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<P><B><TT><FONT SIZE=6>

The Haunting of Benjamin Britten 

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<TT><FONT SIZE=4><A HREF=../../info/contribs/contribs.htm>

John Matthias

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<FONT COLOR=#999999>

Humphrey Carpenter

<BR>

<I>

Benjamin Britten: A Biography

</I>,</B></FONT><BR>

<FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#999999>

Faber & Faber, 1992

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<P><TT>
Almost fifteen years ago I reviewed
Humphrey Carpenter's biography of W.H. Auden in <I>The Southern Review</I>
(Winter, 1983), along with two books treating Benjamin Britten's collaborative
work with Auden and Ronald Duncan - Donald Mitchell's <I>Britten and Auden
in the Thirties</I> and Duncan's autobiographical <I>Working With Britten</I>.
Because Carpenter's subsequent biography of Britten (Faber & Faber, 1992) draws both on his own earlier
study of Auden as well as on the Mitchell and Duncan volumes, I need to
repeat a few things I said more than a decade ago. Most of all, because Carpenter
makes of the Auden letter which I quoted from Mitchell's notes the key
to understanding Britten's life and work, I need to quote and comment on
that strange and prophetic document once more.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">During the comparatively brief phase of their
collaborative work, Auden challenged and dominated Britten like no one
else in his life. Having followed Auden to America in 1939, Britten and
Peter Pears decided in 1941 to return to England, a decision which Auden
regretted and which led him to write in his characteristically intimidating
way about the dangers he foresaw for his friend. "Goodness and Beauty,"
he began, "are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos,
Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention. Bohemian chaos alone ends in a mad
jumble of beautiful scraps; Bourgeois convention alone ends in large unfeeling
corpses." It becomes clear that Auden is really talking about the artist's
need to locate and release potentially destructive energies in himself
while simultaneously controlling, making intelligible, and indeed domesticating
them through the imposition of form.</FONT></TT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Every
artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other. The
best pair of opposites I can think of in music are Wagner and Strauss.
(Technical skill always comes from the bourgeois side of one's nature.)</FONT></TT></P>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">For middle-class Englishmen
like you and me, the danger is of course the second. Your attraction to
thin-as-a-board juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom
of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the
demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health,
i.e. sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.</FONT></TT></P>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Wherever you go you are
and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you,
and praise everything you do, e.g. Elisabeth, Peter (Please show this to
P to whom all this is also addressed). Up to a certain point this is fine
for you, but beware. You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make
things too easy for yourself in this way, i.e. to build yourself a warm
nest of love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling)
by playing the lovable talented little boy.</FONT></TT></P>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">If you are really to develop
to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others
suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against
every conscious value that you have; i.e. you will have to be able to say
what you never have had the right to say - God, I'm a shit.</FONT></TT></BLOCKQUOTE>
<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Carpenter's long examination of the life and
work plays variations on this letter again and again for more than six
hundred pages. Britten's prodigious technical skill - the speed, ease, and
complexity of his composition rival that of Mozart - which produces work
after work on the single obsessive theme of lost innocence; his negotiations
with "the demands of disorder" which lead him to build around himself a
protective and nurturing community at Aldeburgh - his Bayreuth on the Suffolk
coast - while suffering out a series of illnesses and repressed longings
