CONTENTS
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY NEIL POWELL
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1: Britten Minor – 1913–30
CHAPTER 2: Some College – 1930–34
CHAPTER 3: Most Surprising Days – 1935–39
CHAPTER 4: American Overtures – 1939–42
CHAPTER 5: Where I Belong – 1942–47
CHAPTER 6: A Modest Festival – 1947–55
CHAPTER 7: The Poetry in the Pity – 1955–64
CHAPTER 8: The Building of the House – 1965–71
CHAPTER 9: As It Is, Plenty – 1971–76
PLATE SECTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
INDEX
COPYRIGHT
At the Edge
Carpenters of Light
A Season of Calm Weather
True Colours
The Stones on Thorpeness Beach
Roy Fuller: Writer and Society
The Language of Jazz
Selected Poems
George Crabbe: An English Life
A Halfway House
Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations
Proof of Identity
Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age.
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London’s creative and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians before re-crossing the Atlantic by ship in the perilous days of 1942.
But the East Coast of England was where Britten, as he himself said, belonged: this was where he returned to write his most famous opera, Peter Grimes, and – with Pears and Eric Crozier – to found the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. In the years that followed, his international reputation grew steadily, helped by a busy schedule of international tours and, for many, crowned by the extraordinary success of his War Requiem. Meanwhile, his Festival grew from strength to strength, its progress symbolised by the opening of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1967.
Britten was a mass of paradoxes: a solitary, introspective thinker who came to ebullient life in the company of young people, for whom he composed some of his most memorable works; a man of the political left who was on the friendliest terms with members of the royal family; a composer inspired by some of the twentieth century’s deepest preoccupations who combined innovation with a deep understanding of musical tradition. Devoted to his friends, protégés and fellow musicians, he was, above all, someone who lived for music.
Neil Powell’s book is the landmark biography for Britten’s centenary year: a subtle and moving portrait of a brilliant, complex and ultimately loveable man.
Neil Powell is a poet and biographer who has written extensively on literature and music. His previous books include Roy Fuller: Writer and Society (1995), The Language of Jazz (1997), George Crabbe: An English Life (2004) and Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (2008), as well as seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Proof of Identity (2012). He lives in Suffolk.
In memory of Adam Johnson
1965–1993
You great composer, I little composer.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
I want to say, here and now, that Britten has been for me the most purely musical person I have ever met and I have ever known.
SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT
1. Edith Britten with her four children, 1914
2. Benjamin and his father, 1921
3. Cast of The Water Babies, 1918
4. Benjamin with multiple scores, c. 1921
5. Britten with Francis Barton, 1928
6. Britten reading by a river, c. 1929
7. Britten with Ethel and Frank Bridge, c. 1930
8. Wulff Scherchen, Britten and John Alston, c. 1938–9
9. Britten and Beth, 1938
10. Peggy Brosa, Antonio Brosa, Victor Kraft, Britten and Aaron Copland, c. 1939–40
11. Peter Pears and Britten, 1940
12. W. H. Auden and Britten, 1941
13. Pears and Britten with Beth and his niece and nephew, 1943
14. Britten at the Old Mill, 1946
15. Britten and Eric Crozier, 1945
16. Peter Grimes, 1945
17. The English Opera Group, 1947
18. Britten, Pears, Joan Cross, Otakar Kraus, Lesley Duff and Anna Pollak, 1947
19. Britten with children from the cast of Let’s Make an Opera, 1947
20. Pears, E. M. Forster, Robin Long (‘The Nipper’), Britten and Billy Burrell, 1948
21. Pears and Britten, 1948
22. Britten leaving the Concertgebouw, 1949
23. E. M. Forster, Britten and Eric Crozier, 1949
24. Imogen Holst conducting the Aldeburgh Music Club, 1954
25. Noye’s Fludde, 1958
26. Pears, Prince Ludwig, Princess Margaret and Britten, 1956
27. Britten, Pears, Princess Margaret and Prince Ludwig, 1957
28. Britten accepting the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh, 1962
29. Leaving The Red House, 1964
30. Rehearsals for the War Requiem, 1962
31. Britten and Galina Vishnevskaya, 1963
32. Britten and Cecil Aronowitz, 1967
33. Britten and Mstislav Rostropovich, 1964
34. Rehearsals for Peter Grimes, 1969
35. Death in Venice, 1973
36. Britten and Pears, 1975
Pictures reproduced courtesy of the Britten-Pears Foundation (www.brittenpears.org): 1. PH/4/2; 2. PH/4/17; 3. PH/4/8; 4. PH/1/7; 5. PH/4/38; 6. PH/1/21; 7. PH/4/46; 8. PH/4/66; 9. PH/4/60; 10. © Peter Pears, PH/4/60PH/4/70; 11. PH/3/4; 12. PH/4/75; 13. PH/5/8; 17. PH/5/28; 18. PH/5/33; 22. PH/4/141; 24. © Marion Thorpe, PH/5/119; 25. © Kurt Hutton, PHPN/11/1/33; 26. PH/5/138; 27. PH/5/165; 28. © W. B. Allen, PH/4/283; 32. © Richard Adeney, PH/7/67; 34. PH/7/116A; 36. © Victor Parker, PH/3/114
Pictures reproduced courtesy of Getty Images: 14. George Rodger/Time Life/Getty Images; 15. Alex Bender/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 19. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images; 20. Kurt Hutton/Getty Images; 21. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images; 23. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 30. Erich Auerbach/Getty Images; 31. Erich Auerbach/Getty Images
Pictures reproduced courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection: 16. Angus McBean Photograph (MS Thr 581) © Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Pictures reproduced courtesy of Lebrecht: 29. Brian Seed/Lebrecht Music & Arts; 33. Brian Seed/Lebrecht Music & Arts; 35. Nigel Luckhurst/Lebrecht Music & Arts
