BENJAMIN BRITTEN – (1913 – 1976) A BOY WAS BORN

They were a fairly well to do middle class family, although at the time even doctors were not regarded as high in the middle class social order and dentists were well beneath them in the rankings.

 Beni’s siblings displayed no particular musical talent. He himself was introduced at age 4 by his mother both to the piano and notation and he was soon able to pick out tunes and note them down. By the time he was 10 he had composed over a hundred works (800 according to unreliable sources in Wikipaedia) which he stored away and catalogued with opus numbers. It was his sister Beth who recalled in a television film that the realization dawned on her that Beni was a possible prodigy. Apart from his mother and piano teacher he was to all intents and purposes self informed, learning from Steiner’s musical manual and reading scores. They had no radio or gramophone in the house and Beni would acquire his knowledge of a work from playing piano versions of the music, especially Beethoven and later Brahms. At age 7 he started piano lessons with Miss Jennie Astle, a friend of his mother and a teacher in his local prep school, and continued under her throughout his prep school years until he went on to Greshams School at 13. His mother saw to it that he received favoured access to the piano over his brother and the girls. Apparently or apocryphally people were known to stop outside the Britten house just to listen in wonder to this boy practising away and perhaps to cite his example to their own children.

 Later when he was 10 he started taking viola lessons. It was the viola he was to regard as his instrument and here he was keeping good company following the precedent set by Mozart, then Beethoven and also Schubert. The viola is not an instrument from which to acquire virtuosic attraction. It is self effacing but, being central in the middle of the strings, an observation point for a composer or performer to learn what is going on around and about. His teacher was another local, Audrey Alston who had been a professional quartet player and had contact with others in the profession, including Frank Bridge, also a viola player. Thinking about it, Ben had no great virtuosi teaching him. One so often hears of one great pianist having studied with another great maestro. Clifford Curzon with Schnabel, Imogen Cooper with Curzon. For good TV entertainment, you can see Lang Lang receiving a master class from Barenboim. Later, when at the Royal College of Music, young Britten, then 17, studied piano, It was under the Australian composer, Arthur Benjamin, best remembered for his composition for four hands, Jamaican Rumba, but not someone whose name rings out as one of the great pianists.

 One wonders where did Britten get it from, his performing skills,. He had no ambition to be a performing matinee idol or an evening one. He had little time with his studying and composing to keep his piano technique constantly in trim. He expressed self doubts as to his ability to be the soloist even for his own piano concerto in the 1939 proms. Britten certainly had his showy spell in making his name in the late thirties and during his three years in America which would give rise for some critics describing him as clever-clever. Actually he would then have been about the same age as Beethoven was when he went from Bonn to Vienna where he took part in showy concourses and piano duals. The fact is that Britten eschewed the limelight of being a virtuoso professional performer. There has been no shortage of great performers. People can queue up all night if they wish to get tickets to hear – no, to see, – the Horowiz’s and the like in the belief that what they hear will be interpretations and sounds never before attained, which they themselves will have an ability to distinguish even though half of them will go on to cough away during the performance without actually appreciating that they are ruining for everyone else the very thing they have paid through the nose to go and see in the first place. Britten usually partnered another performer such as Menuhin, Rostropovitch or Curzon or otherwise singers such as Pears or Ferrier. One almost felt when he played as if it were the composer himself playing, which in fact it was. It was Benjamin Britten…in the guise of Mozart or Schubert, almost like some compositional descendant. No great showy flurries came from him, never a circus act to bring the house down, but a simple display of quiet intensity which was just… music.

 Returning to young Beni, his first school was South Lodge which was just down the road from the Britten house in Lowestoft where he started when he was 9. Bang next to the sea, it surely prepared him for Peter Grimes! It was a prep school largely for boarders whose parents could deposit them there. In the case of Britten minor – his brother Rob was already there – he was a day boy but his timetable was designed for boarders, 7.30 am to 8.00 pm. when only then was he free for his compositional studies after he got home. He always claimed that he worked best when under pressure with little time to spare. South Lodge which was owned by a Captain Sewell who had seen service in the Great War sounds a little like something out of To Serve Them All My Days. There were some thirty pupils spanning some three years and Ben fitted in well despite his musical quirkiness. He could hold his own if it came to fisticuffs and excelled at cricket, eventually becoming vice captain. He did well at maths and brought great credit to the school on attaining, at 11, intermediate grades of the RAM and RCM with 95 marks out of 99. For his last term he  was appointed school captain.

 Discipline was somewhat traditional and at times imposed by cane which Sewell would administer on the boys’ bare bottoms. Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Britten spends some time pondering whether that would have resulted in some form of sexual interference but there is no evidence of this from other contemporaries and we shall never know. All in all, South Lodge reminds me of Christ College at St Germans Place in Blackheath which was the last school in the country to use the cane and chose go out of business rather than submit to change. Their headmaster and bursar tried to justify to me their cane culture on the grounds that it was what the parents of their boys, mostly from Africa and Asia, wanted.

 At about the time of his going to South Lodge, the ten year old Britten was taken by his Miss Alston to a concert at the Norwich Triennial Festival where Britten first heard live orchestral music. He was knocked sideways by the orchestral suite, The Sea, by Frank Bridge. This was a romantic work dating from 1911. Bridge was commissioned to write a new work for the next festival set for 1927. Entitled Enter Spring, it was a more modern work nodding more towards Debussy than the English rustic school. On both occasions Bridge stayed as a guest with Miss Alston. She again took Ben along, now 13. Her object was not only for him to hear the music but for her to seek to introduce him to Bridge. Bridge himself was not particularly keen on meeting yet again some promising pupil but he could hardly turn down a request from his own host. Just as well because within10 minutes of meeting Ben, he had made up his mind that this clearly brilliant child needed expert training. Although he had never sought to take on any other pupil, he wanted Ben to study with him in London on a one to one basis apart from piano tuition to be given by Harold Samuel. Plans were already in place for Ben to go to Greshams, a public school in Holt because it gave a small bursary for music.   A family decision was therefore made under the more restraining influence of Ben’s father that Ben would go to Greshams, but in the meantime could travel up to the Bridges’ Kensington flat to spend one day at a time with Bridge and stay overnight with one of his sisters both of whom were living in London. Arrangements were also made with Greshams that Ben would be allowed time out for similar excursions.

 Bridge’s teaching played an important part in Britten’s musical development. He was born in 1879 and with his broad brimmed hat and long hair looked like the archetypal Bohemian. In his Sussex country cottage he and Mrs Bridge lived alongside Marjorie Fass, an amateur musician and painter in what appeared to the composer, Howard Ferguson, to be a ménage à trois – and here I am not referring to playing piano trios. As a composer, Bridge was not a hot favourite with the public compared to his contemporaries. He did not give theoretical teaching to Ben. What he did was to emphasize to him that he should know the timbre of each instrument, what it could do and to question himself as to why he had written any passage in a particular way. More generally he emphasized the need for the composer to understand himself, a difficult prospect for a thirteen year old to achieve. Bridge had no sense of time passing and spent all day without a break until Mrs Bridge would interrupt to point out to her husband that the boy should have a rest for half an hour. These lessons could leave Ben close to tears. He would remain devoted to Bridge all his life. It was soon after this meeting that Ben would write the incredible Four French Songs.

