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.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976) – THE LAST TWO DECADES

 We left Benjamin Britten having fallen out of bed with Gloriana in 1953. Even though he might have presented a poker face to the rest of the world, he was undoubtedly hurt. The following evening he was due to conduct in Aldeburgh. The Rev Walter Hussey had been invited during that day to lunch at Crag House but his host did not come down to join him and he was left on his own to eat lunch. When Ben did appear, he was in a highly nervous state and could not eat. Still, that could also have been performance nerves. As he grew older this problem got worse and he could never hold down food once he was in the dressing room. For the last ten years he had been producing works at a rate of knots with operas turned out almost by the year since Grimes. Now there was a marked slowdown. In the next three years he produced only three major works including the song cycle Winter Words based on poems by Hardy. However the one he already had had in mind was “The Turn of The Screw”.

 Since 1935 Ben had been friendly with, the artist, John Piper, who had designed the sets of his operas, and his wife, Myfanwy. It was she who introduced Ben to the novella by Henry James concerning a governess employed to look after two children, Miles and Clara. It was a story of corruption of innocence of the children by two previous servants, now ghosts. It is not clear if these ghosts are imaginary or real and in the Britten neither appears on the stage but we do hear them. It was a theme that would have immediately appealed to Ben and he asked Myfanwy to act as librettist. Ben had had a falling out with his earlier librettists for one reason or another or for no reason. He had previously exchanged ideas with Myfanwy on earlier works and she had got to know what he was looking for. This chamber opera had been commissioned by the Venice Biennale, and although postponed at Ben’s request, he eventually wrote it in an amazing period of four months. Of the music I will say nothing as Matthew has illustrated it already. Every year there will be some half a dozen productions in performance somewhere or another.

 There followed a four month world tour holiday for Ben and Peter) with some friends; well not exactly a holiday as their journey was peppered with recitals. For Ben the greatest delight of this trip would be his experiences with Indian, Balinese and Japanese music. Indian music had interested him after seeing a West End production in 1932. Japanese music would be new to him. It was however the Gamelan of Bali that had an overwhelming influence on much of his future output. Poulenc’s double piano concerto which he and Ben had played together in 1938 had its Gamelan influences. Later, when Ben was in America he met the Canadian composer Colin Macphee who was to become the leading authority in the West on Balinese music. Back in 1939 he and Ben played together on the piano of Elizabeth Mayer and I have been lucky enough to hear a recording. It sounds a bit like minimalist music, a sort of Steve Reich goes east. Now on this holiday Ben was able to hear it for himself. Their journey took them on to Japan where Ben was to see produced Noh plays, very stylised, which formed the inspiration for his later church parable, Curlew River.

 But it was Gamelan, which he listened to intensely, which came to influence his own writing. It was not just imitation exoticism, like Scheherazade, but the adoption of scales and sounds into his own music leaving its effect on much of the later Britten works. The first outcome was The Prince of the Pagodas, a full length ballet of the Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky variety, to be choreographed by John Cranko. For once Ben encountered difficulties and it remained unfinished by the time of his return. The production was not a happy one and Ben more or less withdrew from it, a pity because it contained more orchestral music than in anything he had previously written. His later television opera, Owen Wingrave, contained Gamelan touches as did Death in Venice, neither of which has the remotest connection with Java..

 Soon after this far eastern tour Ben was composing a new song cycle called Songs of the Chinese. This time the accompanist for whom he wrote was not himself but the guitarist Julian Bream.

In 1957 Ben conceived the idea of Noye’s Fludde, a community opera for children based on a fifteenth century Chester Miracle play. Originally it was planned as a television production but that was dropped and instead the first performance was in Orford Church, Suffolk, as part of the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival. It has been likened to a Baroque concerto grosso with a small professional concertino ensemble consisting of string quintet, recorder, piano, organ, and timpani. The rest is strictly amateur for strings, recorders, bugles, hand-bells, and percussion to be played by children performers, even beginners. Being in church, the audience is referred to as the “congregation”, and joins in the singing of three hymns; shades of J S Bach. Its joy is that it is a communal affair. Interestingly one of the first child cast members was a 12 year old Michael Crawford. Britten was insistent that performances should always take place in a church or a community hall but never in a theatre.