In writing this book, I’ve proceeded from assumptions which may not be universally shared but which I hope will be vindicated in the following pages. The first is that Benjamin Britten was the greatest of English composers – rivalled only by Henry Purcell and Edward Elgar – and one of the most extraordinarily gifted musicians ever to have been born in this country: these are slightly different things, of which the latter is perhaps the more clearly incontrovertible, and they certainly don’t suggest that he was infallible. The second is that he was specifically a man of the East Anglian coast, which is inclined to foster (as those of us who have lived by it know) a particular cast of mind, in whose life and work we should expect to discover kinships with Suffolk artists and poets such as Constable and Crabbe. The third is that his fondness for adolescent boys and his devotion to his partner, Peter Pears, represent distinct and complementary aspects of his sexual nature; his conduct in both cases was exemplary and is therefore the occasion for neither prurience nor evasiveness. And the fourth is that in two phases of his career – the periods of his involvement with the ‘Auden Generation’ in the 1930s and of his formative work with the Aldeburgh Festival from 1948 onwards – he contributed to cultural life in ways which go beyond those to be expected of any composer and performer, however great.
This is not a book by a musician, by which I mean that although I can struggle with a score I don’t read it fluently nor do I hear it accurately in my head; if I take the score to the piano, a further lengthy struggle ensues, from which I usually retire in defeat. For people such as myself, notated music examples in biographies are a form of reproachful torment, so I haven’t included any. I write about music as I hear and understand it, in very much the same way as I’ve written about poems and novels in books about authors: the reader who is used to literary biographies will, I hope, feel perfectly at home here. And because I approach Britten’s work from this direction, I’ve been particularly interested in the relationship between his music and its literary sources, in some of his song settings and in operas such as Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice. For the musicologist, there are other studies of Britten by people whose scholarly and technical expertise astonishes me and to whom (as the Bibliography and Notes will testify) I remain greatly indebted.
Both the Britten Estate and the Britten–Pears Foundation kindly gave their approval to this project at the outset, although they obviously bear no responsibility for the finished book. My agent, Natasha Fairweather, has been an unfailing source of encouragement and support, while Sarah Rigby, my editor at Hutchinson, read and annotated my draft text with exemplary care: I’ve acted on far more of her suggestions than is habitual for an obstinate author and it’s been a pleasure to work with her. I’m also deeply grateful to the following people, whom I’ve listed in alphabetically democratic style, for their help and advice at various stages of my work on Britten: John Amis, Amanda Arnold, Alan Britten, Nick Clark, Paul Driver, Roger Eno, Maurice Feldman, Caroline Gascoigne, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, John Greening, Jocasta Hamilton, Rex Harley, Ray Herring, David and Mary Osborn, Philip Reed, Jonathan Reekie, Peter Scupham, Margaret Steward, David Stoll, Malcolm Walker, Martin Wright. Extracts from the letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten and from the travel diaries of Peter Pears are © The Trustees of the Britten–Pears Foundation and are not to be further reproduced without prior permission.
The best of all companions to the music of Britten, whether in the concert hall or on record, was my friend Adam Johnson. I have constantly wished that I could try out ideas and phrases on him while writing this book, which he would certainly have improved. It is dedicated, with love, to his memory.
N.P.
Orford,
THE SUFFOLK COASTAL resort of Lowestoft, where Benjamin Britten was born in 1913, was described in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘a handsome and improving market town, bathing-place, and sea port’ which, ‘when viewed from the sea, has the most picturesque and beautiful appearance of any town on the eastern coast’.1 This was just before the arrival of the railway in 1847 and the massive development of South Lowestoft, between Lake Lothing and the previously separate villages of Kirkley and Pakefield, by Sir Morton Peto of Somerleyton Hall. Thirty years later, Anthony Trollope would choose Lowestoft as the setting for a pivotal chapter in his novel The Way We Live Now, transporting three characters – Paul Montague, Winifred Hurtle and Roger Carbury – to the town: Paul rashly meets Mrs Hurtle there and bumps into Roger, who has been his rival for the hand of another woman. At that time, South Lowestoft’s principal building was the Royal Hotel of 1849: though unnamed by Trollope, it is evidently the scene of Paul Montague and Winifred Hurtle’s meeting. In one filmed version of The Way We Live Now, part of the episode takes place on a hotel balcony, from which the former lovers watch the sun set over the sea; but this is something they couldn’t have done in Lowestoft, since it is the most easterly point on the English coastline, although on a clear morning you might see the sun rise. What is just as likely to greet you, if you look out from the Victorian houses of Kirkley Cliff Road, across the slender green space of the bowls club towards the beach and sea, is an easterly onshore breeze and sleet in the wind.
