Benjamin Britten: Life and Times
A short audio documentary in two parts
A short audio documentary in two parts
written and presented by Jane Potter
with Roger Carr as the voice of Britten
audio editing and sound design by Jack Goodison
produced by Ashley Daniel Foot and Jane Potter
You can also download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify
ACT ONE
The date is June 7, 1945, just one month after Victory over Europe Day marked the end of WW2. The location is the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, newly reopened after wartime closure, and the event is the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s new opera, Peter Grimes……
ACT TWO
Benjamin Britten was a famously reluctant participant in interviews, preferring to keep the spotlight on others rather than himself. The Proust Questionnaire, with its predetermined questions, and no follow-ups, may have been more to his liking. Join us now as Benjamin Britten completes the questionnaire, with answers both real and imagined, as we think he would have responded.
ACT ONE TRANSCRIPT
The date is June 7, 1945, just one month after Victory over Europe Day marked the end of WW2. The location is the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, newly reopened after wartime closure, and the event is the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s new opera, Peter Grimes.
The opera, based on a poem by George Crabbe, about an outsider living in a small fishing village on the Suffolk coast, is hailed as a return to culture after the war years and lauded by critics and opera-goers alike. But more importantly the opera is a turning point for its composer, Benjamin Britten, launching him from promising young composer to instant international stardom. This newfound success paved the way for the composition of some of Britten’s most well-known works including Billy Budd in 1951, Gloriana in 1953, War Requiem in 1962, and, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1960.
But who was Benjamin Britten?
On November 22, 1913, just seven months before the outbreak of WW1, Edward Benjamin Britten was born, the youngest of four, to his parents Robert Victor Britten and Edith Rhoda in the coastal Suffolk town of Lowestoft.
While Britten’s father was a dentist with little interest in music, his mother, Edith, was a talented amateur musician who fostered her son’s early love of music. She was his first piano teacher and his first accompanist, gamely attempting Britten’s first composition, a song written at the age of five or six, and entitled: “Do you Know my Daddy has Gone to London Today?” (p20). Britten later said it was the pattern of the notes on the page rather than their musicality that appealed to him.
However, it didn’t take long for his uncommon musical gifts to come to light and, despite attending a school where music was not taught, Britten spent any spare moment on composition. Remarkably, by the time he was 15 years old in 1927, he had composed no less than 534 works, (p20) and all this in the face of a weak heart and bouts of illness that plagued him from infancy throughout his childhood, and into his adult life.
At 15, Britten was sent to boarding school at Gresham’s, an experience he did not enjoy, referring to the school as an ‘abominable hole’. Mercifully his time there was cut short when, at the age of 17, Britten won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal College of Music in London, where he spent three years under the tutelage of the famous composers John Ireland and Vaughn Williams, among others.
It was during his time at the Royal College that Britten became acquainted with other modernist 20th century composers such as Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Mahler. Britten’s admiration for Mahler lasted his lifetime, something which cannot be said for some of Britten’s other influences, such as the poet W.H. Auden, with whom Britten struck up a friendship when the two worked together composing for films and documentaries for the British Broadcasting Company, the BBC, in the mid 1930s.
During this period of Britten’s life, two major events occurred. The first was the death of his beloved mother from a heart attack in 1937 at age 67, and the second was Britten’s introduction to Peter Pears through mutual friends. Pears, three years older than Britten and a trained tenor, hit it off immediately with Britten. By 1939, they were a couple, both personally, and professionally.
In 1939, Pears planned a trip to Canada and America. Auden had also left the UK for America to escape the imminent war, and it didn’t take much for Britten to make the decision to join Pears. As ardent pacifists and conscientious objectors, both Britten and Pears chose to remain in the US as artistic ambassadors until 1942 avoiding service in the war effort back in the UK.