All of this took place against the background of Ben and Peter moving house again. Much as he loved Crag House and the view of the North Sea, their celebrity resulted in the whole world and its dog peering into their living room to see if they could see them. Fortunately they were able to find exactly what they wanted by doing a house swap with a local artist, Mary Potter, who needed something smaller. Thus it was that Ben and Peter moved into the Red House at the back of Aldeburgh, next to the golf course and away from prying eyes and, alas, the view of the North Sea. For the most part they found solitude and peace, except for the intermittent noise of the planes from the nearby American airbase, low level flying over town and sea. Later Ben and Peter bought a second smaller home some twenty miles inland, a retreat from Aldeburgh activity.

Another change was the expansion of the Jubilee Theatre which lacked until then dressing room space. Money was raised to purchase the adjoining butchers shop which resulted also in extending the size of the pit. It was there that they were able to perform for the first time A Midsummer Nights Dream. This was his next opera and something which Ben had always wanted to adapt. This time he did away with any librettist and he and Peter got down to cutting the play down to size whilst retaining most of Shakespeare’s wording. The magical nature of this work and its set was perhaps a Brittenesque foretaste of the psychedelic swinging sixties. The music has been amply demonstrated by Matthew. So you don’t need me.

The year 1960 brought about a happy or, rather, two happy conjunctions. The Leningrad Philharmonic under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky were giving performances at the Royal Festival Hall. I was there sitting, behind the double basses, for the Shostakovitch 8^th. He himself came on to the platform to take his applause, a painfully shy man. What I would not have known was that Ben had entered his box to meet him. Two shy men who would form a mutual admiration society. Also let loose on this tour was Mstislav Rostropovich (Slava) who was playing the first UK performance of the Shostakovitch first cello concerto. He was the antithesis of Shostakovitch, a man who did everything larger than life. When TV news broke with an attempted coup in Moscow, who else but Rostropovich would announce he was going to the bank and instead jump on a plane and be seen two hours later on TV standing alongside Boris Yeltsin. His wife went spare. I can well remember round about 1980 when visiting Aldeburgh a great kerfuffle erupted in Boots. Someone or another was looking for something he couldn’t find and suddenly there in front of me was Slava complaining fff with the whole staff following him up and down the aisles between the shelves. When Ben was introduced to him by Shostakovich, Slava immediately told Ben he would like him to compose something for him. They couldn’t exchange much conversation as Ben spoke no Russian and Slava only could manage two words of English, Thank you and Good bye. Still they established a lingua franca of German which Slava said no German could understand and which they called Aldeburgh Deutsch. After much difficulty with Ben going to the Soviet Union and Slava getting permission to come to England, Ben was able to play with him the cello sonata, the first of a number of works written for Slava and which, but for him, would never otherwise have seen the light of day.

 In 1961, the City of Coventry commissioned Benjamin Britten to write a work for the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral next to the bombed remains of St Michaels. It was the occasion for a big work. Ben had had thoughts previously of combining the Mass for the Dead with poetry cycles but nothing had come of it. Now was the opportunity to do just that. It needed a further element, a cry for peace and forgiveness, in that it was bombing which had destroyed the old cathedral. His vision was to intersperse sections of the Latin mass performed by the chorus and orchestra with a cycle of poems written by Wilfred Owen shortly before his death in 1918 to be sung by an English tenor (Pears) and a German baritone (Fischer-Dieskau) accompanied by a chamber group. The final climax would have all the forces joining together with Owen’s poem, Strange Meeting, being set against the In Paradisum. Then, having met Slava’s wife, the soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, Ben offered a part in it for her, in the Latin Mass. Thus it became a symbolism for peace between former warring enemies embracing the USSR. This was immediately opposed by the Soviet authorities who would not countenance Vishnevskaya appearing next to a German (it might have been different if he had been from East Germany) and their refusing her an exit permit. The was instead sung by Heather Harper who had 11 days to learn it and in four of which she already had singing engagements. Soon afterwards the famous Decca recording was made, this time with Vishnevskaya but for my money Heather Harper has always proved the better bet.   The first performance was an ecclesiastical shambles, like something out of Trollope. The main orchestra and chamber group were separated and needed separate conductors. The audience on the day was allowed in through a narrow door and were still entering when it was time to start. With the Queen and everybody else from Who’s Who there, except God, and the BBC keeping its eye on its schedules the dean and chapter wanted to get going but Ben would not do so. The War Requiem was a seminal work. It was played round the world. 200,000 copies of the recording were sold within a year.. It and its message were adopted by the Establishment and lefties alike. It was timely, having been written at the height of the cold war, with President Kennedy standing up to Kruschev, as well as it being in the middle of the Vietnam war.

