Ever since the premiere in 1945 of Peter Grimes, his first opera, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) has been regarded as one of England’s leading composers. Yet Britten’s larger significance remains a subject of controversy, and his critical standing has fluctuated so dramatically as to suggest a fever chart of fashion in 20th-century classical music.
Well into the 1960’s, Britten was held to be an important composer, perhaps even a great one. But as the atonal avant-garde consolidated its grip on the classical-music establishment in Europe and America, his refusal to embrace serialism led younger critics and composers to dismiss him as insufficiently progressive. Later on, the disclosure of his homosexuality—never publicly discussed prior to his death—would inspire a new generation of commentators to reinterpret and revalue his work yet again.
In all these aspects, he closely resembles his friend Aaron Copland, who played a role in American musical life very similar to the one Britten played in England. Born to conventionally bourgeois parents, both men became homosexuals and political leftists; as composers, both were initially viewed as radical modernists and eventually found themselves scorned as cautious conservatives; both were gifted, generous organizers who helped advance the careers of innumerable other composers; and both were highly serious artists who nonetheless wrote “accessible” works intended to appeal to a broad cross-section of listeners.
Again like Copland, Britten remained popular with performers and audiences throughout his time in the critical wilderness, and now the collapse of the avant-garde has led to a full-scale revival of interest in his music. Today, opera houses around the world perform Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (all of which have been produced in New York City in recent seasons by the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera). Many of his choral and instrumental works have entered the standard repertoire, and the BBC is currently releasing “Britten the Performer,” a series of CD’s that feature him as conductor and pianist.1 Long dismissed as a stodgy traditionalist, Britten is now considered by America’s “new tonalists” to be a pivotal figure in mid-century music—the last major composer of the modern era to have used the language of traditional tonality to create musical masterpieces.
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Edward Benjamin Britten (he dropped the first name early in life) was born in Lowestoft, East Anglia, the frail fourth child of a quiet but strict dentist and a domineering mother who was determined that her younger son would become “the fourth B”—a composer as good as Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. He began to play piano and to compose at the age of seven, and at fourteen started studying with both the pianist Harold Samuel, a noted Bach specialist, and the composer Frank Bridge, a minor modernist who was more cosmopolitan in his musical outlook than most of his English contemporaries.
In 1930, Britten entered the Royal College of Music, an old-fashioned, peculiarly English institution that (in his words) sought to produce gentleman composers “inclined to suspect technical brilliance of being superficial and insincere.” His middle-class background, as well as the rigorously professional technique he had already learned from Bridge, led him to bristle at the “amateurish and folksy” attitude of his professors and fellow students, and though his gifts were quickly recognized, he never felt entirely comfortable as a student.
Britten left college at the end of 1933, by which time his music was already being played on the BBC; he began scoring government-subsidized film documentaries in 1935, and met W. H. Auden while working on a film about coal mining for which the poet had written the script. Subsequently he became a member of the circle of artists led by Auden and the novelist Christopher Isherwood, supplying incidental music for such Auden-Isherwood plays as The Ascent of F6. Both Auden and Isherwood were homosexual and, sensing that the inexperienced Britten had similar inclinations, encouraged him to act on them. But the young composer was by most accounts equivocal about his sexual feelings, and did not “come out” until he met the tenor Peter Pears, with whom he emigrated to the U.S. in 1939.
“No composer of today has greater fluency or greater natural gifts,” the composer-critic Constant Lambert had said of Britten the year before. But English music was still dominated by gentleman composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Britten felt there was no place among them for a young modernist. Having met and befriended Copland at a recent music festival, he saw America as a land of greater artistic opportunities—as well as a place where he could live more freely. A committed pacifist, he also recognized that a European war was near, and so he and Pears decided to try their luck in the U.S.