Despite being gay in a country where homosexuality was considered illegal until 1967, Britten and Pears’ relationship thrived, lasting forty years. Unfortunately, Britten’s friendship with Auden did not. In 1953 Auden sent Britten a letter critiquing his most recent opera, Gloriana. Britten did not receive criticism well, and returned the letter, in pieces in the envelope, to Auden. From that moment, Auden became one of Britten’s corpses, as they came to be known: former friends and acquaintances with whom Britten cut off all communication following a perceived snub, or criticism.
One of Britten and Pears’ best-known collaborations is Britten’s opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which both Britten and Pears wrote the libretto from the original play by Shakespeare.
Britten’s creative process depended much on his surroundings and this was certainly the case for A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, where two weeks in Venice provided the perfect location to nurture his creativity, as he wrote in a letter to a friend:
“The place is bewilderingly lovely in this summer weather, and I’m now developing a nice routine of work all morning, picnic lunch in some quiet square usually, if possible, containing a masterpiece, wandering around churches and galleries in the afternoon, more work in the evening, and experimenting with out-of-the-way restaurants in the evenings! The opera is just beginning to stir, but too young yet to know if it’s going to be an obedient or intractable child, interesting or boring…”
The young opera matured and Britten completed A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1960. The opera premiered on June 11, 1960 at Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh to wide critical acclaim. The production was moved to London and staged at Covent Gardens in 1961, and has enjoyed many revivals in the years since.
Britten’s rise to the top as a preeminent British composer of the 20th century was cemented by this time, and no one would have begrudged him his retirement, especially considering his poor health. But never one to waste a single moment, Britten completed two more full operas: Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice, and countless other orchestral, vocal, and choral works over the next 15 years. One of Britten’s most famous works, War Requiem, written to commemorate the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after it had been destroyed in heavy bombing during WW2, was premiered in 1962 to much critical fanfare. It remains one of his best known and most loved works to this day.
The decline of Britten’s health took a sharp turn in 1971 when doctors told him a faulty heart valve would have to be replaced if he wanted to stay alive. Having just begun work on what would be his final opera, Death in Venice, Britten somehow managed to complete the opera and see it on stage before allowing himself to undergo the surgery he so desperately needed. In May 1973, the valve replacement was successfully completed. Unfortunately, Britten suffered a small stroke during the surgery which affected his right arm, ending his career as a musician.
In 1976, Britten was awarded a life peerage for his lifetime of contribution to music in Great Britain, and became Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. Sadly, his health continued to decline and on December 4th, 1976, Britten died of heart failure, in the arms of his love, Peter Pears. Despite offers from Westminster Abbey that he be interred there, Britten’s grave can be found right where he wanted it: in the churchyard at the Parish church in Aldeburgh, next to Peter Pears, who was buried there following his death ten years later.
ACT TWO TRANSCRIPT
What is your favourite virtue? “I believe that the artist must be consciously a human being. He must not lock himself in an ivory tower.”
Who are your heroes in real life? “I have been enormously influenced by Henry Purcell. He’s been gone 250 years now but I have said before, one of my chief aims is to try and restore to the musical setting of the English Language, a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell.” (240)
What do you appreciate the most in your friends: “Loyalty. You don’t want to become one of my ‘corpses’ as they’re called. I do wonder what possesses a friend to turn to criticism. I find it very harmful and wish to have nothing further to do with such an individual. Naturally, this sort of response is also one of my main faults. I can’t seem to just brush it off, as some would have me do.”
What is your idea of happiness? “I don’t honestly think I can write in a vacuum. I get inspiration, I get incentive, for writing for people. That is my greatest pleasure”
What is your idea of misery “The whole of my life has been devoted to acts of creation (being by profession a composer) and I cannot take part in acts of destruction. War is my idea of misery.