 Ben was now approaching his fiftieth birthday and in some ways beginning to be seen as an Establishment figure. He had previously declined a knighthood but was one of the few people to have been awarded both the Order of Merit and Companion of Honour. He had no problems in accepting royal patronage if it meant writing music. He remained close to the Harewoods who in fact were musical as well as patrons of the Aldeburgh Festival. George was an opera buff and director at both Covent Garden and the ENO. On the less rarefied side of the coin he was also on the board of Leeds United FC and chairman of the Football Association for many years. Marion, his first wife, had been a concert pianist and was the daughter of the Viennese musicologist, Erwin Stein. And yet, though Ben may have been seen to have hob-nobbed with royalty, (or royalty hobnobbed with him), there is a telling exchange of letters between him and Peter in 1963. The Duke of Edinburgh had earlier asked Ben if he would write something for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Ben’s letter to Peter refers to “all these other dreary HRH’s – these hopeless misfits who go round condemning everything new in their snobbish way”. Peter, with his feet as ever more on the ground commented in reply that it was remarkable that royalty should befriend them at all as “we are after all queer, & left & conshies which is enough to put us outside the pale, apart from being artists as well”.

 In 1964, Ben was to receive the OM, a personal award of the Queen. By this time he was working with difficulty on the next opera, the first of his church parables, Curlew River. He did not want his librettist, William Plomer, to go and see a noh play for fear of what would turn out to be a pastiche. In Noh tradition, the women are played by men wearing masks. The role of the mad woman who has lost her son was to be played by Peter, and the thought of him playing a role in women’s clothes caused Ben considerable anxiety. The work is itself dreadfully difficult and involves players leading each other without any conductor. Often seasoned experts, like Ossian Ellis, the harpist, said that certain effects were impossible to achieve. Yet Ben himself was able to show them, on their own instruments, how it could be done. The man was truly amazing.

 Ben’s health was playing up a lot. During the writing of the Turn of the Screw he first suffered a complaint which affected his right arm making writing difficult. Other ailments affected him and in 1964 he was ordered to rest from performances and he and Peter travelled to India which he loved. Later they were invited by the Union of Soviet Composers to visit Armenia where they stayed with the Rostropovich’s. Whilst there, Ben set six poems by Pushkin to music in hastily contrived Russian for Vishnevskaya to sing with cello accompaniment for Rostropovich. Back in England he was to compose the first of three unaccompanied cello suites for him, inspired by Bach’s example.

 Ben was living now more than ever in Aldeburgh and with failing health the rest of the world came to see him. His public image was one of middle class sedateness, speaking somewhat like a school housemaster which did not betray that underneath was a man of acute sensitivity who could easily be hurt and who could break off from long held friendships. Rosamunde Strode who replaced Imogen Holst in looking after his paperwork made a point of keeping her distance and never interrupting him when he was at his desk. He was a disciplined man who rose early, believed in cold showers, worked uninterrupted till 1 pm; swam or played tennis or walked in the afternoon composing in his head and returned to his desk in the evening unless there were conflicting engagements. He encouraged young composers who sent him their work, like Robert Saxton and Peter Maxwell Davis, advising them not to compose at the piano but to listen for the sounds inside their heads. In 1964 he received the first Aspen award in Colorado out of more than a hundred nominations designed to recognize “the individual anywhere in the world judged to have made the greatest contribution to advancement of the humanities”. There, he delivered a speech setting out his credo on the role of the artist in society. For him music was a three way involvement, to be composed; to be performed and equally to be listened to. For him the audience was an essential participant. He was disparaging of the loudspeaker although, truth be told, it had earned him a bob or two. The prize brought with an award of $50.000 which Ben paid to a charity to help young musicians.

