Benjamin Britten was born in Suffolk and lived almost all his life in that most easterly county of England. Few 20th-century artists have remained so closely in touch with their roots as Britten. Staying near to where he was born helped him to maintain contact with the childhood world to which he so often returned in his music, and with the sea – a constant stimulus for his life and his work.
The Britten family lived in the fishing port of Lowestoft, in a house overlooking the North Sea. In later life Britten was to make his home in the nearby town of Aldeburgh, where for some years he had a house right on the seafront. Elias Canetti suggested – surely correctly – that the sea is the national symbol for the English, as the forest is for the Germans. The English landscape may have inspired more music, and landscape painting is perhaps our foremost contribution to the visual arts; yet the sea, which offers, in Canetti’s words, ‘transformation and danger’,1 has a more potent hold on the English imagination. No composer, not even Debussy, has evoked the sea more powerfully than Britten in his opera Peter Grimes, the work that made him famous. Britten’s first memory, he told his friend and publisher Donald Mitchell, was the sound of rushing water2 as he was being born – but can one possibly remember one’s own birth? Might he not have been recalling the sound of the sea, the constant background to his childhood?
His family, Britten said, was very ordinary middle-class3 – a somewhat misleading remark, as there was nothing ordinary about Britten’s childhood. His father, Robert, was a dentist with a successful practice, but he disliked his job and if there had been enough money in the family he would have become a farmer. He was not musical, and would probably have preferred his son to choose another career than the precarious life of a musician; his wife, however, overruled him. In photographs his hooded eyes make him look a little sinister, though he seems to have been a kindly if strict father, who was known to his children as ‘Pop’, was fond of whisky, played golf and liked to go for long walks. Despite his misgivings about his son’s fanatical devotion to music, he was proud of him: he clearly recognised that Benjamin was unusual, and he was not unresponsive to his special qualities. In his diary for 18 August 1928, aged 14, Britten wrote: Daddy remarks, in the evening, that I will be a terrible one for love, and that when the time comes I will think that my love is different from any other and that it is the love. Britten writes REMEMBER alongside this insightful piece of advice. The letters from ‘Pop’ to Benjamin and his sister Beth, quoted in her book about her brother, are affectionate, if sometimes a little awkwardly expressed.
When Robert Britten was 24 he married Edith Hockey, who was four years older. Hers was the artistic side of the family: her brother Willie became organist of a church in Ipswich and directed the Ipswich Choral Society; another brother was also a church organist, and her sister Queenie was a painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. There were also skeletons in the family cupboard: Edith’s father had been born out of wedlock – the family story was that her grandfather had been an aristocrat – and her mother became an alcoholic and spent some of her life in what Beth Britten calls ‘a home for inebriates’.4 Edith was a beautiful woman, as her engagement photograph shows: such a girl as even I could lose my heart to,5 Britten wrote shortly after her death. Music came to play a central role in her life. She was a keen amateur singer, who sang with the Lowestoft Musical Society, for which she acted as Secretary. The choir gave concerts at the Evangelical church which she attended regularly, though her husband did not. She also loved to perform at home, singing songs by Schubert and Roger Quilter among others, with ‘Beni’ accompanying her. She also played piano duets with him, as she was a capable pianist. Her voice was mezzo-soprano and, as Britten’s boyhood friend Basil Reeve noticed (and his sister Beth agreed), uncannily similar in tone to that of Britten’s partner in adult life, the tenor Peter Pears.
Edith’s fourth and last child, Edward Benjamin (his first name was soon dropped), was born on 22 November 1913, the day consecrated to St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians. He was a lovely boy, with blue eyes and golden curly hair, and he became his mother’s favourite. His health was never robust: at the age of three months he almost died of pneumonia, and he had a congenitally weak heart that was ultimately responsible for his premature death. He did not sleep well, and Edith often had to sing him to sleep. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of this archetypal maternal practice to Britten’s psyche and to his later artistic development. In adult life, Britten was never entirely able to trust the outside world. How many of us can, one might ask? Yet Britten’s uneasiness was extreme, and his music reveals it: his world is a place of danger and often of terror, where innocence is readily corrupted. There can be temporary reassurance in beauty and in love, but sleep is the only sure place where security and trust may be regained. The image of sleep as a refuge is something that Britten returns to again and again in his music: in the Serenade, the Nocturne, the War Requiem. The idyllically happy ending of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is possible because the opera is a dream. In all these works it is the singing voice that brings balm, and especially the voice of Peter Pears, who in many ways took on the maternal role in Britten’s life after her death.
