Introduction

MERVYN COOKE

Not long ago I attended a formal dinner at a college belonging to one of

Britain's most ancient and prestigious universities, and was introduced to
the institution's head of house as someone engaged in researching the
music of Benjamin Britten. 'Really?' came the Master's reply. 'There's not
much point to the Aldeburgh Festival now that Britten and Pears are both
dead, is there?' Before I could respond, the Master had moved swiftly
down the line, presumably to impart another morsel of wisdom in what-
ever subject-area was appropriate to the next guest. After dinner, I sat next
to the wife of a senior fellow and was introduced in a similar manner.
'Well,' she said as she sipped her coffee thoughtfully, 'I'm afraid I find
Britten's music just too aggressively homosexual, don't you?' This time I
managed to issue a sophisticated rejoinder (the single word 'Why?', if I
remember rightly), upon which she rapidly changed the subject.
The persistence of such bigoted views on Britain's most internation-
ally successful and respected twentieth-century composer seems scarcely
credible as the century draws to a close, and it remains an uncomfortable
fact that - in his native country, at least - a small but vociferous body of
commentators still seeks to denigrate Britten's self-evidently significant
artistic achievements. Britten was himself no stranger to such negativity,
and the seeds of an incipient critical malaise were sown as early as the
1930s when he was making a name for himself as a precocious newcomer
armed with a formidable compositional technique embodying a
resourcefulness and flexibility never before encountered in British music.
From the influences of French impressionism and the Second Viennese
School evident in the Quatre chansons frangaises (written in the summer
of 1928 at the age of fourteen, and discussed by Christopher Mark in
Chapter 1) to the emulations of Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg,
Shostakovich and Prokofiev in works dating from his time as a composi-
tion scholar at the Royal College of Music (1930-3), the range of music
absorbed by Britten was phenomenally broad. During his working
apprenticeship as a composer for the GPO Film Unit (1936-8) - a famous
product of which is examined by Philip Reed in Chapter 3 - and as the
creator of incidental music for stage projects mounted by the Group
Theatre and Left Theatre in the same period, Britten's ability to assimilate
[1] any musical idiom required of him grew still more pronounced. His

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 2 MervynCooke

stylistic boundaries broadened to the extent of absorbing jazz elements,

either reproduced in straight pastiche (as in his music to a west-end pro-
duction of J. B. Priestley's Johnson over Jordan in 1939) or more subtly dis-
guised (witness his brilliantly inventive score to the Auden-Isherwood
collaboration The Ascent of F6 in 1937).
Such astonishing technical facility was not destined to endear Britten
to the infamously insular critics of inter-war Britain, all the more so
because he had resolutely rejected the idiom of earlier Establishment
composers such as Vaughan Williams by responding to almost exclusively
Continental influences. Compositional 'cleverness' was itself looked
upon with suspicion in those years, and Peter Evans has justifiably crit-
icized Vaughan Williams's music for its 'disdain for technical finesse
approaching irresponsibility'.1 Vaughan Williams is reputed to have
referred to the young Britten's music as Very clever but beastly' during his
time as a student at the Royal College, lamenting the fact that an English
public schoolboy of his age should be writing 'this kind of music'.2 For his
part, Britten felt Vaughan Williams's music to be blighted by 'technical
incompetence', and declared (with the benefit of several decades of hind-
sight) that his own attempt 'to develop a consciously controlled profes-
sional technique . . . was a struggle away from everything Vaughan
Williams seemed to stand for'.3 Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank
Bridge (1937), perhaps the finest outcome of the young composer's pro-
digious eclecticism, were hailed at the time of their premiere merely for
their 'virtuosity', 'brilliant ingenuity' and 'strikingly original effects'.4 His
Piano Concerto, dating from the following year, provoked this school-
masterly outburst from the same distinguished reviewer:

This is not a stylish work. Mr Britten's cleverness, of which he has frequently

been told, has got the better of him and led him into all sorts of errors, the
worst of which are errors of taste. How did he come to write the tune of the
last movement? Now and then real music crops up... but on the whole Mr
Britten is exploiting a brilliant facility that ought to be kept in subservience.5

Years later, Britten's virtuosic early instrumental scores would be more

warmly appreciated for their wit, ingenuity and vivid characterization
(aspects explored by Eric Roseberry in Chapter 12), and seen as laying the
firm yetflexiblestylistic foundations on which the composer's later work
would build. His output of instrumental music came to include several
substantial 'symphonic' scores and a small body of impressive chamber
music (examined by Arved Ashby and Philip Rupprecht in Chapters 11
and 13 respectively), putting paid to wearily repetitious allegations that
Britten's success was restricted to text-based projects such as opera and
vocal music (the latter surveyed by Ralph Woodward in Chapter 14).