 Back home he was writing more for the Aldeburgh Festival which desperately needed a larger theatre for certain events. They scoured the county when chance fell their way in Snape, near his first house, the old Mill.   The old Maltings, a massive building, once used for making barley, had fallen into disuse and were up for sale. The money needed to convert was £175,000 and was quickly raised. The hall seating 800 was reckoned to be the finest in the country and soon was used not only for the Festival but for other events and recordings. The Maltings was opened by the Queen in 1967 with a concert overture by you know who, “The Building of the House”. I have a recording of it with the chorus entering out of tune, a whole tone higher than the orchestra. Ben would of course have been appalled, but neither he nor the honoured visitor could have possibly commented.

 Early in 1968 Ben took his second holiday in Venice where he composed the third parable, The Prodigal Son, but whilst there he became seriously ill with bacterial endocarditis which affected the inner tissues of his heart, the same disease which ended Mahler’s life. It didn’t stop Ben from completing The Prodigal Son to be performed at the Maltings. It was only modern antibiotics which saved his life, but it would lead to the serious heart condition which was to follow.

 Two years after the opening of the Maltings, disaster struck, in the form of a faulty electrical connection, causing a fire which burnt the new building down. Ben and Peter look shattered, were shattered, but vowed to keep the festival going. The two of them undertook a strenuous US tour to raise money for the eventual re-opening. Later that year they were performing in Australia and New Zealand. This was to be followed by a further opera, composed by Ben to be performed in a new medium. Owen Wingrave was yet another Henry James story which appealed to Ben. This time, it was an opera written for television, about a son in a traditional military family but who is a conscientious objector. Ben did not get on with television and their TV ways and made it clear he had no intention to revisit the opera or the TV studio. Had he lived, which alas he did not, he might well have thought of adapting it to the stage. We shall never know.

 Now in 1970, his mind was turning to another opera, this time based on Thomas Mann’s novella, written following the death of Mahler in 1911, Death in Venice. The story of a dying writer who, in Venice, falls in love with what he sees to be the perfection of a boy whom he has watched but who does not appear to be aware of him. It is yet another Britten theme where he seems to be confronting the world either with his devils or is it a challenge of “so what?”. Is it provocation or is it the release of what he feels? The odd thing throughout is that Benjamin Britten was such a seemingly conventional person who was angered by others who broke the conventions. Although a private misfit himself, he deliberately went out of his way not to draw attention to himself. He seems to have seen the misbehaviour of others as doing harm to him. Thus it was that he was deeply hurt by the behaviour of Lord Harewood in leaving his wife Marion for another woman. Ben had introduced him to Marion in the first place, and now gently suggested ”with regret” that Harewood step down from being chairman of the Aldeburgh Festival; then afterwards let it be known he did not seek his company any more. Ben, with his middle class background, was not concerned for Noblesse Oblige as Les Bourgeois Obligent.

 By 1970 Ben’s health was such that he had difficulty in walking. He was diagnosed as having a defective heart valve and needed an operation. Ben put this off in order to finish Death in Venice. When eventually he underwent surgery two years later it was found his heart was too enlarged to carry out the planned process. During the six hour operation he had a minor stroke. There was nothing the medical world could do. Despite his weakened physical state he continued writing. He turned back to some earlier works from his younger days to give them a new lick of paint. He cried on hearing Paul Bunyan for the first time in thirty five years and might well have decided to revisit it. He wept when he heard in 1973 of the death of Wystan Auden after twenty years of virtual estrangement.

 Confined now to a wheelchair and unable to write, he took on a young composer as an amanuensis, David Matthews who will be speaking to us. Despite his physical weakness he wrote his third quartet requested by and promised to Hans Keller. Matthew has illustrated it to us. The invention and mind of Benjamin Britten are as active as ever. It is like no other string quartet one knows. Its mixtures of duos and solos and a third movement which sounds as though inspired by the sounds of an aviary belong to another planet. The final pasacaglia is simply haunting, a valediction from a man artistically desperate to hang on in, but who knew he was approaching his end. Only with few weeks left he was created a life peer, Lord Britten of Aldeburgh. He justified this jokingly that as he could not use his right arm, he need only now sign his name, “Britten”. He died in the arms of Peter Pears on 6^th December 1976. He was buried in Aldeburgh church yard where the choir sung the Hymn to the Virgin, which he had written at school when he was sixteen.