 Boarding at Greshams did not turn out to be an entirely happy experience for Ben. His relationship with Walter Greatorex, head of music there, did not get off particularly well with Greatorex churlishly saying “so you are the person who knows Stravinsky” – Ben had not in fact yet heard any Stravinsky – and then proceeding to criticize the boy’s piano technique. In all probability Ben was already ahead of him and said just what he thought of Greatorex’s technique in a letter home to his mother. Michael Oliver in his book suggests that Greatorex felt resentment at this boy being taught by others. Still, they had to get on and it was Greatorex, at a school concert, who played the piano in a bagatelle for piano trio written by Ben who himself played the viola part. The school itself was said to be easy going and liberal. Joining the school cadet force was not compulsory as in most public schools and Ben opted out straight away. Bullying (they didn’t actually have dormitories but single cells to sleep in) was like something out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (tossing the victim in a sheet) during which Ben fainted. He spent time in the sanatorium to escape the worst of bullying whilst finding time to compose there. His letters home, expressed in almost oedipal terms, evidenced how unhappy he was. Ben did not wish to take the route of higher education and then on to university which Bridge recommended but his parents wanted him at least to take his school certificate.

 It turned out that there was an annual competition at the Royal College of Music where the one winning student would be granted a place and in 1930, without having yet taken school cert, Ben submitted some of his works. He was invited to sit the three hour written examination which Ben said he completed in twenty minutes before handing in his paper! His mother thought that he must have failed but he was recalled that afternoon for an interview before a panel consisting of Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and S P Waddington and was then confirmed the winner of the competition. “What is a middle class English public schoolboy doing, writing music like that?” Vaughan Williams is supposed to have commented. Ben wanted to leave Greshams immediately without awaiting the result of his school certificate. In fact, to his disbelief, he was to gain one pass and five credits.

 The RCM was a conservative institution where Ben, not yet 17 mind, made few friends, an exception being the Welsh composer Grace Williams. He lived with his sister Beth but also found lodgings where he could practise the piano to the annoyance of his fellow tenants. He now was to study the piano with Arthur Benjamin and composition with John Ireland, just one lesson a week, not a strenuous timetable. Ireland was invariably late for lessons and sometimes failed to turn up at all. Yet when it came to teaching he would be more rigorous than Bridge, whom he did not like and disparaged for not having taught Britten anything. Ben, always a fastidious person and who did not care for swearing, found Ireland as slovenly and his house in Chelsea in a squalid state. On one occasion Ben had to wait there all day for his lesson and when Ireland did turn up he was drunk and proceeded to urinate on the floor. The world which did open up for Ben however was being able to go to concerts, ballet, opera and theatre. He began to think about going to Vienna to study with Alban Berg. As far as the RCM was concerned this was anti-Christ. Schoenberg and Berg were beyond the pale of musical decency. After all Elgar was still alive for God’s sake. Even Mrs Britten advised Ben against as she considered Berg would be a bad influence – maybe she was a Eurosceptic at heart – but her objection might have been more concerned with moral, as opposed to musical, influences. Humphrey Carter suggests she would have been conscious of Ben’s possible homosexual susceptibilities. It was undoubtedly Berg’s influence which was behind Britten’s sinfonietta for ten instruments to which he decided to accord his opus number one and which he dedicated to Frank Bridge. Matthew illustrated this to us in his first lecture of the series. From then on Benjamin Britten found himself in the big wide world looking to make his living and his future as a composer.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – (1913 – 1976) YOUNG APOLLO

 The year was 1932. By now, aged 19, Ben had won a £50 travelling scholarship on leaving the Royal College and started to look to publish. Not that easy as publishers have to make commercial decisions based on what their crystal ball tells them and what return they are likely to get out of it. Take Mozart. He could not find a publisher for his piano quartets, not because they lacked quality but simply because no one out there wanted to buy the sheet music. It was the OUP who took on publishing Ben’s first opuses and then they suggested he move over to Boosey and Hawkes. His first work after finishing at the RCM was a commission he obtained from the BBC, a setting of poems and carols for a capella boys voices, A Boy Was Born, the title filched by me for my previous instalment. Ben might have relied on a family subsidy but here was a young man, still very adolescent in his outlook, optimistically wanting to earn his keep and go places as a composer when even the most seasoned of composers would need to depend on teaching posts to maintain themselves. Gustav Holst teaching at JAGS and St Pauls Girls School is the most obvious one that comes to mind.

I am not going to comment on each work he wrote but Ben’s opus 2 was a phantasy quartet for oboe and strings which Leon Goosens took up to play at an International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) concert in Florence in 1934. Ben travelled there accompanied by John Pounder, a boyhood friend from Lowestoft. En route he met the conductor Hermann Scherchen and his fifteen year old son Wulff with whom he would form a close friendship three years later. This trip however suddenly ended on Ben receiving a telegram to come home as his father was ill – he had in fact already died. Ben managed to get home in time for the funeral and to compose some of the music for it. His mother was left pretty well off and she shortly moved to fashionable Frinton down the coast where she indulged herself in social activity and her newly acquired interest in Christian Science. For Ben, his father’s death ended home life as he had always known it. He had left Ben a legacy of £100 and he still had a little of his travelling award left. So, further reason to earn his oats.

 Ben seems to have had a keen business acumen and possibly this showed quite early. Soon after the oboe quartet he visited his brother who was a prep school teacher in Prestatyn for which Ben wrote a set of children’s songs with piano entitled “Friday Afternoons”, the time when singing took place at the school. He also had the idea of browsing through juvenilia he wrote at 11 and compiled from these his simple symphony for strings and an arrangement for string quartet. With his eye on the opportunity of school performances Ben pressed Boosey and Hawkes to publish before the school year started in September. The Simple Symphony is probably likely to be as good an earner for the Britten Estate as any of his other works.

 In looking for a post Ben approached the BBC whose director of music was the legendary Adrian Boult whose conducting Ben described as execrable, an opinion influenced by Frank Bridge cheesed off with his works not getting played. I remember Boult being wonderful to listen to but to watch he was about as exciting as a sack of potatoes. What did transpire was a tip by a BBC official for Ben to go and see Alberto Cavalcanti, a film sound director working for the GPO film unit under its director, John Grierson. The unit produced documentary films intended to be shown in cinema news theatres. Their studio was in Blackheath in an art school at the end of Bennett Park, the cul de sac where Lloyds Bank is situated. On the outside wall is a commemorative plaque. This building later became the dormitory for Christ College where many a tender backside and its tearful owner would woefully recuperate whilst his consenting parents were getting quiet satisfaction as well as value for money for what an English education was providing.