During the early years of the last century, one of these houses, 21 Kirkley Cliff Road, was occupied by a dentist, Robert Victor Britten, his wife Edith Rhoda (née Hockey) and their family. A semi-detached villa with its entrance lobby to the left-hand side, it was to contain a dental practice for most of the twentieth century and is now a small hotel called Britten House; opposite, next to the bowling green, there’s a car park adorned with aluminium seats and cycle racks, flying-saucer lamp posts and a few municipal saplings in little gravelled squares. Robert Britten, whose father ended up running a dairy business in Maidenhead, where he died in 1881, had originally hoped to be a farmer, but this ambition was thwarted by his lack of the necessary capital. Instead, he trained at Charing Cross Hospital before working as an assistant dentist in Ipswich and, in 1905, setting up his own practice at 46 Marine Parade, Lowestoft; three years later, his growing family and increasing prosperity prompted him to move the mile further south to Kirkley Cliff Road. There, every day at eleven o’clock, he would habitually leave his ground-floor surgery for a fortifying mid-morning whisky, ascending to the first-floor sitting room which he called ‘Heaven’; downstairs, he seems to have implied, was the other place. There’s a hint in this habit of that continuous rumbling dissatisfaction, not unlike toothache, with which Graham Greene so memorably burdened his dentist, Mr Tench, in The Power and the Glory. Yet, probably because he didn’t relish his profession, Robert Britten’s patients found him sympathetic and friendly; he was able to share and respond to their feelings to a greater extent than a more enthusiastic practitioner of his craft might have done.
Robert had met his future wife while studying dentistry at Charing Cross, but there was already a connection between their two families: Edith and her sisters had attended the same school as Robert’s sisters – Miss Hinton’s School for Girls, Maidenhead – where Florence Britten and Sarah Hockey were exact contemporaries. Edith’s father, William Henry Hockey, was a Queen’s Messenger at the Home Office: the family’s staff flat had a misleadingly grand address in Whitehall, and it was from there in September 1901 that the eldest daughter married Robert Britten at St John’s, Smith Square. Edith was a strikingly attractive and talented young woman who might have expected something better than marriage at the age of twenty-eight to a dentist four years her junior, had it not been for her socially compromised background: her father was illegitimate and her mother sufficiently unstable to have spent much of her life in homes. But Robert was young, handsome and something of a challenge, for drink and recklessness had already ruined both of his brothers. Determined to save her husband and children from a similar fate, Edith’s prescription was moderation and music, and it seems to have worked.
By 1913, Robert was thirty-six and Edith forty years old: they had three children – Barbara (born in Ipswich on 11 June 1902), Robert or Bobby (born in Lowestoft on 28 January 1907) and Elizabeth, known as Beth (born in Lowestoft on 10 June 1909) – and they thought their family complete. So their fourth child was what parents are sometimes apt to describe, with a knowing and self-congratulatory smile, as a ‘mistake’. He was born at 21 Kirkley Cliff Road on 22 November, which is the feast day of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music. As if that were not omen enough, he was given the first name not only of his father’s younger brother but, as Edith at least would have been very well aware, of England’s most eminent living composer, Edward Elgar, who in the preceding five years had produced a flurry of major works including the two completed symphonies (1908, 1911), the violin concerto (1910) and The Music Makers (1912). But the Brittens’ youngest son would always be called by his middle name – Benjamin or ‘Beni’, ‘Benjy’ and finally ‘Ben’ – and, as we shall see, he would grow up to have mixed feelings about Elgar.