 This centenary retrospective may not have convinced all of you. No need to worry on that score. Not everyone takes to Bach or is into Wagner or digs Chopin. Let’s face it, Handel is not Matthew’s cup of tea. One might say of Benjamin Britten that he was a marmite composer. What one hopes has come through is the sense of true greatness. This series has shown Benjamin Britten in a different light, that he was not just a youthful show off, as Mozart had been, or as Beethoven was. Love him or not, he was someone who was an intensely individual creative genius as we are never likely to encounter again. Certainly not this side of a convergence of the Great Bear and Pleiades taking place on a St Cecilia’s day.

CLAUDE ACHILLE DEBUSSY 1862 – 1918

This is the last composer in the series selected by Matthew in our Belle Époque series and where Matthew is dealing with his early years. In his life he was seen as one of the set of composers from the group we have examined and it is only later on that he emerges as the great figure of French music who stands out from all the rest. His name is associated with impressionism but it was not he who gave it the name. His music is distinctive in its sounds, its atmosphere, its harmonies and yes its impressions. His methods cannot be compared to the impressionist painters but he evokes the same mood. You only have to set Monet’s realisations of Rouen Cathedral against Debussy’s La Cathédral Engloutie. With his harmonies he developed tone colours. With his light “brush strokes” of sound as in Jeu de Vagues, the second movement of La Mer, he produced spots and splashes of sound which bring to mind Seurat and the pointillist movement.

 Born in 1862 he was named Achille-Claude but he preferred it the other way round and switched it later on. Usually one had a relative’s name bestowed but in this case Debussy was given his father’s first name of Achille which he obviously did not like as he himself was called Claude. There is no record of his mother having dipped him in the Styx or in the Seine for that matter. He was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the north western areas above Paris, the eldest of five children. His father owned a china and hardware shop and his mother was a seamstress. Where have all the seamstresses now gone? The family moved to Paris in 1867, but as with most of the other composers in this series, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 had its effect and Debussy’s mother, pregnant again, moved for safety to an aunt in Cannes. It was there that Debussy at the age of seven began piano lessons which were paid for by his great aunt. Round about 1871 he came to the attention of Marie Fleurville, a pupil of Chopin, or so she claimed. It is incredible that, having started at the age of seven or eight Debussy by the age of ten had gained a place at the Paris Conservatoire. There he spent eleven years, shades of Prokofiev at St Petersburg.

Reports state that, though clearly talented, Debussy was argumentative and experimental, challenging the rigid teaching of the conservatoire, seeking out dissonances and intervals that were frowned upon, just as one saw with Prokofiev. It obviously goes with the age. And like Prokofiev he was a brilliant pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have pursued a professional career as such had he so wished.

 During the summers of 1880, 1881, and 1882 Debussy accompanied the wealthy Russian patroness Nadezhda von Meck, as tutor and piano tutor for her children as she travelled with her family in Europe and Russia. One will recall that she was the patron of Tchaikovsky for eleven years on condition that they never met. Madame von Meck did send a work of Debussy to Tchaikovsky for approval but he dismissed it pretty well out of hand. It was never published anyway. A greater influence was Debussy’s close friendship with Madame Vasnier, a singer he met when he began working as an accompanist to earn some money. She and her husband respectively gave Debussy emotional and professional support. The exact form that this took can only be left to the imagination. Monsieur Vasnier introduced him to the writings of influential French writers of the time, which gave rise to his first songs, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine, the son-in-law of his former piano teacher, Mme. Mauté de Fleurville. So she did have some connections after all, apart from possibly playing Chopsticks with Chopin.