 Ben was the Unit’s director of music for about 18 months from May 1935. He was paid £7 per week which was more than a tidy sum as the national average weekly salary was £3.14.0 (£3.70). There were only a limited number of musicians available but with wind machines, sand paper being scraped and recording sound effects backwards Ben was able to bring off some astounding effects. During this time Ben was introduced to Whystan Auden who was teaching in a South Wales preparatory school. He had been to Gresham a little before Ben and now left his job to join the film unit at £3 per week. It was he who wrote the verse commentary for the film, Night Mail, with Ben of course doing the music with 18 players at his disposal. Ben had spent time at Stanmore researching the rhythmic sound of trains. He then had to compose with precision in minutes and seconds to accord with both the edited film and at the same time to fit the rhythm of the verse commentary written by Auden.

 This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

 It was to be the beginning of an association between Britten and Auden which spanned the next seven years. Auden was very much the dominant figure of the two particularly as Ben, at 21, was just beginning to feel his way in the adult world whilst remaining an adolescent in his pursuits. For instance the 14 year old who had set Verlaine and Victor Hugo to song was the same 21 year old who read J M Barrie and spiffing school boy yarns such as Emil and the Detectives. Auden and Christopher Isherwood took Ben under their wing to the Group Theatre where their plays were being produced and for which Ben would write the music. Ben privately admitted an intellectual inferiority complex in their company and being over awed but when it came to matters musical he clearly could stand his ground. His political awareness was also sharpened up with his moving in left wing circles. Ramsay MacDoanld had resigned and Stanley Baldwin was prime minister. Civil war raged in Spain and Ben signed up for the Peace Pledge Union, newly formed by E. M Forster and remained a lifelong member. Some adjudged Auden’s poems too difficult to set to music but Ben succeeded in doing so efforlessly. For the 1936 Norwich Triennial Festival Ben secured a commission to write a work for solo high voice and orchestra entitled “Our Hunting Fathers”. It was his first large scale orchestral work to be published with various poems including two by Auden. Whilst an apparent outcry against the cruel treatment to animals, it was not an animal rights claim but an allusion to the oppression of fascism. The orchestra, the London Phil, found it a difficult work to play and gave Ben a rough time in rehearsal, pouring scorn on it. The work had only two performances and went into cold storage for twenty five years. Fortunately there is a very good recording now by the LPO on its own label.

The 1936 ISCM Festival took place in Barcelona. Alban Berg had just died and his melancholic violin concerto received its first performance. Ben was moved as was another English composer who was there, Lennox Berkeley, ten years older than Ben and who was also a Gresham old boy. The two went together to Mont Juic, a local park, where they heard Catalan dances. Some time a little later they holidayed together in Cornwall writing four orchestral dances, called Mont Juic, based on themes which Ben had noted at the time. For many years they never let on who wrote which but we now know that the first two were by Berkeley and the second two by Ben.

 Another friendship struck up at Barcelona was with Peter Burra, a music writer from the Times to whom Ben revealed his homosexual feelings. Burra had been at school with Peter Pears who otherwise has not yet entered into this account. The friendship with Burra was short lived as he was killed a year later in a light aircraft crash. It was through that that Ben came to know Peter when both chanced to meet to sort out Burra’s belongings. They were no more than close friends to start with. Although there were a number of homosexual people in his circle, Ben held back keeping his own relationships platonic. Auden was particularly insistent in what seems like an exercise in control freakery which included sending poems to Ben pressing him to come to terms with his sexuality.  It is very likely that Auden himself had hoped for some relationship with Ben. In his diaries Ben had recorded his dichotomy referring to “the sexual thing that I need to get to grips with” and “quel horreur” at entering into a relationship. For Ben, there was the conflict within himself.

 In January 1937 Ben’s mother died. She had travelled to London to look after Beth who had had been struck down with a flu. Whilst Beth recovered her mother went down with the virus and suddenly died. Ben was shattered, having now lost both parents within three years before he was 24. He had been particularly attached to his mother and has been described as a Mummy’s boy although in the years since his father’s death he had displayed an adolescent tendency to obstinacy, like they all do, (this is the voice of experience talking). One outcome from this was that Ben inherited a reasonably substantial sum from her estate. His lifestyle had been somewhat nomadic the last five years in staying with his friends, his sisters and flat sharing during which time he had enjoyed the pleasures that London had had to offer a young man off the leash. He now looked round his native Suffolk to find somewhere and came upon an old mill in the village of Snape, six miles inland from Aldeburgh near to the old Maltings which would one day be converted by him into a concert hall. He purchased the mill with his inheritance and had it converted into what appears to be a mélange between an oast house without a cowl on the one hand and a 1930’s homestead as advertised by the Abbey Road Building Society on the other. The first occupant to take up shared residence with Ben was Lennox Berkeley. During their holiday in Cornwall, the two had spoken of their homosexuality but agreed to maintain a strictly platonic relationship. Berkeley appears to have over stepped the arrangement and there followed an immediate cooling by Ben who quit his mill for London and moved in temporarily with Peter Pears. At this time Pears was a singer with the New English Singers.

 The big breakthrough for Ben came late in 1937 with the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. The Boyd Neel string orchestra had been invited as a visiting orchestra to the Salzburg Festival at short notice. In accepting, Neel, its founder and conductor, had not appreciated that it was expected (which translated into English meant required) that the orchestra would introduce a new British composition. This only became apparent from the official invitation which arrived three months before the event. This posed a knotty problem as most composers could not even manage a fanfare within the time constraints. Neel however had met Ben, seen what work he was doing, seen him composing anywhere and everywhere such as on the corner of a pub table, and approached him to see if he could produce a short work. Ben accepted but even Neel could not believe it when two days later Ben turned up with the completed outline of a work more than half an hour long. It took him a further two weeks to complete its orchestration. Ben had had the idea for it back in 1932 but seems not to have taken it very far. Who knows, he might have kept some sketches! I don’t go in for musical dissection but here I am sorely tempted. After an introduction and the Bridge theme, taken from his second idyll for string quartet, there follow a series of variations or perhaps “genres” might be the word. They include a march the speed of which not even Jesse Owens could have kept up with; a romanza with a sweetness of Mahler at his most Viennese; the aria italiana with a takeoff of a coloratura making impossible high leaps to a mandolin like accompaniment strummed by the middle strings. We then have a Bachian bourée followed by the Wienner Waltzer which may have delighted a Salzburg audience but it seems to owe as much to Ravel as it does to Johann Strauss. A breathless Brittenesque moto perpetuo is succeeded by a funeral march with heavy drum beats – played by double bases; and after a static sounding chant the works ends with a leaping fugue. These variations contain parody, fun and Britten wizardry encased between an opening and closure which bear very dark and ominous shadows characteristic of the 1930’s where even optimism can be portentous. The Frank Bridge Variations were soon to be extensively performed including at the ISCM the following year hosted in London.

