, as if there were still something quaint about the late dentist’s son composing music. ‘Mum is a perfect marvel, even when we go up to Kirkley Cemetary after, she has control of herself,’150 Britten wrote; that ‘control’ belongs to the time and the class, but it is typical of Mrs Britten to have shown it so notably and of her son to have admired it. There was much to be done – Mrs Britten had ‘everso many’ letters to write – but the following week widow and younger son were able to set off for a break at Prestatyn in Wales, where Bobby and his wife Marjorie had taken over Clive House, a struggling prep school. It was an awkward time: Britten had less in common with his elder brother than with his sisters and he had never quite taken to Bobby’s wife who, in the privacy of his diary, he nicknamed ‘Barge’. He made himself useful, coaching the boys at singing and cricket and predictably finding them easier company than the adults; it was an apt place for him to work on the school songs which would become his Op. 7, Friday Afternoons – the time when the Clive House boys sang. He recorded his usual, occasionally acidic, comments on broadcast concerts, although he enthused over Frank Bridge’s ability to make Greig’s first Peer Gynt suite ‘sound positively thrilling’: ‘What the world has lost in his not conducting enough, cannot be estimated.’151 The idea had been to give Mrs Britten a long relaxing spell away from home, but on 7 May this came to an abrupt end: ‘Mum is sent for by Aunt Queenie (her sister) who is in the middle of an attack of “melancholia”. So regardless of the fact that she needs a long rest & holiday, Mum has to pack up in order to go & nurse her. What the rest of the family thinks of it I don’t know.’152 He was perhaps almost as irritated with his mother for agreeing to go as he was with his aunt for summoning her; when he wrote to her, however, it was still in the over-fulsome style of his childhood: ‘I miss you most terribly, my dear…’153 He stayed on for another fortnight in Wales, joined for the last few days by his sister Beth. ‘I shall be sick to leave this place,’ he admitted, ‘& am so fond of the school & the kids that I dread going back to the void at Lowestoft.’154

  That sense of ‘void’ was all the more acute since 21 Kirkley Cliff Road had been Mr Britten’s professional base as well as his home: his assistant, Laurence Sewell, continued the dental practice, retaining the name ‘Britten & Sewell’ on the brass plaque, in the ground-floor surgery. But there were compensations, among them the proximity of that other prep school, South Lodge. Just before leaving for Florence, Britten had seen his sister Barbara off at Lowestoft station and made this laconic note: ‘Walk abit back with Dunkerley of S. Lodge.’155 His friendship with thirteen-year-old Piers Dunkerley prospered during the cricketing summer term, as he wrote on 15 July: ‘In aft. Tony Jones, & Piers Dunkerley (South Lodge Boys) come. Spend aft. on beach & bathe with P.D. Back to tea in garden…’156 Although Piers was only a few months younger than Wulff Scherchen, the two relationships were very different: Piers inhabited a world Britten knew in his bones, while Wulff’s world was entirely foreign. One promised a fond revisitation of past experience; the other beckoned from the unvisited future.

  Britten spent much of that summer retreating into safe familiar pleasures – his diaries record days of cricket, tennis and croquet, sunbathing and sea-bathing – and one can scarcely blame him: the triumphant emergence into musical adulthood, his graduation so swiftly followed by success in Florence, had been abruptly interrupted by bereavement. The task of keeping his mother company necessarily fell mostly on him: Barbara was a nurse in London, Bobby a headmaster in Wales and Beth was setting up her dressmaking business in Finchley. An outsider might have reasonably concluded that, of the four children, Ben was the one who could get on with his work in Lowestoft. But he couldn’t. He was meant to be working on Holiday Tales, Op. 5 – subsequently Holiday Diary – for his new publisher, Ralph Hawkes, but listlessness kept getting in the way. ‘I do odd jobs, try unsuccessfully for umpteenth time to settle down to piano pieces for Hawkes,’ he wrote on 15 September and, two days later: ‘To-day I make a great effort – staying in practically all day (except for a lovely rough bathe before lunch
) & putting off tennis at Tamplins. The result isn’t satisfactory tho’…’157 Music seldom came quite such a poor third after bathing and tennis, but the happiest spell of the summer was a week in which, incredibly, he managed to do without music almost completely. This was a sailing holiday with a group of friends on the Norfolk Broads and, helped by the presence of a man named Roger and a boat called Puddleduck, it sounds like pure Swallows and Amazons: ‘Attempt to take dinghy out in morning near ends in disaster, but Roger does manage to get P’duck down to Potter before lunch…’ At the end of the week, Britten could hardly bear to go home: ‘It has been a great holiday, & it is sickening to go back to civilisation again.’158

  Yet civilisation, even in East Anglia, wasn’t all bad: being based once again in Lowestoft enabled Britten to develop an important, though generally overlooked, friendship with the composer E. J. Moeran, who had recently taken a house with his mother in the south Norfolk village of Lingwood, very much within the orbit of Mrs Britten’s and Audrey Alston’s musical connections. Jack Moeran, born in Norfolk of Irish ancestry, was almost twenty years older than Britten; he had studied at the RCM before the war and with John Ireland after it. At this time, he was starting work on his Symphony in G minor (1937), the second movement of which, he said, ‘was conceived around the sand-dunes and marshes of East Norfolk’.159 That is in every sense close to Britten territory – the county boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk is only just north of Lowestoft – and the notion of creating a musical sound-world from ‘sand-dunes and marshes’ is hugely suggestive in the context of his later work. When Moeran eventually finished the symphony in 1936, he hastened to show it to Britten: ‘Jack Moeran was in last night, with his new symphony.’160 No less influential on the younger man was Moeran’s interest in folk music. On 16 December 1933, returning by train from London, Britten had travelled ‘as far as Beccles with Moeran, & “Harry”, his folk-singer’.161 This was Harry Cox, from Great Yarmouth, ‘who went on to become a celebrated face of the traditional folk revival, recording more than 200 songs and appearing frequently on television until his death in 1971’;162 Moeran had discovered him while collecting Norfolk folk songs, of which he amassed over 150. By early 1934, Moeran had become a key part of Britten’s musical life: his influence led, in February, to the Norwich Festival commissioning from Britten a work for 1936 – it would be Our Hunting Fathers – and he was a moving spirit behind the first performance of Simple Symphony on 6 March. Ten days later, Britten had a ‘long telephone conversation with Moeran about various musical matters’; a week after that, ‘I meet Moeran at Hawkes at 11.00 & play with him the duet version of his Suite Farrago…’163 Thereafter, at frequent intervals throughout the summer, Moeran would visit Lowestoft for lunch or tea, ‘much talk’ and the inevitable sea-bathing. For Britten, he had two enduringly influential qualities: he was a composer who knew how to get the East Anglian coast into his music; and he was fascinated by folk song without resembling Vaughan Williams.