 The winning of the Prix de Rome has featured extensively in this series that by now we might all feel we want a go. Debussy took first prize in 1884 with his composition L’enfant prodigue, This condemned him to a minimum three year residence without remission at the French Academy in Rome, (the Villa Medici). According to the letters he wrote to Madame Vasnier he found the artistic atmosphere stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the monastic quarters abominable. Otherwise it was alright except that neither did he delight in the pleasures of the “Eternal City”, finding the Italian opera of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. Well, you can’t please everybody. Debussy was not the first to experience the boredom of Italy. Berlioz, as related in his Memoires, went through just the same kind of experience. All that was necessary during this sojourn was to produce one work to send back a year, called envois. Debussy managed four of them, first a symphonic ode Zuleima which seems to have disappeared; then the orchestral piece, Printemps, except that it was not an orchestral piece as we now know it until 1913 after the original had been destroyed at some time by fire and only later reconstructed and orchestrated by Henri Busser. It was originally written for voices with an accompaniment of two pianos. It was inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera from which one can conclude that Debussy had his good moments in Italy. The committee back at the Conservatoire pronounced it as containing vague impressionism of the most dangerous kind. The third of these was La Demoiselle Élue a cantata based on the best known poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Debussy had taken a shine to the English Pre-Raphaelites but that has not prevented one entry in Google referring to him as an Italian poet. The cantata was criticized by the committee as “bizarre”. The fourth piece, Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, owes much to César Franck and Fauré. It is in three movements and is the nearest thing to a piano concerto that Debussy created although the piano is not so much a star as a fellow worker. The last of its movements owes a little something to D’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Theme. The committee chided him for “courting the unusual” and hoped for something better. Massenet concluded, “He is an enigma”.

 

We have seen from an examination of the other composers in this series how they all fell under the spell of Wagner in some way. Fauré differed from the others in that, notwithstanding the magnet of Wagner, his musical output showed no sign of influence. Wagnerism can be detected in the others to a lesser or greater extent.

 In 1888, after his return from Rome, Debussy made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to become exposed to and seduced by Wagner’s operas. They had a lasting impact on his work and he responded positively to Wagner’s sensuousness and striking harmonies which is evident in La Demoiselle Élue. Wagner’s extrovert emotionalism was not to be Debussy’s way but Wagner’s methods were employed even though the outcomes were different, as was certainly the sound produced.

 In 1889, the year of the centenary of the French Revolution, Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle. It was there that Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music and from then on made use of the pentatonic scale and the whole tone scale giving his music a trade mark from this time onwards.

 These extremes between Wagner and Debussy are best described in what has been my bible for the last 60 years, Music Ho by Constant Lambert, first published in 1934. I quote:

 “The emotional reaction we get from Wagner may be compared to the direct and almost cinematic emotional appeal of a ship with the hero’s sweetheart on board leaving the quay, or the departure of a troop train in time of war. The emotional reaction we get from Debussy is of the less personal and more subtle order that we get from the mere sight of an unknown ship in sail.

 The complete contrast of both method and aim between Debussy’s work and that of the German Romantics may be seen again if we compare the maddening repetitions in Wagner’s operas with the equally maddening repetitions in Pelléas and Mélisande. The Wagnerian repetitions are a mounting and rhetorical series reminiscent of a lawyer’s speech – an oratorical device whose aim is to emphasize the meaning of the argument until not even the dullest member of the jury remains unconvinced. Debussy’s static repetitions do not quicken the pulse – they slacken it. Like the repetitions of an oriental priest their aim is to destroy the superficial connotations of the phrase until it appeals to the deeper instincts rather than to reason”.

 1889 is a suitable place to pick up on Debussy’s private life. This ranks more alongside Fauré than it does alongside Franck. Debussy’s private life was extremely

turbulent. At the age of 18 he had begun an eight-year on and off affair with Blanche Vasnier. The relationship eventually started to peter out following his winning of the Prix de Rome in 1884 and his obligatory residence in Rome. On his permanent return to Paris he began a tempestuous relationship with Gabrielle (‘Gaby’) Dupont, a tailor’s daughter. They soon set up together but at the same time he was also to have an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, to whom he was briefly engaged. He was condemned by friends for his behaviour and it ended his long time friendship with the composer, Ernest Chausson. It would have ended anyway when Chausson died from a bicycle

accident in 1899. He ultimately left Gaby for her friend Rosalie Texier (‘Lilly’), a fashion model whom he married in 1899, after threatening suicide if she refused him. Oh là là. Chausson would have been turning in his grave. More was to come on the basis of what is good for the gander is good for the goose. But that will be later on. Curtail your excitement please.