 With the onset of the Spanish civil war Auden and Isherwood were off to do their bit not for King and Country but for republicanism. Auden had written a poem, Ballad for Heroes which Ben set to music. Ben was a declared pacifist, that is, he did not believe in war as a means of solving political problems and he probably felt a little uncomfortable in the collaboration. He also received a commission from the TUC to write a march, Onward Democracy. He was now settled back in the mill. He had by chance learned that Wulff Scherchen, now 18, had fled Germany and was at Cambridge. Ben invited him to Snape where their close friendship continued. Eventually it was Wullff who was to put a distance between them. This might have been a factor in Ben’s decision to leave for America but during his journey he kept a photo of Wulff on his dressing table and dedicated one of his songs from Les Illuminations to him as he did for Peter whose friendship overlapped that with Wulff.

 1938 also saw the composition of the piano concerto, commissioned by the BBC, which was first played at the proms by Ben under Old Timber (Sir Henry Wood). The work is exciting, showy but, for some, exhibits the self confidence of a whizz kid going places, or clever-clever as some began to say. William Walton, was not one of Britten’s close friends but in 1967 he dedicated to Ben his Improvisations on a Theme of Benjamin Britten choosing his theme from this piano concerto. It is a powerful work, underperformed and underrated and, unlike Walton’s Siestas and Sicilianas, has a distinctive Britten-like cold North Sea tang about it

 Earlier that year Ben had met Aaron Copland for the first time at the ISCM London Festival. Ben was introduced to El Salon Mexico and Copland to the Frank Bridge Variations. Britten and Tippett were the first British composers to excite him, possibly, according to Howard Pollack in his Copland biography, The Uncommon Man, because they both shared his left wing views and also because they had absorbed American influences. Copland was said to have found English composers stuffy including Lambert and Walton. That’s plain daft. Anyway to judge British composers by how much they had absorbed American influences is as logical as judging German composers by how much they had absorbed Serbo-Croat influences. As to American influences, Mr Pollack should listen to Walton’s Portsmouth Point overture or the last movement of his first symphony whilst Constant Lambert, who was said to be Britain’s answer to George Gershwin, can sound as swampy as Duke Ellington. Ben invited Aaron down to Snape and the two exchanged views on each other’s work. Here were two great composers, getting on like a house on fire and striking up a common musical accord. Yet, here we go again; Pollack attributes this to their common homosexuality. My response to you, Mr Pollack, is contained in a single word which almost rhymes with your surname. What emerged from their meeting is the earliest reference to Ben thinking about a future to be made in America after Copland’s encouraging pitch of the better prospects that would await him there.

 So what caused the decision to pack bags and go to America? The usual answer is that Britten and Pears were scurrying away to escape the war and call up. It is not as simple as that and there can be no one answer as Ben hardly knew his own mind. As we have seen, Aaron Copland had painted a picture of affluent success. Ben would have probably known of Korngold’s success with his music for the film, Robin Hood, with Errol Flynn. Ben himself then received an enquiry from Hollywood to see if he could write the music for a film of King Arthur. He must have questioned his own destiny, which way he was going musically. He questioned the power of the BBC and the establishment. Others questioned where he was going including the Times critic regretting what had become of the talented youngster who had written A Boy Was Born. The political side worried him. The Spanish Civil War was lost. Auden and Isherwood had gone there in their idealism, had returned and gone to China and ultimately together left for America in January 1939 urging him to follow, as Europe was finished. At home there was the Munich Crisis after which no-one knew whether there would be a war or not. And if there were to be, Ben, being a pacifist who would object, pictured the prospect of imprisonment. The one person who had mattered to him to hold him back, his mother, was no longer; his friendships were becoming strained. He needed to distance himself from Lennox Berkeley (even though the Atlantic Ocean was rather stretching it a bit) and Wulff Scherchen wanted to distance himself from Ben. His constant support was Peter Pears who would go with him to scout the territory although he, Peter, needed to be back by August. Against that background, the decision was made to go in March 1939. After a farewell party, Ben and Peter entrained to Southampton where, to their surprise, they found Frank and Mrs Bridge there to wish them Bon Voyage. Bridge was apprehensive that he might not see Ben again – he didn’t as he died in 1941 – but he handed Ben a present, his own viola. It was not Brave New World but a brave man taking his chances in the New World.

 They were on board the SS Ausonia which was actually taking them to Quebec.  Peter was going only to hold Ben’s hand and planned on returning in August. Ben began having doubts on the journey, but then who wouldn’t in the circumstances? On landing there was considerable interest with an immediate commission from CBC (Canadian Radio) for a new work. This turned out to be Young Apollo. It is Britten at his most exuberant yet. Written for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, it demonstrates a verve that leaves one breathless from the first note. It recalls the piano concerto and contains unbelievable glissandos for the piano and the strings alike. Here was someone who had landed in the Americas saying “I can do it your way… but more so”. Strangely he withdrew the work and it was not played until after his death. Michael Oliver suggests that it might have only been the first movement of a projected longer work. There is no evidence of that and perhaps it is safer to assume that Ben sensed that this time he had gone over the top. He and Peter stayed in Canada a month before crossing into the USA at Grand Rapids where, according to Pears in Tony Palmer’s film “A Time There Was”, their relationship changed. They had become and remained an item.

 So here they were in the US of A, land of Roosevelt, Clarke Gable and Gene Autrey, the singing cowboy, with an unknown future stretching out. They made their way to New York in order to be near Aaron Copland who was living in Woodstock. It is an odd quirk that Britten in 1939 was beginning to sound like Copland even before Copland was sounding like Copland. It was only at the end of the thirties that Copland moved from a modernist European influenced style to his homespun American persona. Yet apart from El Salon Mexico and the ballet, Billy the Kid, just being published, the works which would bring him popular fame, Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man were not to spring into life until the early half of the forties. Peter and Ben were also able to meet up again with Auden and Isherwood. Those two had always had an on and off relationship and would soon go their separate ways into new pairings.

 Ben still had works on the go which he had started in England. Matthew has already introduced Les Illuminations, a song cycle based on eight out of forty two poems written by Rimbaud. These are not always easy to follow in English, let alone French, and were supposedly written by Rimbaud often in a drugged state. Britten seems to have mastered with ease whatever difficulties he might have had of writing in French. In fact, he could be said to be a dab hand, having written Four French Songs when he was 14. The work is written for high voice and strings for the Swiss soprano, Sophie Wyss. She had been the soloist in Our Hunting Fathers and was seen as the Britten interpreter par excellence until Pears later came along. Les Illuminations received its first performance at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street in April 1940 with Sophie Wyss the soloist. Its first American performance was two years later with Pears.

 He also completed his violin concerto that same year. It is an advance on the piano concerto and was received well in the US. Not so much in the UK where it saw competition with Walton’s 1939 violin concerto written for Heifetz. The BBC were giving airtime to his works but eventually once the war had got going and, succumbing to the conchie objectors, the Beeb imposed a proscriptive embargo on those composers who were not doing their bit and Ben was in the black book. The wave of protest came not only from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells but in the Commons one MP called on the House to strip these people of their citizenship.