His father had no interest in music: he was, said Britten, ‘almost anti-musical, I’m afraid’.2 The musical ability and ambition was all on his mother’s side: of the seven Hockey children, at least three pursued musical careers, most notably Edith’s brother Willie, who was organist at St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich, conductor of the Ipswich Choral Society and a professional singing teacher. He gave his nephew, for his ninth birthday, a copy of Stainer and Barrett’s A Dictionary of Musical Terms (1889), which in ordinary circumstances might have seemed an overambitious or over-optimistic present. By this time, Benjamin would sometimes stay with his Uncle Willie and Auntie Jane at their home in Berners Street, Ipswich, from where his earliest surviving letter home was written on 25 April 1923: in this, he is more excited by a visit to the railway station and the sight of a new L&NER engine, ‘green with a gold rim round its chimmeny’, than by anything specifically musical. Nevertheless, Marian Walker, a family friend, remembered that when she asked Britten ‘Where did your music come from?’ he replied: ‘I had rather a reprobate old uncle, but he was intensely musical, and I think it was he who originally told me that he preferred to read a score rather than hear anything played.’3
So where did his music come from? Uncle Willie, supplying the crucial distinction between the practitioner’s pleasure in the score and the listener’s in the performance, is clearly part of the answer. But little Benjamin showed conspicuous ability, or so his doting mother supposed, from the moment his infant hand touched the piano in the upstairs drawing room: ‘Dear pay pano,’ he would demand at the age of two, liking to think ‘Dear’ was his name because that’s what people called him.4 Edith was particularly keen that he should be a musical genius, since her two daughters were as unmusical as their father while Bobby, her elder son, preferred to play ragtime; she convinced herself that her younger son would one day be ranked as the ‘fourth B’, alongside Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – although, as things turned out, a more relevant trinity of Bs would be Bridge, Berg and Berkeley. There is a peculiar photograph, taken when he was about seven years old, of the small boy seated at the piano, upon which half a dozen open scores have been ingeniously displayed: whether they are parts to be played simultaneously or pieces to be performed in rapid succession isn’t clear; but the photograph is evidently intended as a joke, since another taken at about the same time shows him tackling a single piece in the ordinary way while, seated on the sofa, his mother listens politely and an unmusical sister reads a book. The point of the first photograph, of course, is that this is a child of prodigious virtuosity; yet virtuosity isn’t the same as creativity. ‘Where did his musical skills come from?’ isn’t the same question as ‘Where did his music come from?’ The latter may prove the more difficult and interesting of the two.
Benjamin received his first semi-formal musical instruction from his mother at the age of five or six; two years later, he began piano lessons with Miss Ethel Astle ARCM, the younger of two sisters who ran the nearby pre-preparatory school called Southolme, at 52 Kirkley Cliff Road. Although he would later praise Miss Astle’s ‘impeccable’ teaching, adding that those with whom he subsequently studied at the Royal College of Music ‘commented on the really first-rate ground-work that I had received’,5 there is no reason to suppose that she was anything much more than a perfectly decent and unexceptional provincial piano teacher. She used the ‘Seppings Music Method’, a rather cumbersome contraption consisting of blocks and cards to be fitted on to wooden staves: like many another ‘progressive’ educational invention of the era, it looks to the uninstructed eye to be more trouble than the conventional grind, although her pupil would remember his ‘early musical days’ with Miss Astle as ‘always interesting and entertaining’.6 She was also a regular participant at Mrs Britten’s fearsome musical soirées where, according to a fellow performer, there was ‘one piece that she always played, and played quite well . . . and it absolutely horrified me, the whole performance’.7 These soirées, though partly designed to show off the musical talents of her younger son, were equally an expression of Edith’s social ambition: the status of dentistry as a profession was ambiguous, so that the Brittens belonged neither to the gentry nor to the tradespeople, and musical parties were one way of joining, or even creating, a cultured social circle. Visitors to the Britten household noticed how, on other occasions, Bobby would have been instructed to play something light and welcoming as the guests arrived; while if Benjamin were playing the square piano in the attic on a warm day with the windows open, a crowd would gather on the pavement beneath to listen. Edith’s apparently fantastic expectations of Benjamin’s musical ability were thus complicated by something altogether more local and pragmatic: music as a means of social advancement. Robert Britten was less bothered than his wife about his status; as for the illustrious prospect of his younger son’s musical career, he thought the whole idea was absurd. His cautious scepticism, it should be added in his defence, sprang less from his hostility to music than from his own experience of disappointed ambitions. Nevertheless, the combination of an obsessively pushy mother and a sternly unconvinced father might have been enough to put a less committed child than Benjamin off music for life.
Among Edith Britten’s circle of musical acquaintances was Audrey Alston, a clergyman’s wife who lived at Framingham Earl, just south of Norwich. Her son John was almost the same age as Benjamin; the two boys would play duets together, each mother privately certain that her own son would be the greater musician. Audrey herself was the viola player in the Norwich String Quartet and in 1923, when he was ten years old, she took Benjamin on as a viola pupil. She was evidently a fine musician and a gifted teacher, but her influence was to be even more momentous in other ways. Firstly, and most simply, she got Ben away from Kirkley Cliff Road, Lowestoft, which contained his entire life: family, home, piano teacher, pre-prep school and prep school. Secondly, she encouraged him to attend concerts in Norwich: since his father refused to have either a gramophone or a radio in the house, his childhood experience of live performance had been restricted to what was possible in the sitting room or at church (he said that his early knowledge of orchestral music came from ‘ploughing through the great symphonies’ in piano duet arrangements with family or friends). Thirdly, she was a friend of the composer Frank Bridge, who stayed with the Alstons when he conducted The Sea at the Norwich Triennial Festival in October 1924 and again three years later when he returned to conduct the premiere of the festival’s commission, Enter Spring. On this occasion, Audrey Alston introduced her promising pupil, still a thirteen-year-old in his last year at prep school, to the composer: it was a meeting which was to have the most profoundly influential and far-reaching consequences for Benjamin Britten’s musical future.