 The naughty nineties would see the emergence of Debussy as his own man, the blossoming of his own style. In an article such as this, one cannot go through his complete oeuvres but simply mention some of the better known. The first major creation was the prelude, L’Après Midi D’Un Faune, an atmospheric image based on a poem by the symbolist poet, Stéphan Mallarmé. It is a comparatively short work, about eight minutes, a languorous description of the faun stretched out on a rock in the afternoon sun. Some critics were unkind (“sounds of a rotten flute”). To-day, it does not matter how many times it gets played on Classic FM it remains as beautiful as ever.

 If we move on to the end of the nineties, the work of note is the Three Nocturnes, Not nocturnes like Chopin or a notturno like Mozart but a nocturne inspired by the impressionist paintings of that name by Whistler. The most authoritative comment I can supply is from Debussy himself who wrote:

 “The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore, it is not meant to designate the usual form of the Nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests. ‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. ‘Fêtes’ gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains resistantly the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm. ‘Sirènes’ depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, amongst the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.”

 Somehow I cannot see how either Nuages or Fêtes could ever be perceived as nocturnal. They are vibrantly filled with light.

 The next big composition was Pelléas and Mélisande, Debussy’s only completed opera from 1902. It was based on a symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck who provided the libretto. At went well until trouble broke out between Debussy and Maeterlinck. Debussy had promised the role of Mélisande to Georgette Leblanc, a singer and actress who shared a relationship with Maeterlinck from 1895 to 1918. However, on hearing the voice of the new Scottish singer, Mary Garden, Debussy became insistent that she should take the role. When Maeterlinck heard of this, he was furious and tried to take legal action to prevent the opera from going ahead. When this failed, he threatened Debussy with physical violence. Debussy’s wife, Lily, sought to dissuade the playwright from attacking her husband with a cane. On 14 April, Le Figaro published a letter from Maeterlinck in which he completely dissociated himself from the production, complaining about the cuts that had been made in the libretto although he himself had originally sanctioned them. Maeterlinck finally saw the opera in 1920, two years after Debussy’s death. He was to confess: “In this affair I was entirely wrong and he was a thousand times right.”

 Pelléas contains a composite of all the idioms and clichés which Debussy had gathered. It is a magical work, sung in a French recitative, with just one shadowy momentary chorus of sailors who disappear into the mist. It needs what it never gets, a decent production. It is a kind of Arthurian legend set in a forest and a castle and would be enhanced by an Art Nouveau decor it never gets. Wonderful musical and theatrical experiences have been ruined by clever-clever productions which show bare stages, forests made of steel constructions and projections and pre-mediaeval characters dressed in vests and jeans.

 Shortly after this time, Debussy’s domestic life was to change again. Although Lily was affectionate, loyal and liked by Debussy’s friends, he became increasingly irritated by what he felt were her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity. In 1904, he was to meet Emma Bardac, the estranged wife of a Parisian banker. Now there is a name we have come across before. Emma had had eight years, on the side with Fauré. The way some, not all, French composers switched attachments can be compared to the way English football managers, not all, switch clubs. On this basis, Debussy was in a league of his own, only on a level with ‘arry Redknapp. Anyway, as far as Emma Bardac was concerned, Debussy decided to have a trial run. Having dispatched Lily to her father’s home Debussy secretly took Emma off to Jersey for a holiday. On their return, Debussy wrote to Lily from Dieppe telling her their marriage was over although he made no mention of Emma. The consequences were sad. You will recall Debussy’s threat of suicide if she had not married him. Now it was her turn. She actually attempted suicide in the Place de la Concorde. She would have done better to have got herself run over. Instead, she shot herself in the chest with a revolver. She did however survive but with the bullet remaining lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life. The ensuing scandal caused a degree of ostracism for Debussy whilst Emma was disowned by her family.

 

In the spring of 1905, finding the hostility towards them intolerable, Debussy and Emma, now pregnant, crossed again to Jersey. Emma’s divorce was finalized in May and the couple settled at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne from the end of July to the end of August 1905. Here, Debussy was to correct proofs to his symphonic suite, La mer, as well as to celebrate his own divorce from Lily on 2 August. The couple’s daughter (the composer’s only child) Claude-Emma, affectionately known as “Chouchou”, was born on 30 October 1905. Her parents were eventually to marry in 1908.