 Still going back to New York in 1939 everything in the garden was sunny. Ben and Peter became house guests in Amityville, Long Island of Elizabeth Mayer and her doctor husband, she an amateur musician. They were a Jewish family who had left Germany when the Nazis came to power and whom Peter had first met on his earlier visit. It started out as a weekend stay in August but two weeks later Britain and Germany were at war. That put the kybosh on Peter being able to get back as planned and the two got invited back to stay on with the Mayers. Ben was in touch through the consulate to see if they could and should return and was told that he would be more useful if he were to stay. Others were in the same boat (except that they weren’t) caught up, wanting to get back and unable to do so, like John Barbirolli and most notably Arthur Bliss. He had gone to the New York Fair in August for the first performance of his piano concerto and spent three frustrating years separated from his American wife and children who were back home in London.

 With the war, money transfers from the UK came to a stop. Although there were occasional performances, the two of them had to think of earning a dime or two. As it happened Ben then chanced across a music group of semi-pro’s in, of all names, Suffolk County in a town called, yes, Southold, where he got a small sum for rehearsing the local orchestra whilst Peter took the choir. It was a pleasant enough existence with Elizabeth playing the role of a substitute mother. Eventually they decided to take their leave, taking up residence in Brooklyn Heights in what was an artistic commune. This was led by Auden with his new partner, Chester Kallman and included George Davis (who would marry Lotte Lenya), Carson McCullers (novelist), Thomas Mann’s son Golo, Louis Macneice, Salvador Dali and the singer Gypsy Rose Lee and others to this glittering array of who’s who in the world of arts. No time for boredom but Ben and Peter would probably have preferred a desert island and from time to time moved back to Amityville for peace.

 There followed a commission indirectly according to one source from the Japanese Government for Ben to write a new work to celebrate what was inaccurately calculated to be the 2600th anniversary of the Mikado dynasty. The account has some semblance to the stranger who called upon Mozart to commission a requiem. Except that in this case the stranger was our man in the British Consulate. Would Ben undertake a commission from a foreign government? He could not say which government– it was too hush-hush for the moment. Ben agreed although he did not learn till later that it was the Japanese government. It would be six months more before the commission was confirmed and by that time he was only left with six weeks to produce something. All he had was the incomplete Sinfonia da Requiem on which he was working. In Britten on Music he stated that he went to see the Japanese consul to explain his position and what the work was about and explained the Latin names of the movements. He was assured all was in order. He produced the work, was paid and heard nothing more for six months when the work was rejected as its Christian nature was an insult. Instead he dedicated it to the memory of his parents, what he had probably had in mind in the first place. Now had it been Malcolm Arnold who had received the commission – his first work, Beckus the Dandipratt, was not written till three years later – he would probably have written A Nanky Poo Overture or, Variations on a Theme of Arthur Sullivan and Hirohito would have loved it. Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem was given its first performance by the New York Philharmonic under its conductor, John BarbirollBen now became more active in writing more populist works including “John Bunyan”, a collaboration between him and Auden of a two act “operetta”. It was not a success with the critics largely because of the scat words of the text. To all intents and purposes it was a musical and Ben could have continued to make a success in the genre had he pursued it. Thankfully, he didn’t. He also wrote the popular ballets Matinées Musicales and Soirées Musicales based on Rossini delectables.

 Other firsts were being produced, his first numbered string quartet, works for the British piano duettists Ethel Bartlett and Robert Robinson which included his Scottish Ballad for four hands; in contrast was a commission from Paul Wittgenstein for the Diversions for left hand and orchestra. Wittgenstein had lost his right arm in the First World War and had commissioned works from Ravel, Richard Strauss and Prokofiev. The Britten would go the same way as the others had. Wittgenstein rejected it and refused further performance.

 The turning point for Ben came when he and Peter were in California where they came across a copy of the BBC magazine, “The Listener”, in which there was an article by E M Forster on the eighteenth century poet, George Crabbe who hailed from Aldeburgh, just down the road from Snape, and who had written a long poem called the Borough. Ben had little idea who Crabbe was but he felt a twinge of homesickness. Peter then was able to find a copy of the Borough in an antiquarian bookshop and it was not long before Ben read it especially Letter 22 about an outcast fisherman called Peter Grimes. From there on he would cease talking of settling. Their next visit was to Sergei Koussevitsky, long time conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for a performance by them of the Sinfonia da Requiem. Ben recounted his story of Peter Grimes and on learning that uninterrupted time was needed for such a project, Koussevitsky immediately offered a $1,000 from his foundation for Ben to write Peter Grimes.

 Ben was now more than ever keen to return to England whatever the outcome. In April 1942, three years after arriving, Ben and Peter secured a passage on a Swedish ship which took five long weeks, not five days to return. During the voyage he had the time to write two works, the Hymn to Saint Cecilia, set to verses written by Auden and A Ceremony of Carols, his delightful work for boys’ voices. Now on returning home he had got something out of his system. He seemed to have found his old self again, the composer who had written A Boy Was Born. He was returning to the Old World, eventually to Suffolk, just as brave as when he left, with the words of Peter Grimes perhaps in mind, “I AM NATIVE AND ROOTED IN THIS LAND”.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976) – NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD.

When Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears returned to England in May 1942 they were probably a little uncertain as to what to expect. They had been tagged and tarred with W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood for cowardly avoidance of service; Ben for thriving on a culture which he had not the courage to defend and a truly back handed pernicious compliment from the editor of the Musical Times of “having saved one’s art and one’s skin at the cost of failure to do one’s duty.” However they were welcomed home with little apparent antagonism with Peter obtaining concert and operatic work which would separate them for long periods. Neither was confronted with the threat they had feared of imprisonment. Both obtained absolute exemption from war service, Pears’ work being regarded as a contribution to public morale. To begin with, the mill at Snape was occupied by Ben’s sister Beth and her family and the pre-war flat in Hallam Street had been let. For ten months or so they slummed it with friends and relatives. Eventually, Ben was to get Snape back and start composing from there.

In the summer there was a performance of the Sinfonia da Requiem at the proms. Their first public recital was in September at the Wigmore Hall for a performance of the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. This had been written, in its original Italian, in America in 1940 and I am a reliably informed by one of our stalwarts who has studied Italian that he cannot make out a word. It was the first work that Ben wrote for Peter Pears. He had not performed the work until he felt ready to do so. Remember, Peter had not been a solo singer but a member of the BBC Singers. In America his range needed extending and he needed to take lessons. Ben recognized his potential. It has been suggested Peter was more a baritone and that much of his high voice was falsetto. The selected sonnets are intense love poems which, except for the last, are addressed to a man. The audience was enthusiastic, the critics favourable, Edward Sackville-West stating the songs to be the finest in England since Purcell. Immediately after the concert, the Decca Record Company approached Ben as he stepped off the stage to sign him up, hence the story by Matthew, cleaned up by him, of the claim that whenever Benjamin Britten farted, Decca were at the ready with the recording mikes.

