BENJAMIN BRITTEN – GETTING TO KNOW HIM

 This is an introductory note for those wishing to know a little more about Britten or having reservations. For those familiar with my notes they will know that the musical evaluation on the subject composer is given by Matthew as an integral part of his lectures. My notes are meant to introduce a little background to a composer.

 In the case of Britten most of us have lived through a period when Benjamin Britten was a dominant contemporary figure whom we got to know whilst he was composing and over a period during which he matured. Thirty six years have gone by since his death and time has stood still. The arrival now of his centenary year gives us an opportunity to review this very individual composer observed from the perspective of the future he did not live to see. For listeners under 45, Benjamin Britten may seem a historical figure like Elgar might have been for some of us older ones. We too, however, instead of looking at a contemporary whose lifestyle and whose artistic novelties formed the basis at the time of our likes and dislikes and prejudices, should be able now to look back from a new century and take a fresh, more detached view of the artist himself, warts and all, accept that not everything he wrote necessarily reflected his genius but that genius there most certainly was when there was. Britten, man and composer, is often perceived as a difficult subject for some to come to terms with but very often for very different reasons. So let me say straight away there is nothing unusual , if such be the case, in being a doubter and not always coming to terms with Britten. I have for instance heard people express an antipathy to Britten because they do not like the singing of Peter Pears and this is not confined to the non-cognoscenti. It is frequently expressed by professional musicians and singers. Thus the association of two people, bonded both in their personal lives and in musical partnership, has itself affected some peoples’ critical judgement of the music itself. Possibly no other performer has had so much written for him as did Pears by Britten but in the end it is the music which counts and has to survive on its own to be judged and performed in its own right. I am hoping that this can be a series about Britten primarily without Pears. You cannot have Hamlet without the Prince but you can have Hamlet without Laertes. Music should not need to rely on the one specialist recreator. Performers die, composers die, but it is the latter who leave us a legacy. The emergence of new interpreters can act as an actual release from earlier shackles.

 I stated above that difficulties arise from different reasons. Another aspect of Britten is that what he produced never followed conventional expectations. For most of us, our musical awareness is likely to have been triggered by the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra written in 1946 for a short film “The Instruments of the Orchestra” introduced by Malcolm Sargent. The obvious mastery of orchestral forces prompted the conventional question “When is this bloke going to write his first symphony?”. The anticipation of such an event matched that of the wait for Brahms’s first or the Walton No 1 which in both cases emerged to be followed by No 2. I can remember the question being posed on the Radio Programme “Music Magazine” for Britten’s fortieth birthday in 1953 when it was suggested that Britten was not concerned with the academic concept of symphonic form, overlooking the fact that his Sinfonia da Requiem is as great a symphony and as cataclysmic as, say, Vaughan Williams fourth written five years before. Anyway there we have for starters the orchestral Britten. Orchestral glitter was to find its way into Peter Grimes with the Sea Interludes and Passacaglia. This was the side of the coin of powerful orchestral forces which, in retrospect dominated Britten’s last years of pre-war England followed by the American years from summer 1939 till the return to England in 1942. They include the Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Sinfonia da Requiem, an American Overture (the nearest that Britten ever sounded to Copland), the Young Persons Guide and on to Grimes. In this period he also wrote but gave no opus number to Young Apollo, a mantra for a composer seen favourably by some as bursting with confidence, and for others more disparaging, as a show off.

 Before that he had had a growing reputation in the 1930’s with various works containing brilliant scoring for strings. In 1933 he fondly wrote the Simple Symphony, based on compositions from when he was eleven. Included in this group are the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) with which Britten burst on to the international scene at the Salzburg Festival followed later in the war by its lesser known sequel, the Prelude and Fugue for 18 string players. I am fortunate enough to recall my first Karajan concert in 1955 when he chose the Frank Bridge Variations as the first English composition he conducted. The disc today is truly wonderful. The 1930’s had also seen the partnership which emerged between Britten and W H Auden. This produced On This Island, five poems with piano accompaniment, Our Hunting Fathers, a cycle of songs with stylised orchestral accompaniment and Ballad of Heroes performed under Constant Lambert in February 1939 and dedicated to the heroes of the Spanish Civil War. It was, amongst other reasons, to follow Auden that Britten left for America in the summer of that year.