The two of them met with moderate success in their adopted country, but they quickly became homesick and by 1942 had returned to England permanently, registering as conscientious objectors. Though they were understandably anxious about how they would be received by wartime audiences, the premiere of Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first of many song cycles Britten would write for Pears’s idiosyncratic but vividly expressive tenor voice, was heralded as a major event. Thereafter, Britten frequently accompanied Pears in recital, in the process showing off his extraordinarily bold and imaginative piano playing, and he soon won fame as an equally gifted conductor, of both his own music and that of other composers.
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The premiere of Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo marked the emergence of Britten’s mature musical style. His harmonic language was unambiguously tonal but also unmistakably modern in flavor; his instrumental palette was lucid and transparent, in the Franco-Russian manner; and he had an exceptionally rich melodic gift. Then and later, he favored the human voice—all but a handful of his best works involve singers—and he was acutely responsive to the rhythms and nuances of English, a language that few classical composers before him had set effectively. Uninterested in the Austro-German tradition (he especially disliked the music of Beethoven and Brahms), he typically avoided the conventional sonata-allegro form, instead allowing the texts he set to determine the shape of his compositions.
As a young composer, Britten had been criticized for being overly “clever.” Perhaps on that account, he later opted for clarity and directness of expression. He reveled in writing pieces with parts for youthful or amateur musicians (it was only amateurish professionals that he detested), and his lack of interest in twelve-tone serialism was in part a manifestation of his populism:
It has simply never attracted me as a method. . . . It is beyond me to say why, except that I cannot feel that tonality is outworn, and find many serial “rules” arbitrary. “Socially” I am seriously disturbed by its limitations. I can see it taking no part in the music-lover’s music-making. Its methods make writing gratefully for voices or instruments an impossibility, which inhibits amateurs and young children.
Though Britten broke with Vaughan Williams in rejecting English folksong as a cornerstone of his style, he was altogether English in his reticence, and like Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar before him, he found it difficult to convey romantic passion in his music. Such middle-period compositions as Peter Grimes, A Ceremony of Carols (1942), and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (1944) are remarkably wide in their expressive range—now blithely exuberant, now gently lyrical, at times disquietingly intense—but they are almost never ardent.
In Britten’s case, this inhibition had specific psychological roots. He was oddly boyish in manner (to the end of his life, he used English schoolboy slang and loved nursery-style foods), and starting in his twenties he would become emotionally fixated on a succession of pubescent boys; though he seems rarely to have attempted to act on these attractions, they were well known to his friends and colleagues, and also manifested themselves in the libretti and song texts he chose, many of which incorporate the theme of innocence defiled.2 In three of his operas, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd (after Herman Melville, 1951), and The Turn of the Screw (after Henry James, 1954), adults do violence to children or very young men, while his last stage work, an operatic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1972), deals explicitly with pederastic attraction.
Since Britten determined early on to write operas, he had to find a way of coming to terms with his inhibition—romantic love being, after all, one of the central themes of 18th- and 19th-century opera. He therefore encouraged his librettists to explore less traditional subjects and settings; only one of his operas, the 1960 version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a conventional love story. By the same token, he frequently chose non-romantic poetry for his song cycles, and virtually all of his choral music is religious in orientation.
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At war’s end, Britten burst upon the international stage with Peter Grimes, an opera about a lonely, anguished coastal fisherman from East Anglia—significantly, the composer’s own home—who is looked upon with suspicion by his fellow townsmen. Musically memorable and theatrically assured, Grimes was also a frankly traditional “grand opera,” so much so that the American composer-critic Virgil Thomson condescendingly (and enviously) described it as a “rattling good repertory melodrama . . . calculated for easy effect.”
A more perceptive account was supplied by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who saw one of the earliest performances of Grimes and later reported on it in the New Yorker.
There have been relatively few composers of the first rank who had a natural gift for the theater: Mozart, Mussorgsky, Verdi, Wagner, the Bizet of Carmen. To be confronted, without preparation, with an unmistakable new talent of this kind is an astonishing, even an electrifying, experience. . . . The opera seizes you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end.