Thus, the answer to the simpler question – ‘Where did his musical skills come from?’ – is actually quite straightforward: from his genes; from his mother and his uncle; from a piano teacher in Suffolk and a viola teacher in Norfolk; from home and church. In all this, his experience was not so different from that of thousands of other children: when he claimed, in 1968, to have ‘come from a very ordinary middle-class family’,8 he was almost telling the truth. Attempting to answer the more difficult question – ‘Where did his music come from?’ – will suggest, among other things, why that ‘almost’ is there.
We need, first of all, to return to Kirkley Cliff: to the fact that it is, precisely, a cliff, although a fairly modest one. The sound of the North Sea – or the German Ocean, as it was still called in 1913 – rattling over the pebbled beach and beating against it was Ben’s constant childhood companion from the day he was born; he once told Donald Mitchell that ‘the sound of rushing water’9 was his earliest memory, although to his sister Beth he said, more prosaically, that the sound he remembered was the gas hissing as he was born. As a boy, he would spend hours on the beach below the family home, often playing a solitary version of tennis against the concrete wall at the foot of the cliff; he was a strong swimmer, too, unintimidated by rough seas or tricky cross-currents. Even when he was a student in London he longed to return to the sea; and, from the moment he bought the Old Mill at Snape in 1937 until his death in 1976, his own permanent home would always be within a mile or two of it. He always needed, he said in 1960, ‘that particular kind of atmosphere that the house on the edge of the sea provides’.10 But if the North Sea can be companionable, it can also be destructive. The Brittens’ aptly named Nanny Walker always took the children on interesting afternoon walks and, when asked where they were going, liked to reply, ‘There and back to see how far it is’:11 a favourite destination was nearby Pakefield, so they could discover whether any more houses had lately fallen over the cliff. Today, the lanes there still peter out uncertainly where other vanished lanes should be, while the parish church stands within a few feet of the coastal path, rather than in a village centre. And the sea has a further effect on the lives of those who grow up or live adjacent to it: the ordinarily accessible world is reduced by half. The inland dweller has four points of the compass and all the directions in between to choose from; the inhabitant of Lowestoft cannot, except by swimming or taking a boat, go anywhere in the 180 degrees between north and south via east. Suffolk coastal places share a sense of being at the end of the road: this genius loci contains feelings of limitation and restraint which can also be intensely creative.
Secondly, there is the matter of young Benjamin’s relationship with his family. His sister Beth said that their mother spoilt her younger son terribly: there was some excuse, for he had been dangerously ill with pneumonia at the age of three months and may only have survived because Edith, who was breastfeeding him, ‘expressed the milk, and fed him with a fountain-pen filler, [when] he was too weak to suck’.12 It was fortunate for Ben, Beth thought, that he hadn’t been an only child, for in that case Edith’s devotion might have been calamitously suffocating; but in crucial respects he was an only child. His brother, with whom he didn’t especially get on, was six years older: too distant, in the telescoped time scheme of childhood, to be useful as a near-contemporary companion and for much of the time away from home as a boarder at Oakham School. His sisters were largely excluded from his private world of music, although Beth would make an exception for the military bands who played on the South Pier, especially the Grenadier Guards, ‘for both Ben and I had a crush on the conductor and would dare each other to speak to him’.13 However, the whole family would participate in plays and pantomimes: at the age of six, Benjamin appeared at the local Sparrow’s Nest Theatre in a production of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, playing the part of Tom, ‘dressed in skin-coloured tights with tiny fins sewn to his shoulders and heels’.14 He also wrote plays of his own, often about what he called ‘The Royal Falily’ (an early and curiously prescient enthusiasm), as well as poems with excruciating Cole Porteresque rhymes: ‘Poor wee pussie cat! / Oh! a matter of fact, / you’re much nicer / than all the mice er!!!’15 But these were in every sense diversions from the main focus of his creative talent. That Robert Britten could appear to be sternly unsympathetic – ‘hard’ on his younger son is a word that recurs in contemporary recollections of him – seems simply to have strengthened Benjamin’s musical resolve, as well as helping to shape a ruthlessly competitive side of his character which was strikingly unlike any stereotype of the sensitive, introverted composer.
Mr Britten made a decent living from dentistry; but with a house to run, including servants and nannies, and four children to educate at fee-paying schools, his resources were often stretched; he was, said his younger daughter, ‘not a mean man, but expenses weighed heavily on him’.16 The composer’s ‘ordinary middle-class’ background certainly included the ordinary middle-class game of keeping up appearances. One such appearance, as we’ve already seen, was the impression created for visitors and passers-by that the household was continually engaged in civilised music-making. Another was the Brittens’ Sunday-morning departure for church in the family car: once there, however, Robert would drop off his wife and children before driving away to call on patients, invariably ending up at a farmhouse pub in the appropriately named village of Sotterley; after Sunday lunch, he would wallow in his weekly hot bath (he took cold baths on weekdays) before setting off to enjoy an evening with his chums at the Royal Yacht Club in Lowestoft. It’s a useful reminder that Robert was a more complex character than he may have at first appeared: although he was a conventionally authoritarian father, who expected his children to stand when he entered a room, there was also a hint of rebellious independence about him. In this combination of opposites, he suddenly seems much more like his younger son than we might otherwise have guessed.