Where would you like to live? “I find big cities distracting. I’ve always liked the country life since I was a child, particularly the sea. I have very deep roots in Suffolk, and I cannot work and live without roots. Suffolk, the birthplace and inspiration of Constable and Gainsborough, the loveliest of English Painters, the ome of Crabbe, that most English of Poets; Suffolk with its rolling intimate countryside; its heavenly Gothic churches, big and small; its marshes, with htose wild sea birds; its grand ports and its little fishing villages. I am firmly rooted in this glorious county. And I proved this to myself when I once tried to live somewhere else. Even when i visit countries as glorious as Italy, as friendly as Denmark or Holland — I am always homesick, and glad to get back to Suffolk. I expect I’ve answered more than one of your questions with that answer.”
Who are your favourite poets? Longfellow, Kipling, Walter De La Mere, and of course, Auden. So many of my compositions are the works of famous poets set to music, it would be awfully difficult to name a favourite. Added to the above list would be John Donne, Shakespeare, George Crabbe, Wilfred Owen. I’m sure to have left out some very important names from this list.”
Who are your favourite composers: Favourite? Henry Purcell of course, and now Gustav Mahler, Stravinsky, and Shostokovitch. Berg. I must include Frank Bridge in this group. I’m most grateful to him for having taught me to take infinite trouble over getting every note quite right. He used to perform the most terrible operations on the music I would rather confidently show him. He would play every passage slowly on the piano and say, “Now listen to this — is this what you meant?” And of course, I would start by defending it, but then one would realize as one — as he went on playing this passage over and over again — that one hadn’t really thought enough about it.”
What is your idea of perfect happiness? A game of Happy Families with Peter and my sister Beth and the others on Boxing Day of course. Followed by a go at a new puzzle. I suppose one must mention one’s profession in response to these sorts of questions, but I am afraid we’d be here all day if I started down that road.
What is your greatest fear? I’ve never stopped to ponder fear -one simply doesn’t have the time when an opera needs finishing, but if I had to answer, it would of course be something awful happening to someone one loves. After that, it would be failure.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I suppose if one is honest about oneself then the answer must be, a lack of self-confidence. I have awful self-doubt and then when the critics start, I simply lose any remaining shreds of confidence and tend to lash out, and in the process, lose friends as well.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? “There should be no such profession as criticism… Criticism must be a sideline. To go through life living off other people’s work clearly has too degrading an effect.
On what occasion do you lie? In 1953, the police paid Peter and me a visit, at the urging of Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe. They were enforcing anti-homosexuality laws in place in Great Britain at the time. We of course downplayed our relationship and no further action was taken. But you know afterwards, I was frightfully worried, and went so far as to suggest to Peter he engage in a sham marriage to keep them off our backs. He refused, rightfully so, and there was no further talk of it.
What or who is the greatest love of your life? That is an easy one. Peter Pears.
What do you consider your greatest achievement? For lasting effect, I feel that Aldeburgh Festival, which has been held every year since 1948, and which Her Majesty attended in 1967 when she so graciously opened the new concert Hall at Snape Maltings, and attended again in 1970 following the rebuild of the concert hall after the fire of 1969. The thing about the Festival, is that the entire town takes part in its production, and we all delight in it.
Musically, I believe the Cello Symphony I wrote in 1963 is the finest thing I’ve written.(382) “[209]
What is your most treasured possession? I have many favoured possessions but in particular what comes to mind is a deck of Happy Families playing cards painted for me by my dear friends Mary Potter. She used local Aldeburgh residents for the different families and we had to keep the deck a secret to avoid offending them, the residents of the village, you know.
What is a word you overuse? “wonderful, maybe ‘frightfully’
What is your most marked characteristic? “ I have a particular inclination as a composer to write music that is useful. If someone asks me to do something, my inclination is to want to please them.”
What is it that you most dislike? “If an artist has everything too easy, sometimes the thing become a little too glib. If he knows he can have as big an orchestra as he wants, say he thinks of 17 bass clarinets, that is not a healthy thing. He must trim his art into the form it is most suited to.
How would you like to die? Peacefully, in the arms of my dear Peter.