Pressure of work, living out of a suitcase, Peter being frequently on tour, led to Ben going into hospital in early 1943 with a bad attack of measles. Ben seemed frequently to have incapacitating illnesses and on each one he seemed able to prepare one of his most felicitous works. This time was no exception as he composed, notwithstanding the red spots, his serenade for tenor horn and strings and the prelude and fugue for 18 string instruments. The Serenade was written for Peter Pears and the 22 year old Dennis Brain. It is as if the homecoming had pointed Ben back to English poetry with six unconnected poems set inside a frame of an identical prelude and offstage postlude for what is made to sound like a valveless natural horn. Dennis Brain was a wonder. He eclipsed all horn players before and after. Playing standards have improved and horns are now built to avoid the misses and bubbles they made pre-Brain. Never so with Dennis the Menace. He took his place as first horn with the Philharmonia and the sound from that section back in the 1950’s was as unmistakeable with him there as it was glorious. He entertained at parties playing the finale of the Mendelssohn violin concerto on horn. The cartoonist, Gerrard Hoffnung, brought his characters alive in a Hoffnung concert where Dennis

was the soloist in a concerto for hosepipe and orchestra. His great passion was fast cars – he kept “the Autocar” magazine on his music stand – and it was a fast car which killed him, halfway up a lamp-post on the Barnet bypass, six hours after finishing an Edinburgh Festival concert in 1957. When I heard the news, I cried.

The prelude and fugue was written for the Boyd Neel orchestra for its tenth anniversary, except that it was the middle of the war and many of its members dispersed or whose whereabouts were not known. Eighteen of them were got together and Ben wrote the work with each one of the 18 players in mind. It is shorter than the Frank Bridge Variations and more taut. I first heard it played at a concert, which included the serenade, some four weeks or so after Ben’s death, the news of which had left me numbed. The soloists at the concert were, making his first appearance since Ben had died, a very brave Peter Pears with Michael Thompson, leader of the Philharmonia horns, as good as any to carry on in Dennis’s shadow.

In 1943, Ben and Peter met Michael Tippett. He had been to hear the first performance of the Michelangelo sonnets, The following June he was sentenced to three months imprisonment after refusing to undertake giving up his Morley College choir as a condition of his registration as a conscientious objector being granted. Ben and Vaughan Williams had campaigned for Tippett’s release. Tippett had written Boyhood’s End which he dedicated to Ben. They became close friends for a while but Tippett was never a member of the so-called Britten circle.

There followed in 1943 the cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb, which I mentioned in my introduction, “Getting To Know Him” commissioned by the Revd. Walter Hussey of St Matthews, Northampton. I had thought he was just some local vicar. Well, yes he was at the time, but my further researches show that he went places in the Church hierarchy. He had become Vicar of St Matthew’s from 1937 and to celebrate the church’s fiftieth anniversary he commissioned Rejoice in the Lamb. He later organised a concert by Kirsten Flagstad. Other commissions included a sculpture by Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, a Litany and Anthem from W. H. Auden, Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice by Gerald Finzi, Crucifixion from Graham Sutherland, and The Outer Planet from Norman Nicholson. He became Dean of Chichester Cathedral in 1955. Whilst there he commissioned Graham Sutherland to paint an altarpiece, Leonard Bernstein to compose the Chichester Psalms, William Walton a Magnificat and Nunc Dimitiis and commissioned stained glass windows from John Piper and Marc Chagall. Not bad going for a local vicar you might think.

Now remember Ben had needed time to get his head down to Peter Grimes, hence the substantial payment from the Koussivitsky Foundation. He was getting and taking various commissions and in a position to pick and choose. He was at the same time still a journeyman composer with theatre and BBC contracts such as the radio play “Rescue” which involved 80 minutes of music. Much of 1944 was spent working on Grimes in which he encountered various difficulties. He had approached Auden to become the librettist but he turned it down. Perhaps Auden underrated his ability after Paul Bunyan but, if that were the reason, he need not have done so as he and Chester Kalman were later to write the celebrated libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Ben turned to Montagu Slater with whom he had worked before the war but found him painfully slow and frequently unavailable because of work he had undertaken with the Crown Film Unit. In any case there was no

immediate theatre to have hosted Grimes at the time. It had been commissioned to be given its first performance by Koussevitsky but, with America having come into the war, the Tanglewood Festival had closed for the duration. Back home Covent Garden was closed down and Sadlers Wells, where Peter had become one of its lead singers, had two companies out touring in the sticks but no home. No-one could know in 1944 when the war would end, indeed in which way it would end. Still Sadlers Wells it was which made what was a brave decision to open its doors again after the war with Peter Grimes.

One major problem in the writing was that, except for Grimes who has no redeeming factors, the characters in the opera do not exist in the Crabbe. They needed inventing and fleshing and Ben and Peter did much of this to create a background to the plot which would work. Grimes is not made a sympathetic character but he is given the chance to express the frustrations of the hostility with which he was faced. Much has been written that Ben felt a common bond with Grimes with both treated as outsiders, but did he think that of himself? Grimes is, in the words of Swallow, rough, uncouth and callous. Did Ben really see himself viewed like that when by now the whole world was fawning around him?

The build up to the first production of Peter Grimes was itself a drama. Many from the company thought that what the House needed was a new production from the traditional repertoire, not this modern music. There was also no sympathy that its composer, its lead singer, Pears, and its producer, Eric Crozier, were all conscientious objectors. The singer offered the role of Balstrode refused to continue as it was unsingable. There were threats of walk outs and a group petitioned the governors to have themselves made an executive committee which could veto the decisions of Joan Cross, the director. Ben was apprehensive that the whole project was going to end in disaster. It turned out as we know to be a great success, a success with all the press, a greater success with the public. Even one bus conductor at the stop on Roseberry Avenue was heard to shout out “Sadlers Wells, Peter Grimes”. The pro’s had been vindicated, the anti’s lived to fight another day. The conductor, not the one on the bus, had been Reginald Goodall who had previously conducted the first performance of the serenade for tenor and horn. He was not just modest but as timid as a field mouse. His musicianship was never questioned and he finished up near canonized in the seventies. Still no-one seems to have taken exception at the time to the fact that he had been a member of Moseley’s Fascist party and was known as a Nazi sympathiser even during the war. When Reggie was later assistant conductor at Covent Garden the one person who refused to allow him anywhere near was George Solti.

There now followed a period which Michael Oliver describes as “too much success”, something Ben was aware of and worried about. In a letter to Elizabeth Meyer he expressed concern as to whether it was not a sign that his music was too superficial and that “too much success is as bad as too little”. If rest was needed after Peter Grimes, Ben didn’t get it. He was now plunged into the seventeenth century and Purcell in particular, 1945 being the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death. Ben and Peter had been touring singing the folksong arrangements that Ben had made and Purcell’s music that had such an overwhelming influence on Ben that he would shortly write three pieces of his own in tribute. He saw something of himself perhaps in his predecessor, Purcell being a child genius. His life was short and he died at 35,

the same age as Mozart. Ben started work on a new cycle “The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Donne (1572-1631) was from an earlier generation that Purcell (1660-1695) but the music that Ben wrote owes much to Purcell.

