Music and Letters

Benjamin Britten was hardly unique as a composer who loved setting words but loathed speaking or writing them. As he made clear in 1962 when receiving an honorary degree at Hull University, 'I admit that I hate speaking in public. It is not really a matter of natural shyness, but because I do not think easily in words, because words are not my medium. . . . I also have a very real dread of becoming one of those artists who talk. . . . The artist's job is to do, not to talk about what he does' (p. 214). The point was reinforced in 1963—'I hate talking about my own music, or my own musical inclination, & avoid it whenever I can' (p. 239)—and again, more poignantly, in 1970, at the time of crisis after the Makings fire when, under extreme stress, he was trying to keep everything in balance. 'After all, one's main job is to write music, and one also mustn't sort of get ill by betraying one's real self (p. 342). The poignancy is intensified in that the composer seems to be recalling Auden's high-handed [End Page 494] verdict from 1942: 'it is your denial and evasion of the demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health'.

Britten's dislike of writing and speaking words might be reason enough for not bestowing the solemnity of hard covers on a miscellany of articles, speeches, interviews, and programme notes such as is offered in Britten on Music. Reading the whole collection at speed inevitably highlights the difference between Britten and composers whose intellectual curiosity found occasional expression in verbal form—Tippett and Carter are the most obvious examples among his near-contemporaries. The patent sincerity of those frequent declarations that the composer's business is to write useful music doesn't gain in force when every grammatical awkwardness in broadcasts and interviews is faithfully transcribed, and some interviewers—Murray Schafer, most obviously—must have polished up the spoken words (with or without Britten's consent?) before proceeding to print.

Paul Kildea has divided the texts into four parts, each corresponding to a decade between 1936 and 1976, and has provided each of them with an Introduction and Chronology, as well as a certain amount of annotation. He probably errs on the side of caution in providing capsule biographies of Pandit Nehru and Nikita Krushchev (p. 281) and translating 'locus classicus' (p. 316); on the other hand, it would be interesting to know if the International Arts Guild that Britten endorsed around 1944 ever got off the ground, and if the composer received the requested £6,000 for the English Opera Group from the Arts Council in 1950. On a page (108) where Constable and Crabbe are given the Nehru/Krushchev treatment, Britten, in his address on becoming a Freeman of Lowestoft (1951), is allowed to say that Albert Herring is set 'in a nameless Suffolk town' (he doubtless meant that the given name—'Loxford'—wasn't real). These are very small matters, however, and Kildea provides a judicious general Introduction, as well as a final, fifth Part that collects together all Britten's programme notes, written mainly for the Aldeburgh Festival, and covering composers from Gibbons to Mahler, as well as a substantial swathe of his own works.

The book is certainly useful, in that Britten specialists will now be able to rely on one source for materials formerly scattered all over the place, not always accessibly. The picture of the composer already familiar from biographical studies and the major documentary project involving the letters and diaries—so much more revealing than most of these public pronouncements—is unlikely to be much affected by its appearance. Yet occasional statements and turns of phrase draw attention to aspects of Britten's thinking that can still be under-emphasized today. One is the strength of his commitment to pacifism, as found in a note written jointly with Peter Pears in 1949, which declares that 'the first patriotic, sane, morally decent step for the youth—any youth of any nation—is to withhold himself from military service' (p. 83). Another is Britten's troubled relationship with the country of his birth: this finds its most interesting expression in comments on musical nationalism that connect quite closely with his very occasional but striking remarks about the true nature of music as he saw it.

Britten's impatience with the folk-based Britishness of Vaughan Williams was expressed with particular clarity in the 1940 article for Tempo, 'An English Composer Sees America'; and it was a view reiterated as late as 1959 in a High Fidelity interview with Charles Reid: 'for my own part I was frankly suspicious of V.W. My struggle all the time was to develop a consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for' (p. 171). Part of the problem with using (as opposed to arranging) folksongs was that 'when used as raw material they tend to obstruct thinking in the extended musical forms. . . . Again, each folksong has a completely suggested harmonic scheme—so that it should sound satisfactory when sung unaccompanied—and much deviation therefore tends to produce a feeling of irritation.' This led Britten (in 1941) to an interesting distinction: 'a work like the Sacre du Printemps of Stravinsky is unsatisfactory because it disregards this fact and suggests in some places a row-boat rocking uneasily on oblivious waves of extravagant harmonies. Later, in Les Noces, Stravinsky is far more controlled and the harmonies are closely related to the tunes. In this fine work he breaks up his folk-themes into small phrases, and is consequently freer to develop the form' (p. 33).