Benjamin’s childhood geographical environment and the tensions within his family both fostered the sense of apartness which is a prerequisite of creativity. So – a little more surprisingly, since it offered nothing in the way of musical education – did his prep school, South Lodge.
Britten supplied his own account of his schooldays at South Lodge in the sleeve note he contributed to the 1955 Decca recording – by the New Symphony Orchestra of London, conducted by Eugene Goossens – of his Simple Symphony:
Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. He was called Britten mi., his initials were E.B., his age was nine, and his locker was number seventeen. He was quite an ordinary little boy; he took his snake-belt to bed with him; he loved cricket, only quite liked football (although he kicked a pretty ‘corner’); he adored mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognised amount, so that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until at the age of thirteen he reached that pinnacle of importance and grandeur never to be quite equalled in later days: the head of the Sixth, head-prefect, and Victor Ludorum. But . . . there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn’t object if his work and games didn’t suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it. I don’t really know when he had time to do it. In those days, long ago, prep-school boys didn’t have much free time; the day started with early work at 7.30, and ended (if you were lucky not to do extra prep.) with prayers at 8.0 – and the hours in between were fully organised. Still there were odd moments in bed, there were half holidays and Sundays too, and somehow these reams and reams got written. And they are still lying in an old cupboard to this day – string quartets (six of them); twelve piano sonatas; dozens of songs; sonatas for violin, sonatas for viola and ’cello too; suites, waltzes, rondos, fantasies, variations; a tone-poem Chaos and Cosmos; a tremendous symphony, for gigantic orchestra including eight horns and oboe d’amore (started on January 17 and finished February 28); an oratorio called Samuel; all the opus numbers from 1 to 100 were filled (and catalogued) by the time Britten mi. was fourteen.
Of course they aren’t very good, these works; inspiration didn’t always run very high, and the workmanship wasn’t always academically sound, and although our composer looked up oboe d’amore in the orchestra books, he hadn’t much of an idea of what it sounded like; besides, for the sake of neatness, every piece had to end precisely at the bottom of the right-hand page, which doesn’t always lead to a satisfactory conclusion. No, I’m afraid they aren’t very great; but when Benjamin Britten, a proud young composer of twenty (who’d already had a work broadcast), came along and looked in this cupboard, he found some of them not too uninteresting; and so, rescoring them for strings, changing bits here and there, and making them more fit for general consumption, he turned them into a SIMPLE SYMPHONY, and here it is.17
Subjecting a sleeve note to close reading might seem odd, but this is an extraordinary document. We need to bear in mind the date, 1955, for two reasons: firstly, because the archness of tone, though unquestionably present, would have seemed far less obtrusive at the time; secondly, because the recent spate of high-profile homosexual arrests and prosecutions – Britten himself was interviewed by the police in December 1953 – made this a dangerous moment for self-revelation. But self-revelation there certainly is, if we care to look for it. To start with, there is the insistence, exactly consistent with his assertion that he came ‘from a very ordinary middle-class family’ but contradicted by almost everything else in the piece, that ‘Britten minor’ – his brother Bobby would have been styled ‘Britten major’ – was ‘quite an ordinary little boy’. In the opening lines, ‘quite’ appears no fewer than four times, and on each occasion its qualifying effect is crucial: here, it means that he wasn’t at all ordinary. In ‘only quite liked football’, it firmly implies that there was something wrong with football, rather than with Britten minor, whose ability to rise above this mundane game is at once confirmed by his kicking ‘a pretty “corner”’ as a casually parenthetical skill. The ‘pinnacle of importance and grandeur never to be quite equalled’, destablised by its ironic ‘quite’, topples towards insignificance; while the mock-modesty of ‘he was quite tough’ manages to suggest that he may have been very tough indeed.