for young boys finding oblique or direct expression in his operas from
<I>Peter
Grimes</I> to <I>Death in Venice</I>; his development from charming provincial
prodigy - a curly-haired Lowestoft teenager who had composed from the
time he first sat down at the family piano - to the tormented and dying
Lord Britten whose "full stature" is reached in part by "making others
suffer" - these are the stories Carpenter has to tell. Many works, especially
the operas, are weighed on the Audenesque balance - this one tending to
bourgeois order, that one to bohemian chaos. And Auden himself, as Britten
once said, is in all of them.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">If Britten's sense of personal guilt was necessary
for the full musical realization of his theme of lost innocence, Auden,
Carpenter insists, predicted the nature of his mature work with the last
full text he provided for his friend, "Hymn to St. Cecilia," arguing (as
Carpenter has it) "that loss of innocence must be <I>celebrated</I>, must
itself become the subject of music":</FONT></TT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">O dear white children casual as birds
<BR>Playing among the ruined languages,
<BR>So small beside their large confusing words,
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">So gay against the greater silences</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Impetuous child with the tremendous brain...</FONT></TT>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">That what has been may never be again,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">O bless the freedom that you never chose,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">O wear your tribulation like a rose.</FONT></TT>
</blockquote>
<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">These lines, written for the composer actually
born on St. Cecilia's day, were set for unaccompanied choir on board the
ship returning him to England in 1942. They anticipate with great accuracy
just what it was that Britten's work would do. But if Britten was able
in his music to celebrate the loss of innocence and acknowledge darkness
or the demands of disorder by setting words, writing operas, introducing
the impurities of "ruined languages" into what might otherwise be pure
articulations of sound, in his life he sought to be a kind of Peter Pan,
to live as only music - pure and utterly gratuitous - can live:</FONT></TT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">I cannot grow;</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT>I have no shadow</TT>
<BR><TT>To run away from,</TT>
<BR><TT>I only play</TT>
<P><TT>I cannot err;</TT>
<BR><TT>There is no creature</TT>
<BR><TT>Whom I belong to,</TT>
<BR><TT>Whom I could wrong.</TT></BLOCKQUOTE>
<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">This middle section of Auden's Hymn describes
pure music, not human life. Britten was such a profoundly musical being
that to many he appeared almost to embody it, to <I>be</I> music. But,
unlike music, he had to grow; he had a shadow that darkened and lengthened;
he could err; there was a creature to whom he belonged and many he could
wrong. He played beautifully, but he played in a fallen world of ruined
languages, confusing words, great silences and dreadful acts where, as
Cecilia says in her italicized response to Auden's supplicant in the final
section of his Hymn, <I>Lost innocence</I> may even <I>wish its lover dead</I>.</FONT></TT>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">When I reviewed the Carpenter, Mitchell, and
Duncan books fifteen years ago, I was brought up short by Duncan's claim in
his memoir that he was "not fooled by Britten's diffidence, knowing his
ruthless ambition; nor impressed by his gentleness, having observed his
cruelty. If he embraced anybody, it was to strangle them eventually ...
No man had more charm ... but behind the mask was another person, a sadist,
psychologically crippled and bent." I wondered at the time, and I asked,
if Duncan's account could possibly be true and accurate; it seemed more
like the bitter and jealous exaggeration of a librettist suddenly replaced
by Eric Crozier. But similar accounts of Britten's humanly crippling yet
musically enabling contradictions multiply in Carpenter's biography to
the extent that one has no alternative but to take Duncan at his
word, to realize that Britten earned the dubious right to say, as Auden
hoped he might, "God, I'm a shit."</FONT></TT></P>
<CENTER>
<P><B><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000"><FONT SIZE=+2>II</FONT></FONT></TT></B></CENTER>