Ben broke off from this composition to go on tour to Germany as accompanist to Yehudi Menuhin. Gerald Moore, the most famous accompanist of his day, had been due to go but Ben asked if he could fill the role and it was agreed. He and Menuhin started practising but stopped after a very short while, having felt what they sensed to be an immediate rapport and common understanding. Ben was a natural brilliant accompanist and Moore himself paid him tribute in stating that Ben was the greatest accompanist he had known. The tour with Menuhin was grim. They gave three recitals a day over ten days touring concentration camps where the victims were still gathered including Belsen and Ravensbruk. The two of them were to come across DP’s (displaced persons) roaming a Germany which had been absolutely annihilated. Ben never expressed his feelings publicly but he told Peter it was one of the most harrowing and moving experiences of his life.

On returning he was able to complete the Donne Sonnets. He also produced his second quartet, again a tribute to Purcell in the way it is written and in reproducing in the final movement a Purcell chaconny which ends, in Britten’s hands, with a series of repeated chords where you never can tell which one is going to be the final one . His final Purcell tribute in 1946 was the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra based on a theme from Abdelaazar. No need for me tell you about it.

Now with a successful grand opera under his belt, most English composers would have called it a day. Not Ben, he was working on the next one. The difficulty laying ahead was in being able to mount another opera of the scale of Peter Grimes. Ben’s thoughts had turned to opera on a chamber scale. Solo singers and chamber instrumentalists; no pit orchestra and no chorus. No such precedent existed; Ben conceived the idea and gave birth to the child. The background to these plans was a schism of near Henry VIII proportions which had broken out at the Wells. Joan Cross was a leading pre-war soprano who had studied at Trinity College of Music – I wonder if they know that downstairs – and had directed Sadlers Wells during the war. With mutiny threatened by some of the Wells singers, she now decided to break away with her troops. Ben was in the course of writing an opera based on a play by André Obey he had seen in Paris, The Rape of Lucretia. It is a strange cross breed between the Rome of Tarquin, about 500 BC, with references to the crucifixion of Jesus. This came from a suggestion by Ben to his librettist, Ronald Duncan. Well if poets can have licence, why not composers? Glyndebourne had not yet re-opened and Rudolf Byng invited Joan Cross to join forces to create the Glyndebourne English Opera Group. The conductor was Ernest Ansermet, founder and conductor of the Orchestra of the Swiss Romande, with assistance from Reginald Goodall. The production with Kathleen Ferrier playing Lucretia turned out to be a disappointment and a financial loss on tour. However the concept itself was established, opera that could be performed in local halls and taken on tour. Despite Lucretia being a problematic and disturbing piece it is one of the most widely performed of operas. John Christie, founder of Glyndebourne, having lost fifteen thousand pounds with the production decided that the partnership could not continue. The new company was dissolved with Joan Cross continuing instead as the English Opera Group.

The next chamber opera, this time a comedy, Albert Herring, was more successful. It was based on a short story by Maupassant, Le rosier de Madame Husson, and the setting transposed to Loxford, an imaginary village in Suffolk. It centres on the choice of a suitable person to be Queen of the May. After some shenanigans by a housekeeper who has dug up dirt on every single girl nominated, proving that none is worthy to wear the May Queen’s crown there is a young man in town, Albert Herring, who is as certainly virginal as the girls are not – and he is made May King. Who but Britten could make a subject out of that! I won’t go on with the synopsis but the opera is full of musical quotations including a quote from Tristan and Isolde when Albert drinks a potion of lemonade, spiked with rum. Some have suggested that Albert was a satirical self-portrait of the composer.

Lucretia and Albert were written in 1946 and 1947. Not only did Ben have his hands full in composing and performing and involvement in the productions but he was taking on more commissions, a fanfare for a play by Jean Cocteau, incidental music for the Duchess of Malfi in New York and the Occasional Overture written for the opening of the BBC Third Programme and performed under the baton of the “execrable” Boult. Poor Adrian but Ben could just never see eye to eye with him and suppressed the work, and not the first time either, a pity. In his American years he had written an earlier Occasional Overture which amazingly he had absolutely forgotten. In his later years he at first denied the work was even his until he was shown the autograph. Again a pity, as one can tell after listening to the recording made by Simon Rattle with the Birmingham orchestra, now renamed “An American Overture”.

In December 1946, Ben visited America for the premier there of Peter Grimes. You will remember it had been commissioned by Koussevitsky who was able at long last to give it its first American performance. The remaining performances were undertaken by a 26 year old assistant conductor, Leonard Bernstein. Later, in the eighties, Bernstein took on a 23 year old assistant conductor of his own at the Schleswig Holstein Festival. His name? Matthew Taylor. What a link! Our Matthew may or may not have Peter Grimes in his veins, but he certainly has it in his DNA.

One of the most traumatic things in life is moving house and, with all of this going on, Ben and Peter did just that. The old mill at Snape was sold and they bought Crag House on Crag Path in Aldeburgh overlooking the pebble beach and within spitting distance of the Old Moot Hall where the inquest on the apprentice, William Spode, takes place at the opening of Peter Grimes. Nowadays you can pay a cool million for a detached house there. In 1947 you could have picked up one for a song. And Ben and Peter had plenty of songs in their repertoire.

It is at this point that I turn to a tale of two Burghs. First there is Edinburgh which launched its first international festival in 1947. Then we have the other burgh, Aldeburgh. Having moved into the town, it was Peter who mooted that if Edinburgh can have its festival, then why not Aldeburgh? It had the Jubilee Hall there which could house 340 people, sufficient just for the chamber operas, and various churches in the locality to boot. It wasn’t just Peter and Ben running the show but it no doubt helped to have the Earl of Harewood as president and in the background was Imogen Holst who had experience of festivals. This First Festival which ran for eight days in June 1948 was made under the auspices of the newly founded Arts

Council and also the English Opera Group; Ben wrote St Nicholas for church performance with chorus, children’s chorus strings and percussion commissioned by Peter’s old school, Lancing College. The Jubilee Hall performed Albert Herring and so it was that first Aldeburgh Festival of 1948 got under way. The success of this small town festival led to the decision to turn it into an annual event which has remarkably lasted now for nearly 65 years! What the Salzburg Festival is for Mozart, the Aldeburgh festival is for Britten. Still right from the start there has always been a featured composer, if not two. In 1948 they were Purcell and Lennox Berkeley.

As a result of the Festivals there soon grew what was called the Britten Circle, close friends, socialites and hangers on and a reputation that you were either in or you weren’t or that you were once but no longer so. It led also to antagonism from some who were outside the magic circle. It was rumoured that you had to be homosexual to belong although quite a number of close friends were women. This of course was at a time when homosexuality remained an imprisonable crime and despite the common knowledge of the Britten/Pears relationship they themselves treated the matter as very low key. Still, things were said or thought to be said and doubtless heard by them. Ben in particular was thin skinned and touchy and if he heard something unpleasant he would apparently drop the person concerned without a word being said. This had happened to Lennox Berkeley back in 1940 without his knowing why. At the time of the first Festival Ben was writing an adaptation of John Gay’s Beggar’s opera, sufficiently original for him to accord it an opus number of his own. It got back to him that William Walton had referred to it as “The Buggers’ Opera”. Walton always denied it and Ben accepted that. It is doubtful however if Ben would have had any time of the day for Sir Thomas Beecham who referred to one of Ben’s operas as the Twilight of the Sods!