While at the time of his departure from the USA in 1942 Britten felt driven to claim that 'now, more than ever, nationalism is an anachronistic irrelevance' (p. 37), he remained persuaded that a sense of nationality was not just unavoidable, but useful. Even before the end of the war he was arguing that 'we in England have a few things we can teach our visitors—things that maybe have lain dormant for some time, but which are I feel stirring again. A strong melodic line—rhythmic ingenuity, & above all a free and ruthless harmony, [End Page 495] enjoying clashes and full of intensity' (pp. 45-6). Such terms reappeared a year of so later in 1945 when he acclaimed Purcell's 'unfettered rhythms, boldly discordant harmonies, his long soaring melodies without automatic repetitions of "memorable" phrases, and especially his love of the virtuoso, the operatic, and conscious exploitation of brilliant sounds' (p. 52). A comparable appreciation of apparently iconoclastic yet instantly accessible procedures comes in comments on Verdi's later operas made in 1951, noting that 'the numbers melt into each other with a really astonishing subtlety' (p. 103). Here is an acknowledgement of that need for connection which mattered so much to Britten in his own work, and which led him on more than one occasion to regret 'the broken quality' of so much contemporary music, 'the endless succession of isolated notes'. Hence the belief (expressed in 1966) that 'I myself cannot work without some kind of—to put it in its simplest way—tonal centre' (p. 299), and the element of defensiveness evident three years later: 'my methods, which are entirely personal to me, are founded on a time when the language was not so broken as it is now' (p. 327).

Among passing hints of how Britten thought about matters of form and style is the comment from 1969 that, in going to the theatre, 'I want to see something heightened; I want to see something stylized. And that is why I believe the operatic form, like the poetic drama, is so much more illuminating than, for instance, just a straight drawing-room comedy' (p. 330). There is a confidence and decisiveness here that contrasts sharply with the more characteristic diffidence: Britten said, at the end of that 1950 Arts Council meeting whose minutes are among the highlights of this collection, that 'I am a very bad speaker. I always think of what I wanted to say afterwards' (p. 101). He also acknowledged that, where music by others was concerned, 'I am an arrogant and impatient listener' (p. 103). How impatient—unsatisfied—he might have been as a composer can be sensed from his ambivalent tribute to his most important teacher, Frank Bridge: 'he gave me a sense of technical ambition. People sometimes seem to think that, with a number of works now lying behind, one must be bursting with confidence. It is not so at all. I haven't yet achieved the simplicity I should like in my music, and I am enormously aware that I haven't yet come up to the technical standards Bridge set me' (p. 253). This was written, not in 1940, but in 1963!

The Bridge—Britten relationship is touched on by Graham Johnson in his Britten, Voice and Piano: 'although shy by nature Britten was already [in the late 1920s] precociously outspoken about what he thought was good music or bad. The sparring sessions with Bridge reinforced a natural tendency to judge music in terms of either adoration or active dislike. In these respects Britten was usually a man for black and white judgements rather than grey' (p. 15). As this shows, Johnson is not a writer to shrink from his own clearly expressed judgements, about both man and music, and this confidence is justified by a narrative that is always readable and frequently absorbing. Johnson knew Britten in his final years, and worked regularly with Peter Pears, but his text is blessedly free of nostalgic rhapsodizing or special pleading, and his practical sense of how the music can work in performance also helps to keep the narrative's feet on the ground.

The book has a rather unusual format, based on what were originally pre-performance talks for a concert series given (mainly) by students at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Johnson's extended and reworked texts remain geared to the music included on the accompanying pair of CDs, but the recordings do not wholly reflect the final balance of the book itself: the only complete vocal work on the discs is Canticle IV, and while the inclusion of substantial instrumental items may relate to the concert series, one such work, the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, is fully described in the text but not included on the discs. It also seems odd that one major voice/piano work, Who Are These Children?, is barely mentioned, even in Johnson's expanded text.

In the end, however, these things matter relatively little, given the strengths of Johnson's writing. After an initial account of 'The Young Britten (1913-25)' he abandons chronology in favour of topics focusing on genre (folksong settings, engagements with the Tudor and the Baroque) and 'landscape' (England, Europe, Russia). There are times when Johnson's penchant for discursiveness risks getting out of hand, as in the extensive use of Peter Pears's travel diaries in the 'Russia' chapter, but this material is so vivid that it is hard to regret the space given over to it; and the bulk of the text balances perceptive biographical interpretation with close readings of the works for voice and piano that are models of how to turn the traditional art of commentary on surface specifics to interesting and relevant use.