<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">All this makes Carpenter's biography very
painful reading. One would rather hear the music itself, take out all the
old recordings. Doing so, however, it becomes difficult after reading Carpenter
to hear the work the way one did before; everything seems to be autobiography,
even an opera about Queen Elizabeth.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Carpenter has been criticized for musically
unsophisticated and essentially literary readings of Britten's works, but
these works, many of them, belong to literature as well as music � they
are settings, in several languages, of some of our greatest poetry and
treatments of stories, myths and liturgies that define our culture. It
is for this reason that Britten, above all other British composers, is
of importance to literary as well as musical history and why his biography
demands discussion in a literary magazine. But it is true that Carpenter,
who can effectively quote from poetry to demonstrate a thesis in his biographies
of Auden and Pound, often attempts to do the same in his biography of Britten,
and never once reproduces a passage from a score. Instead, substituting
a rudimentary description and analysis of the music which he hopes will
be accessible to laymen, he risks the charges of reductiveness and superficiality
brought against him by reviewers like Robin Holloway and Nicholas Spice,
who feel, as the latter wrote in the <I>London Review of Books</I>, that
insofar as Carpenter analyses the music at all, he treats it "as just text
in another form � in short, as code." Although it is clearly difficult
to discuss music, as Spice says, "in terms of texts and narratives without
reducing [it] to crude and schematic verbal paraphrases," Carpenter takes
his risks on behalf of the general audience for whom his book is written.
How many readers would be able, even with expert guidance, to read a passage
- to <I>hear</I> a passage - from a Britten score?&nbsp; Besides, many
books on Britten of great musicological sophistication already exist, and
the expert or musician will want to seek them out. I don't myself feel
that Carpenter damages the music by reading it, through the lens of the
texts it often sets, as autobiography. He does, however, make us conscious
of uncomfortable dimensions in it which, knowing little of Britten's life,
we may never have considered.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Before Auden, the chief influences on Britten's
life were clearly his mother, the sound of the sea breaking on the beach
at Lowestoft, and the music, example, and teaching of Frank Bridge. Mrs.
Britten provided the first "warm nest of love," adored Britten, nursed
him, sang with him, and praised everything he did - which included, by
the age of fourteen, twelve piano sonatas, six string quartets, pieces
for violin, viola and cello, a tone poem, a symphony, an oratorio, and
many songs. Early on, she conceived the notion that Britten would be the
fourth "B," after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. A fifth "B," Bridge, provided
the training in technique and attention to sincerity, clarity, and professionalism
which Britten later failed to find at the Royal College of Music. By the
time he got there, he was rapidly advancing beyond the abilities of his
teachers. Bridge's <I>The Sea</I> echoed the sound which Britten had heard
from birth on the Suffolk coast, introduced him to modern music, and provided
a source for the brilliant "Sea Interludes" in <I>Peter Grimes</I>. In
an early draft of the <I>Grimes</I> libretto, Montague Slater wrote: "I
have a father in the sea / Scolding from the tides ..." Britten's actual
father, a dentist, remained rather remote and slightly sinister; Bridge
scolded and encouraged, and Mrs. Britten cheered, comforted and, perhaps,
made the nest of love, in Auden's terms, "a little stifling." But the early
years seem to have been remembered as a time, as Hardy wrote in the poem
which Britten set last in <I>Winter Words</I>, of "primal rightness ...
when all went well."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">If there was a violation of the rightness
and innocence of Britten's early life, it was a profound one. Carpenter
makes much of Eric Crozier's claim that Britten once told him "he had been
raped by a master at school," a version of which story Beata Mayer remembers
more generally from long talks during Britten's illness and fever at her
mother's home in 1940 as "a traumatic sexual experience" of some kind.
Donald Mitchell wonders if Britten was "fantasizing" when he told the story,
and warns against "building some enormous superstructure of speculation"
on it. "We shall never know," he says, "what he meant by 'rape', if he
used the word. Nor can we summon back to life the inflection of tone or
voice in which the claim was uttered." After investigating all of the possible
circumstances at South Lodge School in which such an event might have occurred,
Carpenter appears, in the chapter where he first brings it up, to drop
the idea as perhaps "fantasy sparked off while [Britten's] imagination
was at work on his operas." However, it is a hypothesis to which he returns
from time to time in a tentative way throughout the book, particularly
when Britten's homosexuality is at issue.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Whether the incident actually occurred or
not � and it seems to me unlikely on the evidence provided in Carpenter's
text � Britten was clearly behaving like a sexually repressed, rather than
a sexually traumatized, young man when he met Auden. Determined to "bring
him out," to make Britten admit his homosexuality and "throw aside all
repression," Auden wrote "Underneath the Abject Willow," with its invitation
to "Walk then, come / no longer numb / into your satisfaction." This is
a poem which Donald Mitchell feels Britten "parried," as it were, in his
setting of it "as a kind of brisk - jaunty, even - impersonal and highly mannered
polka-like dance."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Carpenter follows the strange dancing with