This strange cold shoulder behaviour was also applied to a number of the boys that Ben had befriended, young trebles with angelic voices which would inevitably break as they developed out of their pre-pubescent stage. They would be dropped. The motivation here however would not have stemmed from a reaction to any wound. One explanation offered is that Ben was possessed of a Peter Pan outlook of not wanting to grow up and that the onset of adolescence would create a loss of innocence in the boy and a loss of empathy for him. This year the psychological columnists are having a field day trying to dish up dirt. There is something reminiscent of Peter Grimes in the way they conduct their form of inquest. Ben’s attitude to children is best evidenced by the numerous works he wrote for them. The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was written for children to listen to. Let’s Make an Opera was a DIY opera, The Little Sweep, for children to perform. It was a wonderful experience for Ben and the joy he had in working with them is wonderfully reproduced in a book of photographs by collected by Donald Mitchell and John Evans. In one Ben is seen giving a ride in his car to a mixed group of about eight boys and girls from the cast. It is a moment of apparent joy caught in an innocent instance. And yet Richard Morrison very recently in The Times chooses this photograph of both boys and girls together to link Ben with a reference to Jimmy Savile; to describe Ben as a paedophile, “not a predatory sexual one perhaps. But a platonic paedophile, certainly”. This, Mr Morrison, is a discreditable oxymoron.

One legacy of the Aldeburgh Festivals is the number of works written by Ben with performance in a church in mind. This was very much a chicken and egg

conception. Apart from Jubilee Hall, local churches were the main venues for performance. Hence the reason to compose a new work, suitable in subject matter and musical style, meant for a church environment. The outcome was Ben producing works which were peculiarly his own invention. No-one else would have conceived the five canticles. The first of these was written for the Rev. Dick Sheppard, former vicar of St Martins in the Fields and leader of the Peace Pledge Union. The second canticle, was written in 1952 for Peter, Ben and Kathleen Ferrier to perform as a fundraiser for the English Opera Group. The text is based on the Abraham and Isaac story as depicted in the Chester Mystery Plays. There is a somewhat sad sequel. Ferrier died of cancer in 1953. The up and coming contralto at the time was Norma Proctor who was invited to make a recording with Ben and Peter. They rehearsed it in a hotel room not knowing it was being trial recorded there. It then came as a shock for to her to be told by Ben and Peter in a cab that she would not be doing the main recording. They had had in mind John Hahessy, an Irish alto, to record it instead. Norma Proctor was understandably deeply upset at falling out of favour and being ditched. Some forty years or so later when she was in her eighties tears were to run down her face after the original recording tapes from the hotel were discovered and played over for her to hear and recall for the first time. It is a superb performance, far better than that with Hahessy. The canticles should not be confused with the later Church Parables, chamber operas and again written for church performances.

The years from 1945 to 1950 were particularly fruitful. Benjamin Britten in that time had turned from a brilliant up and coming but a tad showy composer into a mature person who had developed his own brand as no-one else could. Now with the fifties approaching Ben had developed an idea for another big opera. In 1951 the Festival of Britain was planned by the then Labour Government as a centenary for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and to celebrate the beginnings of recovery after the war. Three operas were commissioned for the event, one by Benjamin Britten who turned to Melville’s Billy Budd. It was an unfinished novella with varying drafts as to how to portray the characters. The action takes place aboard a man of war in 1797 in the early Napoleonic wars following a mutiny at the Nore. The story appealed to Ben who turned to E M Forster and Eric Crozier for the libretto, something EMF was uncertain of as it was a new experience for him. It is sufficient to say that liberties were taken with the story sufficient to see it as an allegory where Billy Budd is portrayed as a Christ like figure of innocence and perfection – apart from a stutter; Claggart, the master at arms, a nautical Scarpia who seeks to destroy Billy in order to suppress the attraction he has towards him which he reveals in one soliloquy. Captain Vere, who witnesses Billy strike and kill Claggart can save him but duty prevents him from doing so. Billy is tried and found guilty according to the articles of war, and blesses Captain Vere before being hanged at the yard arm. It is set in the wake of mutinies, heavy with oppression, press ganging, brutality and boredom. I do not think because of this the work is overlaid with homoeroticism as a number of commentators have stated. It is, perhaps uniquely, an opera for men only set in claustrophobic surroundings. Still, I think these writers are simply repeating what others have said before and read too much into what they know of the authors. The real moral of the story is Captain Vere who is torn between observing the strict rules of naval discipline or allowing discretion for mitigating circumstances. To me, having spent a lifetime in the law, it bears out my long held adage that, when it comes to the law, justice happens to be merely incidental.

The success of Billy Budd led to a prestigious further commission. Late in 1951, the labour government fell; the conservatives had won, just; Winnie was back; steel was denationalised; sweets came off the coupon; the Festival of Britain was axed, the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon demolished (but fortunately not the Festival Hall). In January 1952 the King suddenly died, having smoked one cigarette too many, and a new young queen hastened in the new Elizabethan Age. It was all in the Daily Express and the News Chronicle at the time. The coronation was set for June 1953 and Ben was commissioned to write an opera to celebrate the event. What better subject than Elizabeth I, a particular favourite of the new Elizabeth, to be called “Gloriana”, the name given by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser to his character representing Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene. The libretto was by William Plomer and based on Lytton Strachey’s 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. It turned out to be the biggest disappointment, a flop to the delight of some. There have been very few performances since and no recording has been made. Few people know it and I can only hazard a guess as to what happened. First of all the story itself showed the illustrious ancestor in a mean light, even pinching the clothes of the Duchess of Essex (Harvey Nick wasn’t around at the time for her to be able to afford a change of dress). This portrayal is said to have upset the Queen. Anyway the Queen didn’t do opera and she obviously preferred Pinza to Britten and Pears, (Here, I refer to Pinza, the 1953 Derby winner, not Enzio Pinza, the opera singer) . The music was never going to please everybody. The opera goers were torn between the trads and the mods; the Courtly Dances were period reproduction and not to the taste of the new emerging school of purists nor to the taste of the Queen’s handsome consort for whom there was no hornpipe for him to jig to; and the vast majority of black ties and fur coats would have expected a pageant for a coronation opera and Ben didn’t go in for pageants. Willie Walton should have been the man for the job. It would have been a glorious mix of Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre written respectively for the coronations of Edward VIII/George VI and Elizabeth II, mixed in with a variant on Henry V and Agincourt, added to the ingredients. Mind you it would have taken Willie five years minimum to write it and I doubt that Her Majesty would have been prepared to postpone her coronation. Still now’s your chance to judge for yourselves. Greenwich Cinema are showing from 19 August Billy Budd recorded at Glyndebourne in 2010 and Gloriana on 28 June direct from Covent Garden. See you there.

From the return in 1942 and throughout the immediate postwar years all had gone successfully. It could be said that, Gloriana excepted, Benjamin Britten had never had it so good. At this point, in Matthew’s mid-morning words, let’s take a break.