 Then there are those whose preference is for opera. For them it is the Britten whose stage works come first and foremost, the first British composer of modern times who was a composer of operas as opposed to a composer who had a go at turning his hand to an opera. Apart from Gilbert and Sullivan there is little evidence of an opera tradition in England as there was in France or Italy. After Purcell there was of course Handel who was a naturalised Brit and following him there was Thomas Arne of Rule Britannia fame who wrote seven operas. You won’t see any of them at Covent Garden. Stanford wrote four but none is played or recorded and it will need some archaeological work to unearth them. Elgar never tried his hand. It is therefore a little astonishing that Britten would create a greater operatic output than, say, Puccini, who, apart from the odd mass wrote little else. For many, including myself, Peter Grimes is a musical experience never to be missed although I cannot always say that of the productions I have seen. This great opera which exudes the aroma of East Anglia and the North Sea was first performed for the re-opening of Sadlers Wells after the war. Actually, it was not his first as he had written a two act operetta, Paul Bunyan, in America in 1941 to a libretto by Auden and which, truth to say, was not a success. Each opera he was later to write was always individual, quite distinct from its predecessors both in concept and as a genre within opera itself. It would have seen natural to have followed the success of Grimes with another conventional large scale opera . Instead Britten turned to a form of travelling opera, soloists accompanied by a chamber group, in fact chamber opera which he himself largely invented for the English Opera Group. It was to grand opera what chamber music was to the symphony. The first of these, The Rape of Lucretia, owes something to Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, not that Stravinsky seemed to be a particular favourite of Britten. It was not so much the music as the static nature of its neo-classicism with soloists accompanied by an instrumental ensemble. It may have left a number of its audience somewhat challenged but I challenge anyone to produce anything more rarely beautiful than the sequence of goodnights at the end of the first act. If you haven’t heard it then do give it a listen. There is a recording by Richard Hickox (not for once recorded in Blackheath Halls but at Goldsmiths College not that far away).

 For others Britten is the composer primarily for song cycles written frequently but by no means always for Peter Pears, sometimes accompanied by piano, very often by a string orchestra. Songs and song cycles are going to be more esoteric. They are not everyone’s cup of tea. Let’s face it there are enough people who know Schubert’s unfinished symphony backwards and who have listened umpteen times to the Death and the Maiden quartet at Blackheath Concert Halls, yet who do not take to lieder any more than to lapsang souchong. Britten’s earliest venture in this field was before he reached fifteen when as a school boy he wrote Quatre Chansons Francais, settings of poems by Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine. One wonders what his class mates, struggling along with La Plume de Ma Tante, made of that! Quatre Chansons was to be a foretaste for “Les Illumnations” written in 1939, a setting of poems by Rimbaud for high voice and strings. He had already had a go in Italian as well with his setting of seven sonnets by Michaelangelo to song, the first work written by him for Peter Pears but not to my knowledge ever attempted by Pavarotti.

 It is however to English poetry that he would turn. Best known in this field is the Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings, written on his return to England from America in 1942 for Pears and Dennis Brain. Britten here displays his skill of collating a themed anthology of verse and setting it to his tune. He was the consummate troubadour. He finds music in every word to bring out the poetry and inspiration in every word to create the music. There is the Spring Symphony ending with “Sumer is icumen in”, his Nocturne where each song is accompanied by a different obligato solo instrument and Winter Words, a setting of Hardy but arguably his finest achievement was with the poems of Wilfred Owen accompanied by chamber orchestra being interspersed with the Mass with chorus, children’s chorus and full orchestra in the War Requiem written for the re-consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962.

 Mention of children is another aspect of Britten which some find difficult and others a sheer delight. There is the depiction of innocence in his compositions involving children. They are not only present as we have seen in the War Requiem and the Spring Symphony but to be found in his operas, most famously Noye’s Fludde written for children performers and also the Little Sweep, part of “Let’s Make an Opera”. The innocence of children is a theme which attracted him to the last with Death In Venice. However in his chamber opera, “The Turn of the Screw” based on a novella by Henry James, the innocence of the two children, Miles and Flora, becomes diabolically corrupted but the corruption is by adults or rather the ghosts of adults. Apart from his characterisation of children, there are a host of church works written for the voices of children, typically the Missa Brevis written for George Malcolm and the choristers of Westminster Cathedral, the Ceremony of Carols and St Nicholas splashing in his bath.