The dated prep-school slang was both an enduring habit – throughout his life, Britten used the School Boy’s Pocket Diary, delightedly entering his personal details in the conventional juvenile fashion – and a code. In fondly recalling his locker number, he discloses his continuing affection or even need for school-like order; while his reference to the snake-belt which he took to bed with him suggests something still more personal, a talismanic, almost fetishistic attachment to objects associated with his schooldays. No one coming across the note in 1955 would have been in the least bothered by the ‘contacts’ with cane and slipper, which were still commonplace implements of prep-school discipline, but an attentive reader might have been struck by the mixture of coyness and relish of ‘left its marks behind’ in the subsequent parenthesis: the merest hint of a preoccupation which was to recur in his work. And as for that ‘pinnacle of importance and grandeur’, it is comical partly because we will more readily associate such terms as ‘the Sixth’ with an eighteen-year-old on his way to university than with a thirteen-year-old at prep school and partly because, even as prep schools go, South Lodge was a small one with fewer than fifty pupils: a school photograph of 1923 shows thirty-seven.18 The hours of study may have been long, but there is no evidence to suggest that the academic standards were at all exceptional. Yet it was precisely this – in the dialectical fashion which is so often the way with creativity – that led the young Britten to compose music: paradoxically, had he been given more time and encouragement to do so at school, he would almost certainly have written much less. South Lodge provided him with the sense of pressure and discipline which would always be a feature of his working habits as a composer. ‘I often thank my stars,’ he said in a 1960 BBC interview with his friend the Earl of Harewood, ‘that I went to a rather strict school where one was made to work and I can, without much difficulty, sit down at 8.30 or 9 o’clock in the morning and work straight through the morning until lunchtime.’19
South Lodge was a tall and exceptionally ugly early-Victorian house on the opposite side of Kirkley Cliff Road, adjacent to the beach and the sea; the school had been founded in 1862. Soon after Britten went there as a day boy in September 1922, its proprietor, ‘an ancient clergyman named Phillips’,20 sold it to his mathematics master, Thomas Jackson Elliott Sewell MA MC, known to parents as ‘The Captain’ and to pupils as ‘The Beak’. Sewell was not just a close neighbour of the Brittens; he had taught Ben’s elder brother Bobby and courted his twenty-year-old sister Barbara, before dropping her in favour of a young woman whose dowry enabled him to buy the school. Since this completely disrupted Barbara’s life – she left home, trained as a health visitor in London and formed a relationship with an older woman, whom even the Britten parents must have recognised as a lesbian – it seems a little strange that Sewell remained sufficiently in favour with the family for Ben to have been sent to his school; but the compensatory advantages included proximity to home and to his music teacher, Ethel Astle, as well as relative cheapness compared with boarding at some more distant establishment. Yet it seems that he may have boarded briefly at South Lodge – perhaps while his parents were away from home for some reason – since, in the Harewood interview quoted above, he said that he ‘used to disconcert the other children by writing music in the dormitory and all that kind of thing’.21
His days there were less cloudless than he later chose to recall. Although records of South Lodge are sparse – the school, which was twice destroyed by fire,22 moved premises several times, ending up at Old Buckenham Hall in Norfolk – it’s clear that ‘Britten mi.’ spent much of his time towards the bottom of his form. Like his father, he notably failed to subscribe to some aspects of the place’s conservative orthodoxy: a master, perhaps Sewell himself, once barked at him, ‘Stand up the boy whose father voted Liberal!’23 In his final term, he wrote an essay on the subject of ‘Animals’ which caused deep offence and received a mark of nought because it protested against bloodsports and cruelty instead of taking the approved pro-hunting, pro-shooting line: he thus anticipated the adult self who in 1931 would set to music W. H. Davies’s anti-hunting poem ‘Sport’ and in 1936 compose Our Hunting Fathers in collaboration with Auden. The Britten scholar Mervyn Cooke says that, as a result of the ‘Animals’ essay, Britten ‘left his prep school in disgrace’,24 but this is an overstatement: both his mathematical ability and his outstanding success in the Associated Board’s music exams had made him too conspicuous a favourite of Sewell’s to be undone by a single essay. Even though there was ‘no music at all’ at South Lodge, according to Britten (apart, he added, from ‘the end of each term, on the last evening’ when ‘we sang some songs’),25 Sewell was shrewd enough to realise that this remarkable young musician, whom he envisaged as a future concert pianist rather than as a composer, might bring honour and prestige to the school. Britten was also a successful sportsman, vice captain of his school’s cricket team and junior county tennis champion, yet even on the cricket pitch he wouldn’t be allowed to forget his musical destiny. ‘For this reason,’ his schoolfriend Alan Lyon, who was the team captain, remembered, ‘he always had to field in the deep and when a high ball was hit to him the Headmaster, Captain Sewell, fearing for his fingers, would shout from the boundary, “You’re not to catch it, Britten! You’re not to catch it!”’26
Although Sewell was an able teacher of mathematics and of classics, this is not why he was chiefly remembered by his pupils. One recalled that he was ‘very fond of beating boys – which one didn’t understand in those days . . . at that age. But obviously there must have been a little bit of a fixation.’27 ‘You got beaten on the slightest pretext, with a hell of a palaver,’ said Britten’s South Lodge friend John Pounder. ‘For really extra special beatings the whole school was assembled, and the criminal was brought out before them, and then was led away to a dormitory above the school room. We always said that Sewell liked beating boys, but we were much too frightened to complain.’28 Sewell, according to another contemporary, removed boys’ trousers and underpants before beating them ‘to enable me to see what I am doing’.29 Interviewed by the Guardian in 1971, Britten said: ‘I can remember the first time – I think it was the very first day that I was in a school – that I heard a boy being beaten, and I can remember my absolute astonishment that people didn’t immediately rush to help him. And to find that it was sort of condoned and accepted was something that shocked me very much.’30 That is a different tone from his 1955 recollection of South Lodge, and a different kind of partial truth: what he didn’t – and couldn’t – say on either occasion was that Sewell’s fondness for beating ‘left its marks behind’ in a more complicated psychological way. It would be naive to accept at face value the suggestion that Britten was simply dismayed by violent corruption of the young, which is why it became a recurring theme in his work; there’s too much obsession and excitement for that to be the whole truth. But what we might more usefully do is to accept calmly that his sexual character contained a sadomasochistic element which he transformed into a source of creative energy while, no less admirably, treating the sequence of boys to whom he became devoted with exemplary gentleness and generosity.