Auden all the way from <I>Our Hunting Fathers</I>, a major but still infrequently
performed song cycle from 1936 with texts either written or chosen by Auden;
collaborations on plays and films before the sojourn to America; <I>Paul
Bunyan</I>, a musical theatre piece which seems part Broadway, part Kurt
Weill, and part anticipation of the proper operas that would come; to Auden's
place, as Carpenter would have it, in most of the operas themselves either
in their treatment of the tension between "Bohemian Chaos" and "Bourgeois
Order," or in some version or other of a more specific presence - as The
Tempter, for example, in <I>The Prodigal Son</I>, whose injunction to the
son to "Act out your desires" echoes "Underneath the Abject Willow," or
in <I>Owen Wingrave</I> which concludes "as if Auden had suddenly returned
and had again thrown down his 1942 gauntlet" when Kate accuses Owen of
cowardice and "challenges him to spend the night in the haunted room" where
he dies. There were not to be many polkas. Donald Mitchell finds as early
as "The Dance of Death" in <I>Our Hunting Fathers</I> "a ferocious transformation
of music hitherto associated with the hunt" brought to "the very brink
of chaos and disintegration."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">The break with Auden, when it came, was permanent.
Perhaps Britten sensed that further collaboration would <I>be</I> a kind
of Dance of Death; in any case, he required more compliant librettists.
He had also, shortly before his mother's death, met Peter Pears, thus beginning
one of the most remarkable collaborations in the history of music.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Carpenter says that Pears's singing voice had
an uncanny resemblance to Mrs. Britten's. If this is so, it only reinforces
what is obvious - that Pears took over the job of providing "the warm nest
of love," that he presided at the festivals of adoration, nurture, and
praise. In Auden's terms, at any rate. But Pears also seems to have seen
that Britten would not "develop to his full stature" if he remained under
the intellectual and emotional domination of Auden, whom he thought of
as a kind of bully. After three years in America where Britten and Pears
had gone at the outbreak of World War II in part for professional reasons
- Britten felt he might have a bright future in the country - and in part
because they were conscientious objectors, they returned with a suitcase
full of compositions and plans for <I>Peter Grimes</I>, the opera that
would establish both of them as permanent features on the British cultural
map. Although often unhappy and ill in America, Britten nonetheless managed
to write a good deal of music, including <I>Les Illuminations, Sinfonia
da Requiem</I>, and the first string quartet. He also composed the first
of endless pieces specifically for Pears, <I>Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo</I>,
which, Carpenter says, has "been taken as a declaration of love between
composer and singer" even though "its storyline portrays a restless and
largely unsatisfied desire."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">While they were still in America, Auden referred
to Britten and Pears as "a happily married couple," and so they appeared
to be to most people who knew them. But both were also clearly attracted
to young boys, and in Britten's case even a repressed paedophilia was a
source of terrible anxiety and guilt. Those "thin-as-a-board juveniles"
of whom Auden wrote moved him in a way that was neither "sexless" nor "innocent,"
and had nothing to do with any evasion of "the demands of disorder." Quite
the contrary, the attraction was the greatest temptation in Britten's life
to surrender to disorder, to bohemian chaos. "Chaos and sickness," Aschenbach
mutters to himself in Myfanwy Piper's libretto for <I>Death in Venice</I>,
and then to Tadzio: "What if all were dead / and only we two left alive?"
Ronald Duncan, Norman Del Mar and Donald Mitchell even feel that Britten
was a reluctant homosexual in adult
relationships, and Duncan says he was "a man in flight from himself, who
often punished others for the sin he felt he'd committed himself. He was
a man on the rack."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">After Britten's death, Pears maintained that
"Ben never regarded his own passionate feelings ... as anything but good,
natural, and profoundly creative." The evidence, however, seems to suggest
that Pears's account of Britten's sexuality comes closer to describing his
own relaxed and uninhibited feelings than it does those of the composer.&nbsp;
But even if Duncan's extreme account is accurate and Britten was "a man
on the rack" who felt that his most secret and powerful longings were "sinful,"
there is no doubt that his emotions were, in Pears's terms, "profoundly
creative." He understood from the inside both innocence and the desire
to destroy it, and was therefore able to embody musically both a Billy
Budd and a Claggert, both a Miles and a Quint. Especially in <I>The Turn
of the Screw</I> is the temptation to surrender to "bohemian chaos" expressed
at its most seductive possible pitch. In Quint's melismas on the single
syllable of Miles' name, we hear the uncanny voice of an unfulfilled desire.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Carpenter sees the <I>Serenade</I> for tenor,
horn and strings, with its setting of Blake's "The Sick Rose," as a pivotal
work. "Nowhere else," he says, "had Britten conveyed 'the sense of sin'
so graphically." Not only the setting of Blake, but also that of the fifteenth-century "Lyke Wake Dirge" that follows it as a kind of <I>dies irae</I>
in which "the tenor's grotesque sweeps up the octave [suggest] mortal terror
of judgement," are written, Carpenter feels, directly out of an experience
of "dark, secret love" which terrified the composer even as it attracted
him. But if <I>Serenade</I> prefigured certain aspects of <I>Peter Grimes</I>,
it is also clearer in its implications.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000"><I>Grimes</I> has fascinated and puzzled critics