 The above events took place against the composition of La Mer, for me the greatest of Debussy’s works. It is called a symphonic seascape and is a three movement triptych. It is almost as if parts of the Nocturnes and Pelléas had been preparations for the sound world of the new work. It is the apex of Debussy’s impressionism where colour and atmosphere have taken over from formal principles of exposition and development. Pictorially it is Turner, not Monet. What Debussy gives us is pure cold salt water or as Constant Lambert again wrote:

 “Whereas in most works of art inspired by the sea, Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony for example, we are given the sea as a highly picturesque background to human endeavour and human emotion, a suitable setting for introspective skippers, heroic herring fishers and intrepid explorers, La Mer is actually a picture of the sea itself, a landscape without figures, or rather a seascape without ships”.

 There are some works which never fail to thrill, however many times one hears them. They vary of course from person to person. For me in these is a frisson I get every time I hear La Mer in the concert hall. It is an experience never fully captured on disc. The first movement entitled “At sea from dawn to midday”. After hearing it in rehearsal Erik Satie said to the composer, “I liked it all but particularly the little bit at a quarter to eleven”. It grows to a wonderful climax. A kind of chorale sounds in the depths as the sun reaches its zenith, and one last wave breaks into foam. The second movement, Play of the Waves serves as a splashing and dancing scherzo.

The final movement is the dialogue between wind and sea which becomes an all-embracing force sometimes terrifying with alternating crashing waves and calms leading to one of the greatest orchestral swells which will continue in the mind long after the music has ceased .

 La Mer is a combination of the pictorial and the symphonic. Debussy was not to repeat it but he later produced his preludes, two books, each containing twelve miniatures for piano. Pictorial and picture postcard in size. But don’t be mistaken by this. Each states a lot more than “Wish you were here”. Picture Album might have been a better name as they are not a prelude to anything. Apart from Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp minor, no-one remembers preludes by number or key and Debussy sensibly overcame this problem by giving them all alluring titles. Mind you, he curiously wrote these at the foot of each. Was he trying to tell us that the music is more important than the impression it describes or was it abstract music he had written with a penned after-thought, as if to say “this is what it might remind you of”? Possibly so with the Dancers of Delphi or Footsteps in the Snow but surely not with the Submerged Cathedral or General Lavine – Eccentric?

 Debussy’s life descended into difficulties. One little known curio he wrote in 1910 was La Plus Que Lente (The Less Than Slow). It is written for orchestra with solo cimbalom, an instrument I have only heard before in Kodaly’s Hary Janos. It is a salon piece, a waltz, which somehow seems to look back like some tearful fond farewell to the Belle Epoque. In 1909 Debussy developed bowel cancer. The first world war would depress him and he began to suffer from a loss of inspiration but there is no hint of this in his music. Later Debussy was to include a set of orchestral Images, atmospheric impressions of England, Spain and France with England represented by the Keel Row. There was the ballet, Jeux, commissioned by Diaghileff and first performed just before the Rite of Spring. It is a curious affair of a tennis match but not of the Roland Garros – Grand Slam variety. It owes more to Zola than to Federer and I can’t imagine it being listened to by Andy Murray or his mum.

Debussy’s joy in life was Chou-Chou for whom he wrote the Children’s Corner Suite (orchestrated by André Caplet) including Jimbo’s Lullaby and the Golliwog’s Cakewalk. This latter has thankfully so far escaped the attentions of the officials of Rotherham who might ordain that it receive the same treatment as Robertson’s Marmalade.

 Towards the end he turned his attention to the abstract and his inspiration was renewed with a planned series of six sonatas but of which he only completed three, for cello, for violin and for violin, flute and harp. He died of cancer in March 1918. At the time Paris was under bombardment from the German spring offensive of that year. Debussy was buried at the cemetery at Passy. Sorrowfully, his daughter, Chou-Chou, was placed next to him after she succumbed to the great flu epidemic of 1919.

 In the end, it was Debussy who turned out to be the great individual champion for French music. He was only 56 when he died. Who knows what directions his music would have taken had he lived on till, say, the outbreak of the second world war. We will never know. We can only be thankful for what he did leave us.