 We then come to another aspect of song by Britten. Not the Britten of poetry but the Britten of folksong settings. This is a completely esoteric side of his output for some whilst for others he is on a par with Schubert. For folk music enthusiasts, Pears and Britten together with Kathleen Ferrier – she died in 1953 – had the ability to make folk music entertaining. Who can forget their rendering of the Foggy Foggy Dew and its naughty ending, much in the same spirit as Dudley Moore entertained us, indeed had us rolling in the aisles, in Beyond the Fringe in 1960, with “Little Miss Britten”, an uproarious send up of Peter Pears singing Little Miss Muffett.  

 Vocal works were not limited to folksong or poetry settings but also to a very special Britten creation, the canticles, of which there were five. As with nearly everything by Britten, these works are never a repetition of a previous success. One only has to see the difference in voices and instrumentation to see this.

 Canticle I : It is scored for high voice and piano and entitled “My beloved is mine and I am his”. It is based on a poem taken from The Song of Solomon and written as a memorial for Dick Sheppard, former vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Canticle II “Abraham and Isaac” was written in 1952 for Peter Pears, Kathleen Ferrier and Britten to perform and is based on the Abraham and Isaac story as depicted in the Chester Mystery Plays. Britten was to quote this work in his War Requiem. By chance one of Owen’s poems was based on the Abraham and Isaac story but where Isaac represents the seed of Europe who were to be wiped out one by one

Canticle III: Still falls the rain written for voice, horn, and piano in 1954 is based on an Edith Sitwell poem “The Canticle of the Rose.” Dennis Brain, the horn soloist was tragically killed in a road accident in 1957.

Canticle IV: was written in 1971 for countertenor, tenor and baritone, with text based on the T. S. Eliot poem “The Journey of the Magi.”

Canticle V entitled “The Death of Saint Narcissus” was written in 1974 for tenor and harp for performance by Peter Pears and Osian Ellis.

 Britten also set about a form of cross fertilization between his chamber operas and the canticles with three parables for church performance. Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968).  Curlew River was inspired by a noh play Britten saw in Japan which he adapted so as to place in a mediaeval church setting in the Fens. He was particularly fond of it but some may not find its stylisation immediately easy listening. The Burning Fiery Furnace is based on the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar and the three Israelites, Ananias, Misael and Asarias, better known if you know your spirituals as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Anyway because of their refusal to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s image of gold, they got thrown into a furnace. What else would you expect? However, God, who is about as neutral as a Chelsea football supporter, saves them from death, as the voice of an angel joins the Israelites in a ‘Benedicte’. As a presentation these parables owe something to the masques of Thomas Arne

 Also written for church performance and much more fun is Noye’s Fludde to be performed and played by children singing “Kyrie Eleison”, usually with Estuary accents, as the animals enter two by two. Here I can give this worke the plugge it deserves as it is being performed in ye Blackheath Concert Halls in February. Watch out.

 When it comes to chamber music you won’t find as you might expect a cycle of piano sonatas, trios or whatever except strangely he produced five string quartets. Two of these written when he was fifteen and seventeen are juvenilia without opus numbers. In the case of Britten one must not confuse juvenilia with being juvenile! The two great quartets are those officially numbered two and three. Number two was composed following a tour playing with Yehudi Menuhin at concentration camps in 1945 and includes a chaconny based on a theme of Purcell. His last, the third, composed in Venice included references to “Death in Venice”. It was written for the Amadeus Quartet shortly before his own death but not first played till afterwards. Particularly fruitful was his meeting Rostropovitch. Despite the fact that neither could speak the language of the other they had an intense musical communication, a fusion which gave birth not only to the cello symphony but also to three unaccompanied cello suites and a cello sonata, as well as to the best Schubert Arpeggione on disc.

 One can now see how diverse is the spread of Britten’s extensive output that it is little wonder not everything can appeal to everyone in the same way. Let’s face it, there have been enough people who know every note of Beethoven’s symphonies but who nonetheless remain totally non-plussed by his late quartets. Much the same can be said of Shostakovitch, another fellow spirit close to Britten’s heart, whose symphonies alone are variable in quality and appeal, to say the least. We take on board those of them that we like and give a miss to those that aren’t so much a hit but which perhaps we later come round to accepting more readily. If you don’t happen to rank yourself as an all round Britten aficionado, you can regard him then as a pick and choose composer.