ever since its premier. Is Grimes a psychopath, a poet, a paedophile, a
visionary, or some combination of these? Is he utterly at odds with his
community, or does he seek to become a part of it? Is he in love with Ellen
Orford, his apprentice, or the sea? Britten and Pears had read an essay
by E. M. Forster on George Crabbe's <I>Peter Grimes</I> while still in America,
and the poem, the essay, and the notion that there might be an opera were
factors in the decision to return to England. <I>Grimes</I> is set in Aldeburgh,
a small town on the Suffolk coast near Britten's native Lowestoft, and the
future home of his now-famous music festival. Was <I>Grimes</I> to represent
a homecoming, or the impossibility of ever being at home in the world -
even in one's native place? It is also worth remembering that the war had
just ended, and that Britten and Pears were well known as conscientious
objectors. Edmund Wilson, who attended an early performance, wrote that
"at first you think that Peter Grimes is Germany. But, by the time you
are done with the opera ... you have decided that Peter Grimes is the whole
of bombing, mining, machine-gunning, ambushing humanity which talks about
a guaranteed standard of living yet does nothing but wreck its own works,
degrade or pervert its own moral life and reduce itself to starvation."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">There are two famous tenors, not just one,
who have made the part of Grimes their own - Peter Pears and Jon Vickers.
Their interpretations are very different. Pears, who had a hand in writing
the libretto and whose early notes on the plot included lines that were
never set for Grimes to sing to his apprentice - "you are sweet, young ... you must love me" - plays the fisherman, in Pears's own words, "as an
ordinary weak person who, being at odds with the society in which he finds
himself, tries to overcome it and, in doing so, offends against the conventional
code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as such." Edmund
Wilson's remark about "a guaranteed standard of living" is more than a
bleak post-war jest, for Grimes is also motivated, and encouraged by
Ellen Orford, to make himself respectable, make money, become acceptable
to the Borough, and set up in a household. Peter Conrad has deprecated
Pears's Grimes as "an ineffectual dreamer, beseeching the pity of his fellows"
in order to praise Jon Vickers's "barnacled prophet, a pathological martyr
who defies the community rather than imploring its aid." Interestingly,
Vickers has said that he could play the "totally symbolic" figure of Grimes
"as a Jew," or "paint his face black and put him in white society," but
that he could not play Grimes as a homosexual because this "reduces him
to a man in a situation with a problem." But that problem was part of Britten's
"situation" as he moved back to Grimes' own Suffolk, living first in Snape
and later in Aldeburgh itself, intending to celebrate a homecoming with
his first opera, but also, as Conrad feels, "confirming an outlawry from
which he [was] seeking to be pardoned." According to English law before
1967, Britten was, of course, a criminal. Living as an open, if discreet
and largely domestic-minded homosexual, he could perfectly well have been
prosecuted.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">After the next two operas, The <I>Rape of
Lucrecia</I> and <I>Albert Herring</I>, were written and taken on tour,
Britten and Pears conceived the idea of creating the festival in Aldeburgh.
Not only did Britten establish a household with Pears where even Ellen
Orford might have been a contented guest, but from this point on Aldeburgh
would also be his Music Center, the place where a man in many ways at odds
with society - as pacifist, homosexual, and obsessive artist - would attempt
to integrate himself and his work by "imploring aid" and seeking to "make
himself acceptable" to his community, but also by challenging that community
to pardon outlawry by, as it were, legalizing and licensing its fullest
artistic expression. It is a strange paradox; it is as if Peter Grimes
had been elected mayor.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">The festival provides a setting in which Carpenter
can portray, over the years, the actions and attitudes of those two sides
of Britten one might call "Good Ben" and "Bad Ben." "Good Ben" charmed
and delighted everyone, especially in the early years of the festival,
and some who knew him well - Janet Baker and Mstislav Rostropovic, for example
- seem only to have seen this side of him. "Bad Ben," on the other hand,
appeared, in Auden's terms, determined "to make others suffer." Joan Cross,
an early colleague says, "He just used people, and he finished with them,
and that was that."&nbsp; Stephen Reiss, perhaps Britten's most conspicuous
victim, felt that Britten's cruelty was linked in some way to sexual frustration.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">The early days of the Aldeburgh festival must
have been remarkable. I began to attend it myself only in the 1960s after
the concert hall had been built at the Snape maltings, but even then one
got a sense of what the initial excitement, informality, and charm of it
all must have been like at performances that were still being given in
the old Jubilee Hall and the local churches. Britten, of course, was not
only a director of the festival but an active participant. He made much
of his impact as a performer and conductor, and both his virtuoso skills
as Pears's accompanist and his brilliant conducting of his own and other
composers' works were always part of the Aldeburgh experience. The local
community - and later on a range of wealthy patrons - supported and attended
some events that were easy to understand and aimed at giving listeners
uncomplicated musical pleasures, but also new and demanding works by Britten
himself and other contemporaries.&nbsp; Britten, Pears, and the musicians
who came to perform were accessible and eager to please, and by all accounts
people experienced something magical in Britten's presence. Janet Baker
