Letters: Since the last volume in this series was published, more letters have surfaced from the years 1932-45 and these are placed at the beginning of the current volume. They include correspondents like the critic and rejected lover Edward Sackville-West.
Between 1946 and 1951 Britten created the operas The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and Billy Budd. In 1946 he was still only 33 and had just had a major success with his first opera, Peter Grimes. Britten's early international success is astonishing. He was done everywhere and toured everywhere as conductor and especially as accompanist to the tenor, Peter Pears, his lifelong partner.
He was born into "the land without music" and was wildly embraced. Purcell's death in 1695 was followed by a vacuum of two centuries in British music, suddenly filled by Elgar and then Britten. The real thing at last.
The letters cover everything from wallpaper ("The wallpaper is arrived, & looks awfully nice! I'm very pleased with it - it's nice and nursery for me!") to the Irish - "dotty and casual". (Britten stayed in Buswell's Hotel in December 1947). There is his housekeeper who served him for 25 years and cooked "nursery food . . . milk pudding . . . spotted dick". Those were the days when letters to one's publisher really did begin "Dearest Erwin" or "My Dear Ralph".
He writes from Los Angeles: "Our concerts here are nice - good orchestra, friendly people - different from beastly, hateful, sinister, stupid, unimportant New York - (I don't like New York)." During the LA visit, Stravinsky wrote to Nicholas Nabokov: "All week here I've listened to Aunt Britten and Uncle Pears, but we will discuss that later." Isherwood threw a party for them, which he described in his memoir, Lost Years. "The house was certainly crammed with young men who were most of them fairly attractive. They danced together or went upstairs and necked. When invited they said they were eager to meet the guests of honour, Britten and Pears - but, having done so, they quickly lost interest in them. In this gay setting, where celebrity snobbery was replaced by sex snobbery, Ben and Peter were just a pair of slightly faded limey queens, who were, furthermore, too shy and too solidly mated to join in the general kissing and cuddling. The party wasn't really for them, though they politely pretended to believe that it was."
Constant writing and touring led to Britten's exhaustion and depression in December 1949.
He writes to Pears: "My darling, Eventually your sweet letter arrived - almost one whole week after you wrote it - but it couldn't have arrived more opportune-like, because I was at the bottom of the well, & it was the best bucket & strongest rope to lift me out of it! It was a darling letter, quite a vintage one, & I won't tell you exactly whereabouts on me I carry it, in case it'll make you blush."
There is extensive correspondence between him and his librettists during the writing of the operas. For a composer as wonderful as he was it's odd that he sanctioned so much poor text. Eric Crozier was one of the better ones.
One of the dodgiest was Ronald Duncan, librettist of The Rape of Lucretia: "Beauty is the hoof of an unbroken filly,/ Which thundering up to the hazel hedge/ Jumps into the sun/and is gone." I like this: " . . . and always he'd pay his way/ With the prodigious liberality/ Of self-coin'd obsequious flattery." The opera may deal with rape but one reviewer said the text made the Glyndebourne audience "titter".
It's possible that focus was lost in these moments because the operas were written so quickly and there wasn't time to dwell. Britten had set up his own opera company to put them on so he was composer, conductor, impresario all in one.
He had the strange habit of constantly playing bits to his collaborators while the writing was still underway. After a session on Billy Budd, EM Forster, one of the librettists, devastated Britten with: "It is my most important piece of writing and I did not, at my first hearings, feel it sufficiently important musically . . . I want passion - love constricted, perverted, poisoned, but nevertheless flowing down its agonizing channel; a sexual discharge gone evil. Not soggy depression or growling remorse. I seemed turning from one musical discomfort to another, and was dissatisfied." The letters prompted me to buy Britten's recording of Albert Herring. I'd never heard it before.
It's marvellous! It made me laugh out loud. You can feel Britten's pleasure in it.
Britten's lower orders sound as if they've sported their oaks in their Balliol Oxford rooms and are generally laughable. All chaps together. But in certain Britten works, when so much that's good is on offer, you just get on with it.
The opera is about the citizens of a small town (Loxford), ruled by Lady Billows (think Lady Bracknell), who discuss candidates for the town's May Queen. None are chaste enough - so they decide to have a May King instead and choose Albert Herring the greengrocer - sung by Peter Pears.
But the opera is really about the shedding of fear - Albert's.
Lady Billows is magnificent:
"Is this the town where I
have lived and toiled?
A Sodom and Gomorrah
ripe to be despoiled!
O spawning-ground of horror!
Shame to Loxford; - sty
the female sex has soiled!"
As always with Britten the appearance of the children is haunting:
"Bounce me high,
bounce me low,
bounce me up to Jericho!
Bounce me slow,
bounce me quick,
bounce me to arithmetick!"
I've never heard a voice as strange as that of Pears. It's a wonderful hothouse sound. Because he recorded all the operas, when you hear him as Albert Herring you are also hearing The Rape of Lucretia and the operas to come, The Turn of The Screw and Death in Venice. Anything sung. The voice swallows everything.
When as Albert he sings "Oh no, Sid, gambling's not in my line. Mum wouldn't like it . . .", it might as well be "Oh my blacke Soule! now thou are summoned/ By sicknesse" or the one he refused to sing in Billy Budd, "Clear the decks of seamen", a bridge too far, even for Pears.
I didn't know that John Gielgud tried to persuade Britten to make an opera of The Tempest. Discussions continued for years but it never came to anything.
"In a vehemently anti-homosexual period Gielgud was arrested in Chelsea for soliciting and fined. Later that autumn Britten was questioned by Scotland Yard." Cecil Beaton was also interviewed but no action was taken against either.
It's a pity that such a brilliantly edited book should be marred by a long introduction which obsessively revisits the whole subject of Britten's relationship with boys. Its aim is to rubbish unfounded speculation and to protect Britten, but in the face of denials from the boys interviewed that the relationships were sexual, it's pointless and excessive.
Stories of Britten's rape at school and his own father's interest in boys are also recalled.
Bizarrely, the introduction contains an unpleasant attack on Eric Crozier - the book's dedicatee - safely dead. The tone of the whole thing leaves a bad taste and one has to separate it from Britten.
He writes to Pears in March 1949 in one light-headed sentence: "My darling This is only to say good morning & to say I love you, and miss you, & long for you to come back on Friday, & how I hope that you've had a lesson today, & that it was a nice one & pleased you & Madame too, & that the opera libretto is pounding ahead with Morgan still at full steam & irrepressible, and that I like the Spring Symphony, apart from one still beastly bit that I can't, can't, can't get right, but I suppose I shall one day, and how are you, and are you taking your blood-pressure pills, & if not, why, & hadn't you better go & see the Doctor again, & tell him what's the matter with them, and to ask you what train you think you'll be on on Friday, & thatit doesn't seem likely that we will be able to come to Ipswich because Eric's got to be in London for a Director's meeting (did you see or talk with Anne - a bit important) & to send you my love & my love, & my love, & kisses & my love - Your B."
Gerald Barry's new opera, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, will be given its concert premiere on May 27 at the NCH, Dublin, and its staged premiere in September at English National Opera
Letters From a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume Three 1946-51 Edited by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke Faber & Faber, 758pp. £25