On the biographical side, Johnson adopts what we might term a post-Brett (or post-Keller) stance, in which Britten's sexual orientation is seen as central to his creative concerns, and part [End Page 496] of a wider anti-establishment tendency. This provides a suitable context for discussion of the blending of spiritual and sensual in Canticle I, and the treatment of folk melodies like 'The Minstrel Boy' and 'The Last Rose of Summer', where 'Britten subverts all the cosy expectations of the generations who have grown up loving the melody, its original purpose long forgotten' (p. 100). Johnson is a winning advocate for the neglected fourth volume of folksong arrangements, and shows a shrewd sense of social context when he observes that 'the antiestablishment side of Britten's nature was rarely confrontational; instead he seemed to have delighted in changing the intellectual and moral landscape from within—a kind of subtly subversive Fifth Column within the otherwise ultrarespectable ranks of Aldeburgh society' (p. 179).

Yet this was also the Britten who was not only 'down to earth about his work', with 'a passionate belief in no-nonsense, professional graft', but also 'essentially unashamed (sometimes defiantly so) of his homosexuality' (p. 147). So there is no talk of ambiguity in respect of the first of the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo: 'everything about this music suggests masculinity, professionalism and suppression of self-indulgence'; and in adding that 'this rigorous opening recalls the music that closes Schubert's "Prometheus" D674, where the rebellious son of Zeus, a potter rather than a sculptor, creates the human race with blasphemous abandon' (pp. 44-5), Johnson (like Britten) achieves a level of directness through analogy that shows him at his best. At the very end of the book, the comparison with Schubert returns in a discussion of Canticle II that is as evocative of that work's supreme mastery as any more technically elaborate analysis: for example, in the duet section beginning 'Father, do with me as you will', 'simple sequences fall to simple cadences in the deepest obeisance—no great sophistication here—but there is something truly sublime about the ineffable sweetness of this music; this is a state of musical grace to be found in Schubert when he is at his most unreachable by other composers, and there, as here, the listener can only feel grateful' (p. 251).

Johnson's detailed accounts of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and Winter Words are especially successful in balancing a performer's insights with a critic's assessments, and their perceptiveness is closely linked with the ability to present Britten the man in a persuasively complex way. There may be a touch of the idealistic in the claim that 'Britten's hope for his listeners was not only a sharpening of the musical ear, but also a conversion to a state of mind that was more liberal and inwardly free' (p. 115). But this is balanced by a commonsense reading of that lengthily described Russian holiday of 1965 as 'a fantasy defection on the part of two left-winged children of the 1930s with more than a residue of feeling for the mythical "Mother Russia" of their youth. . . . Theirs was a politically harmless defection, which lasted only a month, but during that period everything was done to ensure that the visitors experienced the idyllic Russia that most defectors might have wished to experience, but almost never did' (p. 197).

Johnson is led to this conclusion by his views on Rostropovich, great cellist but also archmanipulator, and these certainly ring true; no less well judged is his deftly comic portrait of the clash of temperaments involved when Britten worked (or tried to work) with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. There are some details to quibble over. It's a pity that the only music example, comparing chords in Death in Venice and the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, should garble the end of the latter extract (p. 52). Britten was 20, and not therefore 'still a teenager' (p. 42), when he travelled to Florence to hear his Phantasy Quartet in April 1934. It is scarcely the case that, when Britten returned to England in 1942, 'his new opera' was 'under his arm' (p. 125), even if ideas for it were very much in his mind. The tenor soloist's final phrase in the War Requiem's Agnus Dei'—'Dona nobis pacem'—is not 'unaccompanied' (p. 133): rather, it depends greatly for its expressive impact on the way its ascending line inflects the chorus's sustained F# major triad. On page 185, the Cello Symphony is said to date from 1968. If one wanted to be seriously pedantic, one would also complain that Great Western trains from Paddington do not go directly to 'Hardy country' (p. 230), if this is confined to the area around Dorchester. Where it matters, however, Johnson's judgements are to be trusted, and the usefulness of his perspective now that we are within a decade of Britten's centenary is made clear at the outset, when he writes that 'far from being yesterday's dated sentimentalist he remains a classic with a lean and economical style that has held the stage and stood the test of time' (p. 2). In other words, that 'consciously controlled professional technique' which Britten struggled for, and—perhaps—could never convince himself that he had actually acquired, lay behind all his most powerful compositions, the power coming from the fact that what was 'consciously controlled' was at the same time so deeply felt. [End Page 497]