Britten’s theatrical flair was every bit as unexpected as Wilson claimed. No English composer since Henry Purcell (who died in 1695) had written a successful opera, and, since Puccini and Strauss, no composer of any nationality had written an opera sufficiently stageworthy to be added to the standard repertoire. The worldwide success of Peter Grimes made it feasible for Britten to devote most of his time and energy to opera; unsatisfied with England’s few fully professional companies, he soon launched his own English Opera Group, for which he wrote small-scale “chamber operas,” most notably The Turn of the Screw.
In 1948, Britten and Pears started a summer music festival in the East Anglian town where they lived, and the rapidly expanding Aldeburgh Festival soon became the center of their joint musical operations. By the early 50’s, the two men ranked among England’s most influential musical figures. The nature of their relationship was an open secret, universally known but never acknowledged, though some of their colleagues joked about it privately (Billy Budd, with its all-male cast, was dubbed The Bugger’s Opera by an unknown wag), and more than a few musicians, Constant Lambert and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham among them, complained—sometimes not so privately—about the backstage power wielded by the “Homintern.”
The power was real, but so was the talent behind it. As a young man, Britten had told a friend, “I would be a ‘court composer,’ but for my pacifism and homosexuality.” In the long run, neither one mattered. His music eventually became so popular, even beloved, that he achieved something closely approaching that status: in 1952, he was commissioned to compose the opera Gloriana in honor of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and at the very end of his life he became the first composer to be elevated to the English peerage, taking the title of Lord Britten of Aldeburgh.
But Britten’s star sank among younger musicians in inverse proportion to his popularity and prestige. No doubt the gradual drying-up of his inspiration was partly to blame—starting in the 60’s, his music grew increasingly austere and noticeably less lyrical—but it was his persistent refusal to bow to the god of avant-gardism that was chiefly responsible for the eclipse of his reputation. Failing health also played a part: Britten never fully recovered from a 1972 heart operation (which he had put off as long as possible in order to finish Death in Venice), producing only a few isolated pieces between then and his death four years later.
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In 1977, a year after Britten died, the musicologist Philip Brett published an essay, “Britten and Grimes,” in which he not only made explicit reference to the composer’s homosexuality but declared that
it is to the homosexual condition that Peter Grimes is addressed. At any rate, if we look at the opera in this allegorical way, the problems (both moral and dramatic) about Grimes’s character fall away, the viciousness of [his] persecution becomes more explicable, and Peter’s own tragedy, that of guilt and self-hatred, all the more poignant and relevant to people today.
This interpretation of Peter Grimes is by no means far-fetched, and subsequent revelations about the composer’s private life, particularly the candid description of his inclinations supplied by Humphrey Carpenter in a 1992 biography, add force to the now widely accepted argument that it is impossible fully to understand his music without taking his sexuality into account. Yet such a critical perspective, while capable of providing valuable illumination, is ultimately unequal to the task of explaining Britten’s enduring appeal.
“Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature,” Samuel Johnson rightly observed in his “Preface to Shakespeare.” Hence it is no coincidence that Death in Venice, with its equivocal hint of special pleading for a taste few listeners share, is the only one of Britten’s operas that has consistently failed to engage audiences. Elsewhere, he is, like Copland and Tchaikovsky, not a prisoner of identity speaking only of and to his own kind, but a universal genius intelligible to everyone. Even in The Turn of the Screw—perhaps his best work, certainly his most disturbing—he succeeds in transcending the particularity of his sexual character and portraying the human dilemma in terms that speak directly to all men in all conditions.
Such is the stuff of artistic greatness. Though not all of Britten’s music is of the first rank, much of it is comparable in quality to the finest compositions of the giants of modernism. To rank him with the likes of Bartók, Copland, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Hindemith may seem unduly extravagant, but closer acquaintance with such works as Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw, Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, A Ceremony of Carols, and the Tenor-Horn Serenade—to name only five pieces that have stood the test of time—suggests that he was not only England’s greatest composer, but one of the century’s greatest as well. Certainly there has been no more prodigiously gifted musical artist, and few who have told us more about the darkest secrets of the human heart.