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 3 Introduction

During Britten's sojourn in the USA in the Second World War,

attempts to tarnish his reputation took a more sinister and personal turn.
A notorious example was a statement by George Baker of the Royal
Philharmonic Society in a letter published by the Sunday Times on 15
June 1941:
In your last issue, Mr Ernest Newman, under the heading 'Thoroughbreds',
said he had 'been fighting single-handed the "battle of Britten"'.
There are a number of musicians in this country who are well content to
let Mr Newman have this dubious honour. The young gentleman on whose
behalf hefights,Mr Benjamin Britten, was born in 1913. He is in America.
He may have had perfectly good reasons for going there, and may decide to
return to his native land some time or other. In the meantime I would like to
remind Mr Newman that most of our musical 'thoroughbreds' are stabled in
or near London and are directing all their endeavours towards winning the
City and Suburban and the Victory Stakes, two classic events that form part
of a programme called the Battle of Britain; a programme in which Mr
Britten has no part.

It was, of course, the spectacularly triumphant staging of Peter Grimes in

1945 that secured Britten's international reputation soon after his home-
coming - although that success, too, was tainted by open resentment
against the three-man team of conscientious objectors (Britten, Peter
Pears and Eric Crozier) responsible for mounting the opera'sfirstproduc-
tion. Britten's pacifism was nevertheless to prove a deep and lifelong
commitment which, as Donald Mitchell reveals in Chapter 10, by no
means bore artistic fruit merely in those scores where the preoccupation
is most obvious.
In the immediately post-war years, Britten's creativity and sense of
cultural responsibility both seemed unstoppable as he produced a steady
stream of universally acclaimed stage works and pursued his firm
commitment to touring them to venues well outside the privileged milieu
of central London. The evolution of the versatile medium of chamber
opera, charted by Arnold Whittall in Chapter 5, was but the first of many
compositional developments rooted in considerations of practicality and
accessibility. The success of the Aldeburgh Festival, founded in 1948 and
discussed by Judith LeGrove in Chapter 17, furthered the sense that here
was a musician devoted to the wider community, his compositional gifts
backed up by phenomenal talents as a performer which made him the
envy of many a less-gifted composer. The warmly complimentary tone
generally adopted by Britten's reviewers began to change around 1951,
however, when the composer's former champion, the influential Ernest
Newman, dismissed Billy Budd in print as a 'painful disappointment'.6
The tone of other reviews of this Festival of Britain opera was unusually

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 4 Mervyn Cooke

carping. One writer shed intriguing light on the widespread shift in crit-
ical stance by commenting that 'one always resents having it dinned into
one's ears that a new work is a masterpiece before it has been performed;
and Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd" was trumpeted into the arena by such
a deafening roar of advance publicity that many of us entered Covent
Garden... with a mean, sneaking hope that we might be able to flesh our
fangs in it'.7 The debacle surrounding the notorious gala premiere of
Britten's Coronation opera, Gloriana, brought this resentment swiftly to a
head in 1953 in circumstances re-assessed by Antonia Malloy-Chirgwin
in Chapter 6.
Ernest Newman's short-sighted response to Billy Budd had been
promptly rebuffed by Donald Mitchell, who had by the early 1950s begun
to make a name for himself as an outspoken champion of Britten's music
in the pages of his journal Music Survey.8 Mitchell's editorial work with
Hans Keller led naturally enough to their decision to collaborate on a
volume of essays written by a long list of distinguished contributors and
entitled Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on His Works From a Group of
Specialists (DMHK), which appeared in 1952. The composer declared
himself to be delighted with 'the seriousness of it, the thoroughness of its
planning & editing, its excellent get-up, & the admirable quality of a good
deal of the contents'.9 Less pleased were the representatives of the growing
anti-Britten lobby, startled as they were at the audacity of issuing a
detailed - and positive - study of a composer still only thirty-nine years of
age. Peter Tranchell spoke for them in a brutal review entitled 'Britten and
Brittenites', which took several of the symposium's contributors to task
for their modish use of 'musicological jargon', the author barely dis-
guising his resentment that here was a book daring to consider a living
composer 'great' in spite of his objection that 'the serious appraisal of a
creative artist's work must be left to posterity'.10 Tranchell concluded by
extending 'to the subject of this hero-worship my condolences that the
book should not have been better written and that he should have been
the victim of so inopportune an outburst of noble intentions'.
It would have taken considerably more than a few griping critics to
check Britten's continuing meteoric career, however, and the interna-
tional success of major scores such as The Turn of the Screw (1954) and the
War Requiem (1962) easily compensated for the temporary set-backs of
Gloriana (1953) and The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), neither of which
was initially well received - although posterity has since accorded both
works a more serious and balanced appraisal. Britten's stylistic horizons
continued to broaden in the 1950s with his investigations of dode-
caphony and Far Eastern cultures (his creative encounter with the latter is
outlined in Chapter 9), both of which encouraged him to strive for ever