 The variable nature of Britten’s output has been said by some to have been dictated by whatever were the commissions he received. But then most composers relish receiving a commission if they can get one. Ask Matthew! Britten was showered with them, from Boyd Neel who needed a work in six weeks for his orchestra for the Salzburg Festival of 1937 and which resulted in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. We owe Peter Grimes to a commission from the philanthropic conductor Sergei Koussevitsky in Boston but the idea for the opera was always that of Britten after having read an article by E M Forster on George Crabbe and his poem “The Borough”. Not all patrons were wealthy. Rejoice in the Lamb for four solo singers, male chorus and organ is a particular favourite of mine. It was the outcome of a commission in 1943 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his church by the vicar of St Matthews, Northampton. These are settings of poems written by Christopher Smart in the mid-eighteenth century in a lunatic asylum to which he was rightly or wrongly committed. The poems express the wonder of God through the eyes of the poet, his cat Jeffery, a mouse and the flowers. Exactly the sort of thing to appeal to Britten.

 The 22^nd November 1963 was the fiftieth birthday of Benjamin Britten and I drove home that day in order to watch a celebration on TV with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Gennady Rozhdestvensky. When I put on the radio there was grim news coming through from Dallas of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Later after the long extended news bulletins and tributes I watched the delayed Britten programme in bleak black and white. So I can say exactly what I was doing the night Kennedy was killed. Rozhdestvensky, who always looked miserable anyway, then introduced the Sinfonia da Requiem which I had never heard before. It starts with thunderclaps on the timpani and bass drum and is followed by a ghostly harrowing slow death march. It then rises to its cataclysmic climax. I can never now hear that work without recalling Kennedy’s death. It is the force of association which music has the power to transmit.

 I mention this because there are a number who express a reservation about Britten by an association they have made. For some he, and thus his music, remains tainted by his sexuality which clearly gets in their way. I think it fair to say that this is likely to come, not thank goodness from younger people, but from men, particularly of my generation, to whom I would say “Get over it”. Today the relationship between Britten and Pears would not come under question and younger people would not lift an eyebrow. In their time, Britten and Pears risked prosecution under the law and there would have been many who would have had them consigned to the same treatment as Oscar Wilde. Yet would anyone reject the music of Tchaikovsky because he was also homosexual and promiscuously so. Britten’s homosexuality also gets linked to his music written for boy singers and the inference is that his relationship with them might have been sexually questionable. That I doubt. He lived a monogamous life with Pears whilst paedophiles are generally thought to be complete loners. If anything it is the quality of innocence that Britten seeks, at least in his music, to safeguard. None of these adolescent singers has corroborated this suggestion, and I can do no better than quote from this month’s BBC Music Magazine.

 “Today such relationships are often regarded with suspicion. But the actor, David Hemmings, (with whom Britten had a later falling out ) who was the original Miles in The Turn of the Screw in 1954 – and who even then, as he himself put it, was more heterosexual than Ghengis Khan was quick to deflect such thoughts. Britten was not only a father to me, but a friend – and you couldn’t have had a better father, or a better friend. He was generous and kind, and I was very lucky. I loved him dearly – I really did. I absolutely adored him.”

 In the end it does not matter and it really should not concern anybody especially as Britten has been dead for 36 years. What matters is the music he created. Prejudice towards the creator has no relevance as regards his music.

 With Benjamin Britten we have probably the most gifted musician that England has produced, composer par excellence, the most sensitive of performers, the man who conceived a festival for Aldeburgh in contrast to the Edinburgh International, was inspired to build the Maltings, a superb international concert hall in the middle of nowhere and has left all of this as a thriving legacy. One feels his presence pervading the town of Aldeburgh. As to his music, it has a language of its very own. You have to get to know a language to understand it and usually that understanding comes about from familiarity. So, just don’t worry if you need to listen more than just once.

 

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

Genius is a rare gift which lands very infrequently out of nowhere and emerging in the most unlikely of places.   Such a genius, a boy, was born in the Suffolk town of Lowestoft on 22nd November 1913, St Cecilia’s Day as it happens, the patroness of music and church music.   The parents of this newly born were not yet to know that it was a genius which had arrived in their midst. They were Robert Britten, a local dentist and his wife Edith who was a reasonably talented amateur singer. The boy was named Edward Benjamin Britten but to the family he was Beni. The Brittens at that time already had three children, Barbara aged 11, Robert aged 6 and Beth aged 4. Beni was unexpected according to his mother; an accident waiting to happen but a fortunate one as it turned out.

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”.