talks about a sensation "almost like [that] of being in love," and Robert
Tear remembers "those times when Ben was so wonderfully charming that when
he spoke to me the world seemed to stop." And it was not only fellow musicians
like Baker and Tear who felt this; people who were employed by Britten,
ordinary Aldeburgh residents, children, even fishermen like his friend
Billy Burrell report, in the early days, similar reactions.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Carpenter says that those who worked with
Britten thought that a change in the nature of the festival, and perhaps
in Britten himself, could be felt from about 1953, which was the year in
which <I>Gloriana</I> was first performed. Although Carpenter's reading
of that opera as a "continuing private debate, an examination of the choices
an artist has to make ... and a self-portrait and examination of the
stresses experienced by a public figure such as [Britten] had now become"
seems at first a bit far-fetched for a story, after all, about Elizabeth
and Essex, such an interpretation should not be dismissed out of hand.
Janet Baker, for all her affection for Britten, says that she could not
ever be put entirely at her ease, that "being with Britten was a bit like
being with the Queen"; and Stephen Reiss, speaking of his forced resignation
as Aldeburgh Festival general manager in 1971 remarks chillingly "that
had it been in Elizabethan times, he would quite happily have had me murdered."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">The catalogue of cruelties committed by "Bad
Ben" while "Good Ben" continued doing his best to compose, perform, conduct,
and be a responsible citizen rather than an autocratic monarch is depressingly
long. To begin with, his musical standards were extremely high and he would
frequently find that a colleague, often one who had been a close friend,
was no longer meeting them. Musicians were dismissed, soloists not invited
back, former proteges dropped without a word, singers cut dead in the street,
an ailing member of the orchestra verbally abused from the podium. Librettists,
in particular, had a rough time - Auden, Montague Slater, Ronald Duncan,
Eric Crozier, E. M. Forster, and William Plomer all being replaced in their
turn with little thanks and no warning. In a book on Britten carefully
supervised by the composer himself, Imogen Holst omits any reference at
all to Salter, Duncan, or Crozier. Crozier, not only a librettist, but
a founding father of both the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival,
felt that Britten always had "a particular favorite upon whom he would
lavish affection, while foreseeing with a grim kind of pleasure the day
when that special friend would be cast off." Britten told Crozier that
Montague Slater was "one of [his] corpses," adding that Crozier himself
would "be one, too, one day."&nbsp; Even Auden, to the end of his life,
referred to Britten's break with him as "a permanent grief."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Instead of the sense of generous inclusion
that most people appeared to feel in the early years of the festival, there
was now a sense of exclusion. George Malcolm speaks of "an organization
called The Club. It consisted of people who used to sing or play for Ben."
The old feeling of community diminished both among those who came to play
or sing and those who came to listen. Meanwhile, Britten, Pears, and whoever
was temporarily part of the entourage sometimes looked, as Robert Tear
caricatures them, like "Pope, King, a couple of sycophantic academics and
perhaps a handmaiden or two strewing palms." Tear sums up the atmosphere
of Aldeburgh as he found it in the later years as "weird, personal, unhealthy,
obsessive, perhaps incestuous, but above all these seductive." He remembers
a place characterized by "waspishness, bitterness, cold, hard eyes ...
cabalistic meetings ... secrecy."
Of Britten, he says, "there was a great, huge abyss in his soul."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">It is in the context of these accounts and
others like them that Carpenter takes up in great detail Britten's infatuation
with boys - with David Spencer, Ronald Duncan's son Roger, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, David Hemmings, Ronan Magill, and others. He quotes Gathorne-Hardy, now an author who has written much about the complexities of sexual
experience, to explain that in spite of Britten's devotion to Pears, his
greatest passion may have been for these boys: "It's a common homosexual
situation," Gathorne-Hardy argues, "when their passions are in one place,
and their hearts and affections in another." And so it becomes a central
thesis of this book that Britten's passion, although never acted on beyond
the hugs, pats, and goodnight kisses which the boys, grown up, have been
happy to describe to Carpenter, was for children; and that desire, deeply
felt but in the end repressed, produced the contradictions in Britten's
character and determined the nature of his work.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">The passion twisted, yet also sustained, Britten's
Peter Pan characteristics which Auden reflected in the second part of <I>Hymn</I>
to <I>St. Cecilia</I>, and in a strange way may actually have made possible
the remarkable music which he wrote for children, without, as Nancy Evans
has said, ever writing down for them. In works like <I>The Little Sweep,
Noye's Fludde, The Golden Vanity,</I> and <I>Children's Crusade</I>; in
parts like Miles's in <I>The Turn of the Screw</I>, Isaac's in <I>Abraham
and Isaac</I>, and the boy's spirit in <I>Curlew River</I>; and in writing
for choirs or small groups of boys in <I>Spring Symphony</I>,<I> War Requiem</I>,
and <I>A Midsummer Night's Dream</I>, the repertory of music written for
young voices is expanded beyond measure. Britten, says Donald Mitchell,
"does not cheat by writing music for [children] that is isolated from the
music he writes for adults. He skilfully takes account of their talents
as performers ... but his real respect for them shows in his insistence