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 5 Introduction

greater economy and clarity in his music. The emotional impact of the
War Requiem on the popular imagination, even more spectacular than
that of Peter Grimes before it, kept himfirmlyin the limelight in the 1960s,
and the work's stature was deemed by some to be sufficiently daunting as
to make criticism 'impertinent'.11 Needless to say, reaction against this
view soon set in, fuelled by discomfort that The Times could loudly pro-
claim the work to be a masterpiece well before a note of the score had been
heard in public.
Britten's respectability in musicological circles, initiated by the
Mitchell-Keller symposium, began to grow steadily with the appearance
of a number of analytical articles on his music in the 1960s. Several per-
ceptive essays by Peter Evans would later form the basis for his detailed
book on Britten's musical language (PEME), first published in 1979 and
followed three years later by Arnold Whittall's comparative account of the
music of Britten and Tippett (AWBT). Whittall noted the significance of
Evans's monumental tome as the first substantial study of any twentieth-
century British composer 'to emphasize technical matters in a systematic
manner'.12 Both books remain the first resort for any would-be student of
Britten's music, and have enabled a younger generation of Britten analysts
to embark on more elaborate dissections of the composer's works with
the confidence born of belonging to a well-established musicological
tradition.
A handful of less technical accounts of Britten's life and work had
already appeared during the last decade and a half of the composer's life-
time (including two books largely devoted to his operas, published in
quick succession by Patricia Howard and Eric Walter White in
1969-70),13 and Britten's death in 1976 at the age of sixty-three was
quickly and inevitably followed by a rash of personal tributes. The first
important step in objectively chronicling the composer's life and career in
some detail came two years later with Donald Mitchell's and John Evans's
vivid pictorial account (DMJE). Then, in 1981, Michael Kennedy's infor-
mative and concise biography (MKB) elevated the composer to the hal-
lowed status of 'Master Musician'. In the same year, Mitchell began his
concerted attempt to illuminate the socially, politically and artistically
fascinating years of Britten's first creative period with his book Britten
and Auden in the Thirties (DMBA), a topic reconsidered here by Paul
Kildea in Chapter 2. Mitchell's work on Britten's early period culminated
in 1991 with the appearance of an encyclopaedic two-volume edition of
the composer's correspondence up to 1945, co-edited with Philip Reed
(DMPR) - a mine of information on everything from the critical reaction
to premieres of Britten's works, to intriguing trivia such as the composer's
preferred brand of toothpaste. The third volume of Britten's letters is

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 6 Mervyn Cooke

currently in preparation, and the project is likely to extend to at least two

further volumes thereafter.
The surge of interest in Britten studies in the 1980s would scarcely
have been possible without the formidable research resources offered to
scholars by the Britten-Pears Library* established at Britten's home at The
Red House, Aldeburgh, at the start of the decade. Philip Brett's study of
Peter Grimes (PBPG), published in 1983, showed how valuable Britten's
libretto drafts and composition sketches could be in shedding light on the
composer's working methods and extra-musical preoccupations, and his
book became a model for later monographs on Britten's major works.
Many of the essays in the present volume are indebted to the source
materials at Aldeburgh for their insights.
Brett's more recent publications have continued to illuminate the cre-
ative results of Britten's homosexuality, a topic discussed with increasing
frankness since the composer's death (though not always with equal rele-
vance to his art). Clifford Hindley, whose work is represented in Chapter
8, has provided many perceptive and thought-provoking interpretations
of Britten's operas from this perspective. Humphrey Carpenter's contro-
versial biography of the composer (HCBB), published in 1992, set out to
provide a warts-and-all account of Britten's private life and offers the
most comprehensive account of the composer's character yet to be made
available. The motivation behind Carpenter's close questioning of several
men who were taken under Britten's avuncular wing in their youth is
transparent enough, although none confessed to any physical dimension
to the relationship. (Britten's complex attitude towards childhood and all
that it symbolizes, which bore fruit not only in music specifically con-
ceived for children to play but also in various stage and vocal works, is
considered afresh by Stephen Arthur Allen in Chapter 15.) Carpenter's
otherwise scrupulously well-sourced book unfortunately bases many of
its assumptions concerning the tensions in Britten's psyche upon sexual
incidents for which only the flimsiest of evidence survives: an alleged pro-
clivity for little boys on the part of Britten's father, and Eric Crozier's
recollection that Britten confessed to having been craped' while at school.
The author's preoccupation with the latter trouve inevitably colours his
interpretations of the operas: thus the Novice's flogging in Billy Buddy of
which the victim sings 'The shame'll never pass', is directly linked to
Britten's putative 'rape', which took place 'possibly while undergoing a
flogging'; the opera as a whole is reduced to an allegory of life in a brutal
prep-school.14 (It might strike the sceptical observer as somewhat odd,
however, to find a composer allegedly so traumatized by sexual violation
in his youth making a musical in-joke concerning rape in his comic opera
Albert Herringy where he quotes from the earlier Rape of Lucretia: see