It makes even less sense than usual to speak, in Britten’s case, of his being young or old ‘for his age’. He acquired ‘from the very first day I was in a school’ – and by this he obviously means South Lodge rather than the tiny and innocent Southolme – an awareness of the power and excitement of violence, but that doesn’t imply that he could yet connect it with anything sexual. He was out of phase with himself: in some respects, precociously well informed; in others, startlingly innocent. And this was partly a consequence of the confined geographical orbit in which he lived: many boys, at nine or ten years old, do some significant growing up while talking dirty in a gaggle on the bus or train home from school, but Britten’s home was just along the road; even the traditional rituals of cigarettes, obscenities and sexual exploration ‘behind the bike sheds’ would have been denied to a serious boy who didn’t need a bike to get there and who, when the long school day was over, mainly wanted to go home and compose. Moreover, he remained in this highly protective environment for an unusually long time, not going on to board at Gresham’s School, Holt, until he was nearly fifteen.
Nevertheless, some transforming experience seems to have occurred towards the end of his final year at South Lodge, 1927–8. It was, in any case, a momentous time for him, the year in which he achieved all those unrepeatable schoolboy honours as well as the year in which he met the composer Frank Bridge: he possessed the outward confidence of a talented boy who knew exactly where he wanted his talent to take him. There could hardly have been a more auspicious moment for some sort of sexual awakening to take place. Much later he told the director and librettist Eric Crozier that he had been ‘raped by a master at his school’: he didn’t say which school, and the absence of a qualifying adjective such as ‘prep’ or ‘private’ suggests that he was referring to his public school, Gresham’s, rather than South Lodge. But assuming (for the time being) that he was talking about South Lodge, he didn’t say ‘headmaster’: so he would have meant not Sewell but one of the assistant masters, who in prep schools were often young men filling in a year before or after university. It may well have been a provocative remark designed to disconcert a professional colleague with whom he had a fairly edgy relationship, although the biographer Humphrey Carpenter pointed his suspicious finger at an ‘opportunity’ suggested by Britten’s diary entry for 13 June 1928: ‘Set off to play Match against Taverham, but I only get 1/2 way and I go back to School in Capt. Sewell’s car as I am not well. Lie down at school and come home after and go to bed.’31 But after three days’ illness, he returned to his diary – and to an entry unmentioned by Carpenter – on 17 June: ‘Am much better, go to the Colemans’ to tea, I got up at 12 o’clock . . . Rewrite some songs, written on Friday and Saturday namely Dans les bois, and begin to rewrite Nuits de Juin.’32 Was this, for young Benjamin Britten, the moment in childhood when a door opens and lets the future in?33
Probably it was. But I suspect that the way in which the door opened for him was far less sensational, though no less profound, than Carpenter suggested. For this was the year in which his friendships with two of his South Lodge contemporaries – John Pounder and, especially, Francis Barton – became intensified by the emotional force of adolescence and further sharpened by the sense that, with his imminent departure from the school, they might be about to end (although, as we shall see, they both continued well into adulthood). Francis, the son of a Sussex clergyman, was a lively, bright boy who looked and was, but didn’t act, two years younger than Ben. There’s a charming photograph, taken that summer term, of the pair smiling from an open railway-carriage window at Lowestoft station: perhaps they’re setting off for one of those away cricket fixtures, wearing their badged South Lodge caps, Ben in a smart jacket and prefectorial tie, Francis in his striped blazer. Francis, leaning over Ben’s outstretched arm, grins with impish dimpled pleasure; yet Ben’s smile has something more subtle and complex, even proprietorial, about it. Surely, he was in love: though this wasn’t a word he could have used to Francis, in the privacy of his dreams or his creative consciousness he can’t have had much doubt about it. Those three days of illness, so near the end of the summer term, may well have been the catalyst which transformed his emotional turmoil into astonishingly mature musical utterance: he began work on the Quatre Chansons Françaises, his first truly adult compositions. The future had definitely been let in.
Britten’s extravagant-looking claim, in his 1955 note, that by the time he was fourteen ‘all the opus numbers from 1 to 100 were filled (and catalogued)’ is actually a massive understatement. According to the definitive catalogue of his juvenilia prepared by the Britten–Pears Foundation in 2009,34 he had composed no fewer than 534 works by the end of 1927, which was shortly after his fourteenth birthday; the peak year was 1925 (128 works), closely followed by 1926 (108). Not all of these would have been granted the honour of an opus number, of course, but the sheer quantity of effort, energy and invention is staggering. The earliest surviving piece – a song entitled ‘Do you no my Daddy has gone to London today’ – dates from 1919, when Britten was five or six years old. The following year, he composed another song, ‘The rabbits stand around and hold the lights’, which clearly illustrates his fascination with the ‘dots and dashes’ and the musical sounds they might represent, although he had yet to grasp the exact connection between them: ‘I am afraid it was the pattern on the paper which I was interested in and when I asked my mother to play it, her look of horror upset me considerably.’35ffppf