on being no less himself in [works like] Vanity than in a work of grander
proportions."</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Both Eric Crozier's unpublished memoir quoted
extensively by Carpenter and Tony Palmer's television film about Britten,
<I>A
Time There Was</I>, suggest that the boy whom Britten most passionately
sought was perhaps ultimately always himself as a child - "a kind of idealized
[self] at the age of ten or twelve, the gay, attractive, charming young
Lowestoft boy," as Crozier says. The treatment both of innocence and the
compulsion to destroy it in many of the works of his middle and later years
may well reflect Britten's sense both of what he had done to himself by
the life he had led, and the singing child still alive in him and father
of the man who found its image in choristers, boy trebles, prodigies, poets
who died young, midsummer dreams, ghost stories, plays, parables,
and the children of his friends. If this was fundamentally a kind of narcissism,
his relentless examination of it in his work made it socially responsible
and, finally, essentially religious. He did not, after all, abuse young
children; instead, he wrote great music. His last Canticle, the fifth,
is a setting of Eliot's "Death of St. Narcissus":</FONT></TT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT>By the river</TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">His eyes were aware</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">of the pointed corners of his eyes</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">And his hands aware</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">of the pointed tips of his fingers</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Struck down by such knowledge</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">He could not live men's ways,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">but became a dancer before God....</FONT></TT>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Knowing at the end</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">the taste of his own whiteness,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">the horror of his own smoothness</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">...he became a dancer of God.</FONT></TT>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">The journey from the polkas with Auden to dancing
before God was a long and exhausting one. Along the way, there were moments
when the youthful exuberance of the <i>Piano Concerto</i> and <I>Les Illuminations</I>
returned, notably in the <I>Spring Symphony</I> and <I>The Prince of the
Pagodas</I>, and there were some fine compositions that are not amenable
to autobiographical readings - the cello suites, sonata, and <I>Cello Symphony</I>
written for Rostropovich, the <I>Harp Suite</I>, the <I>Metamorphoses</I>
for oboe. But Britten's most characteristic work remained driven, in one
way or another, by language, and the texts he found among the poets and
required from his librettists produce a sequence of major works in <I>The
Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night's Dream, War Requiem, Curlew River,
Death in Venice,</I> and several of the song cycles and Canticles in which
Carpenter is able to follow the theme of innocence and its loss to an autobiographical
resolution in music which grows increasingly austere in its economy of
means, and increasingly direct in its treatment of Britten's engagement
with the demands of disorder.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Peter Quint in The <I>Turn of the Screw</I>
and Oberon in <I>A Midsummer Night's Dream </I>represent a similar temptation.
Donald Mitchell has said that beneath the etiquette of the court and the
"escape from the carnal enchantments of the wood" in <I>A Midsummer Night's
Dream</I>, we are beckoned by the music's covert life - its "audible sexual
delirium." Quint tells Miles that he is "all things strange" in whom "secrets
and half-formed desires meet," and so indeed is Oberon - a counter-tenor with a coloratura soprano for a consort - who, like Quint, is a supernatural
being who desires to possess a human boy, whose home key is E flat and
whose characteristic singing is melismatic.&nbsp; By the time Britten wrote
<I>Curlew
River</I>, however, the glissando recalling Miles' response to Quint is
the disembodied voice of a Madwoman's dead child telling her to "go her
way in peace" and that "the dead shall rise again." That is also what the
choral settings of the mass in <I>War Requiem</I> tell the baritone and
tenor singing Wilfred Owen's poems: <I>Requiescant in pace</I>. Even Tadzio
says as much - although he neither speaks nor sings - dancing before Aschenbach,
but also before God.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">I happened to attend the premier of <I>Death
in Venice</I> at Aldeburgh in 1973. At the time, I had no idea how ill
the composer had been as he worked on his opera, that he had delayed surgery
on his failing heart in order to complete it, that the operation had not
been successful, or that he turned off his radio that night, unable to
listen to the BBC broadcast in his house a couple of miles from the concert
hall in Snape.&nbsp; He lived for three more years and wrote a few more
works, including a valedictory string quartet, his third, that quotes extensively
from <I>Death in Venice</I>. Was he himself Tadzio as much as he was Aschenbach?
Was he Billy Budd, Miles, Isaac, the Madwoman's son, Owen's doomed youth?
In <I>Winter Words</I>, his Thomas Hardy cycle which I mentioned earlier,
he concludes with a setting of "Before Life and After":</FONT></TT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; A time there was - as one may
guess</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; And as, indeed,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; earth's
testimonies tell - </FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Before the birth of consciousness,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When