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 7 Introduction

p. 103.) Carpenter's attempt to view all Britten's stage works as funda-

mentally autobiographical leads him up some amusing garden paths. The
spoken dialogue at the end of Grimes exists, we are told, because 'Britten
has perhaps identified so closely with Grimes that he cannot portray his
death musically. Death means for Grimes what it would mean for Britten,
the end of all music' This theme is resumed in the discussion of Owen
Wingrave, which again contains speech at 'one of those moments in
Britten's operas that are too intense for singing' (!): Kate's challenge to
Owen to sleep in the haunted room is read cas if Auden had suddenly
returned and had again thrown down his 1942 gauntlet' - a reference to
Auden's famous letter to Britten in which he advised him 'to suffer, and
make others suffer' if he were to develop to his 'full stature'.15
Consideration of the tensions and frustrations in Britten's personal
life may well lend added insight into the preoccupations that coloured his
stage and vocal works, but the ongoing fascination with the composer's
sexuality seems in danger both of lending too one-sided a slant to inter-
pretations of his operas (the universal appeal of which continues to be
vividly demonstrated by numerous high-profile stagings across the
globe) and distracting attention from his purely musical achievements.
Much of the attractiveness of Britten's art lies in the scope if offers for
interpretation on numerous levels, whether arising from the designedly
ambiguous dramatic suggestions of his operas, or through a refined
musical language that somehow manages to speak directly to the wider
public while keeping even the most rigorously systematic musical analysts
in employment for the foreseeable future. In that 'somehow' lies the
simultaneous freshness and intellectual appeal of a style that, in Robin
Holloway's words, 'has the power to connect the avant-garde with the lost
paradise of tonality; it conserves and renovates in the boldest and sim-
plest manner; it shows how old usages can be refreshed and remade, and
how the new can be saved from mere rootlessness, etiolation, lack of con-
nexion and communication'.16
Posterity, on the whole, continues to serve Britten well. Interest in the
composer's work has never been so widespread, and the quantity and
range of postgraduate dissertations devoted to his music on both sides of
the Atlantic is formidable. The richness and suggestiveness of Britten's
operatic language, in particular, ensure that no commentator can ever
hope to have the final interpretative word, and a vast amount of primary
source material relating to the composer has yet to be studied in the detail
it deserves. The present volume presents a varied collection of essays on a
wide range of topics central to Britten's career, some written by those who
knew the composer personally and were at the cutting edge of Britten
research at its inception, others the work of those who were much too

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011
 8 Mervyn Cooke

young to have formed a critical response to his music while he was still
alive. One thing all the contributors share is their keen awareness of the
rare ability of Britten's music to speak forcibly to a wide audience, even to
those listeners whose lack of confidence in musical technicalities might
influence them to fight shy of a contemporary idiom. This unusually wide
appeal is reflected in the dauntingly extensive catalogue of recordings of
Britten's music currently available, perhaps a more potent reflection of an
undiminished appreciation of the composer's art two decades after his
death than any amount of academic argument advanced in its favour. No
one can today claim that Britten's music is not destined to outlive the
memory of Pears's interpretations, as once was predicted by the more
vociferous of the composer's detractors, or that Aldeburgh and its associ-
ated activities have not comfortably outlived the artists who nurtured
them half a century ago.

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521573849.002 Companions
Published online Online
by Cambridge © Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011