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Britten on CD: A Select Discography
Virtually all of Britten’s music is available on CD, much of it in performances by the composer himself. He made his first commercial recordings in 1941, and returned to the studio regularly until heart problems ended his public career in 1972. The word “definitive” is overused by critics, but most of the recordings he made of his own music—especially those featuring Peter Pears—have yet to be bettered. In addition, he performed and recorded an exceptionally wide variety of other works, and many of these interpretations are no less compelling.
Here are ten key recordings of Britten’s music, followed by a sampling of his interpretations of works by other composers:
1940: Britten accompanied Pears at the piano in the first recording of Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op. 22. This youthfully vital interpretation, set down on 78’s shortly after the first performance in 1942, has been coupled on CD with the equally striking premiere recording of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31 (1943), featuring Pears, the incomparable horn player Dennis Brain, and the Boyd Neel String Orchestra, with the composer making his conducting debut (Pearl GEMM CD 9177).
1942: A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28, an exquisite setting of medieval carol texts for boys’ voices and harp, is sensitively performed by the St. John’s College Choir, Cambridge, conducted by George Guest (London Jubilee 30097).
1945: Britten conducted the first complete recording of Peter Grimes, Op. 33, made in 1958 with Pears, the soprano Claire Watson, and the ensemble of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This performance, though not without flaw, remains by far the most compelling of the versions released to date (London 14577, two CD’s).
1946: Though The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34, has been recorded countless times, no one has performed this wonderfully winning piece with quite so much panache as Britten and the London Symphony (London 17509).
1951: Billy Budd, Op. 50, may be dramatically the strongest of Britten’s large-house operas, and the first recording, with Pears as Captain Vere and the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, remains the best (London 17428, three CD’s).
1954: The Turn of the Screw, Op. 54, was recorded shortly after its premiere by the cast of the original English Opera Group production, and this interpretation, led by Britten and captured in excellent monaural studio sound, is charged with all the intensity of a stage performance (London 25672, two CD’s).
1962: Britten recorded his War Requiem, Op. 66, with Pears, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau—the singers were chosen to represent three of the nations that participated in World War II—accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Whatever one may think of the antiwar sentiments embodied in the poems of Wilfred Owen that the composer interwove with a traditional requiem mass, the result remains one of the century’s most impressive oratorios (London 143-832, two CD’s).
1963: Nocturnal after John Dowland, Op. 70, composed for the English guitarist Julian Bream and masterfully recorded by him in 1966, is a set of variations on the Dowland lute song, “Come, Heavy Sleep” (unusually, the theme is heard only at the end). One of the few extended works Britten wrote for a solo instrumentalist, it is among the most haunting of his many evocations of the world of sleep and dreams (RCA Victor Gold Seal 61601).
1976: The String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94, based in part on themes from Death in Venice, was Britten’s last important composition, and perhaps the finest of his multi-movement instrumental pieces. It has been recorded several times, most effectively by the Lindsay Quartet (ASV CDDCA 608).
Four characteristic performances of works by other composers are Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550, recorded in 1968 with the English Chamber Orchestra (London 44323, two CD’s, coupled with other Mozart recordings by Britten); Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, recorded live in 1968 with the English Chamber Orchestra (BBC BBCB 8012-2); Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, recorded live in 1961 with the London Symphony (BBC BBCB 8004-2); and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14, Op. 135, recorded live in 1970 with Vishnevskaya, the bass Mark Rezhetin, and the English Chamber Orchestra (BBC BBCB 8013-2). In addition, Britten’s classic recording with Pears of Schubert’s Winterreise, currently out of print in the U.S., can be ordered from England via www.amazon.co.uk.
With the exception of the last item, the recordings listed above can be purchased online by viewing this article on COMMENTARY’s website: www.commentarymagazine.com
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1 Several of these CD’s are listed in the selected discography at the end of this article.
2 Britten once told a colleague that he had been raped by a master at his prep school, implying that this was the cause of his later homosexuality.
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