all went well.</FONT></TT>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; None suffered sickness, love or loss,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; None knew regret,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; starved
hope, or heartburnings;</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; None cared whatever crash or cross</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Brought
wrack to things.</FONT></TT>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">"But," the poem concludes, "the disease of feeling
germed, / And primal rightness / took the tinct of wrong." Like Grimes,
like Claggert and Quint, like Aschenbach, Britten experienced the germing
of his feeling, and followed in his way, and up to a point, its logic.
During the composition of <I>Death in Venice</I>, Pears told Sidney Nolan
that "Ben is writing an evil opera, and it's killing him." At the end of
it, recalling Plato's dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, Aschenbach
delineates Britten's dilemma in his life and work:</FONT></TT></P>
<blockquote><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Does beauty lead to wisdom, Phaedrus?</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Yes, but through the senses.</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Can poets take this way then</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; For senses lead to passion, Phaedrus.</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Passion leads to knowledge</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Knowledge to forgiveness</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; To compassion with the abyss.</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Should we then reject it, Phaedrus,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; The wisdom poets crave,</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Seeking only form and pure detachment</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Simplicity and discipline?</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; But this is beauty, Phaedrus</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; Discovered through the senses</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; And senses lead to passion, Phaedrus</FONT></TT>
<BR><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">&nbsp; And passion to the abyss.</FONT></TT>
</blockquote>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Although it's Myfanwy Piper's libretto, the
basic terms of Auden's letter written to Britten so many years before would
still seem to be relevant. I should conclude by addressing a final point,
the common objection to Britten's later work anticipated earlier when I
mentioned its austerity and economy of means. With the <I>War Requiem</I>
excepted, we observe a tendency in his music analogous to that in Auden's
later poetry - a determination to hold prodigious virtuosity in check,
chasten the expression of emotion, narrow the focus of attention, eschew
the inessential, and counter the romantic expectations of an audience.
The small orchestras of the chamber operas shrink to seven or eight musicians
in the church parables; Grimes's robust singing in his meditative moods
becomes Aschenbach's <I>recitativo secco</I>; rich instrumental writing
grows severe, abstemious, ascetic. "Too many notes," complains Peter Schaffer's
Joseph II upon hearing Mozart's <I>The Abduction from the Seraglio</I>;
Britten's critics said there were too few. But Britten's response, I feel
sure, would have been exactly that of Mozart in <I>Amadeus</I>: "There
are just as many notes, neither more nor less, as are required." Although
both biographical and musicological arguments have been advanced to explain,
lament, or (sometimes) praise the later work, one finally reaches the point
when it is necessary to say - Go and listen to it. Nicholas Spice in his
review of Carpenter convicts the mature style of anemia: "The bloodlessness
of fear, on one hand, and the bloodlessness of idealized innocence, on
the other." T. W. Adorno was the cruelest of all, calling Britten's music
"the apotheosis of meagerness." But go and listen to it.</FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">When Britten died, I wondered for a day or
two what sort of elegy Auden would have written had he been alive to write
it. Then I wrote my own, for a program on the BBC, trying to answer Adorno
and trying to make it seem at least in some respects, in Auden's absence,
Audenesque. I'd like to put it in the record.</FONT></TT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT>Operas! A feast for burghers, said Adorno.</TT>
<BR><TT>And of your work: The apotheosis</TT>
<BR><TT>Of meagerness, a kind of fast. That's</TT>
<BR><TT>A cruel case against you</TT>
<BR><TT>And it may have weight, in time.</TT>
<BR><TT>But let's call meagerness</TT>
<BR><TT>Economy today</TT>
<BR><TT>And call the bourgeoisie the people</TT>
<BR><TT>Who like me have (barely) what it costs</TT>
<BR><TT>To listen and who like to hear</TT>
<BR><TT>These songs, but who will pay a price.</TT>
<BR><TT>Economies of living soon enough</TT>
<BR><TT>Make meager even music of the spheres!</TT>
<BR><TT>To be of use, you said.</TT>
<BR><TT>Directly and deliberately I write</TT>
<BR><TT>For human beings. And not</TT>
<BR><TT>Posterity - for which the general outlook</TT>
<BR><TT>Isn't very bright.</TT>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<TT>A tenor mourns. And you lie down in Aldeburgh</TT>
<TT>One last time. But you have work to do</TT>
<BR><TT>In spite of what the two of us have said.</TT>
<BR><TT>A tenor sings. When you</TT>
<BR><TT>Get out there over the horizon</TT>
<BR><TT>This December morning with the likes</TT>
<BR><TT>Of Peter Grimes,</TT>
<BR><TT>Row your shining boat ashore</TT>
<BR><TT>And be extravagant in song:</TT>
<BR><TT>Leave economy to the ungrateful living</TT>
<BR><TT>Who will need it, whose Justice</TT>
<BR><TT>And whose History have multiplied unendingly</TT>
<BR><TT>Expenses by Apotheoses by Sublimes.</TT>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
</BLOCKQUOTE>

</BLOCKQUOTE></TT></P>





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