Edith had been disappointed that her other children, Robert, the eldest of the four, and the two sisters Barbara and Beth, had shown no special aptitude for music, though Robert had learnt the violin. Benjamin was different. He started playing the piano, he said, as soon as I could walk,6 and was soon improvising experimentally and trying to write down what he played. His mother helped him to learn the rudiments of piano technique, and at seven he began formal lessons with Miss Ethel Astle, one of the mistresses at his first school. He quickly showed great talent as a pianist, and started to compose in earnest. Edith did all she could to encourage him. Many successful children benefit from an ambitious mother, and few mothers have been so ruthlessly ambitious as Mrs Britten. She completely dominated Benjamin’s early life; as Basil Reeve observed, she was ‘determined that he should be a great musician’.7 She would soon be telling friends that her son would be ‘The Fourth B’ after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms (and perhaps she was right). Because Britten was the centre of her attention, the object of her most fervent love, he soon came to believe that he was special, someone around whom the world should revolve.
At the age of eight he was sent to a nearby preparatory school, South Lodge, as a day boy. Most of the other pupils were boarders. Britten enjoyed learning mathematics, which was taught by the headmaster, Thomas Sewell, and was enthusiastic about games, especially cricket; but he was shocked by the spectacle of other boys being beaten (he mostly managed to stay out of trouble himself). For his ninth birthday his Uncle Willie gave him Stainer and Barrett’s A Dictionary of Musical Terms, and soon afterwards his attempts at composing became more sophisticated. Among his first proper compositions was a set of ‘Twelve Songs for the Mezzo Soprano and Contralto Voice’; they included a setting of Burns’s ‘O that I had ne’er been married’, and ‘Beware’ to words by Longfellow. It is a little disconcerting to find the texts of both these songs are warnings against women. ‘Beware’ was clearly an important song for Britten, since he copied it out a number of times. The two stanzas that Britten set are as follows:
I know a maiden fair to see,
Take care!
She can both false and friendly be,
Beware! Beware!
Trust her not,
She is fooling thee!
She has two eyes, so soft and brown,
Take care!
She gives a side-glance and looks down,
Beware! Beware!
Trust her not,
She is fooling thee!
No doubt his mother sang these words with her son at the piano; one wonders what she made of them. They are a telling reflection of the intensity of the mother–son relationship, which must have contained hate as well as love. The avowals of love from Britten’s side are plain to see: one of his earliest surviving letters (from November 1923) is signed With tons and cwts and lbs and ozs of pakages of Love, Your own tiny little (sick-for-Muvver) BENI.8 Later letters read even more like those of a lover: You will come, won’t you darling, when the snow has gone and when I am better and allowed to go out with you? Please, please, do!, Britten pleads in a letter from his public school in February 1929, a letter which is signed your worshipping, adoring loving (etc) son.9 Edith in turn demanded much from her son: a weekly ritual was to play duets every Sunday afternoon on the piano in the upstairs drawing room (the room that Mr Britten called ‘Heaven’). There was a specially prescribed piece: the Siegfried Idyll, the song of love that Wagner had composed as a present for his wife Cosima shortly after the birth of their son Siegfried. It was re-enacted as a love duet between Britten and his mother. At this time, and for many years afterwards each of them was the centre of the other’s emotional life. It hardly needs to be said that Mrs Britten was powerfully influencing the course of her son’s emotional development and very likely his sexuality, although the consequences would not become apparent until much later.
Despite his long school day – from 7:30 in the morning until 8 at night – by the age of 11 Britten was producing enormous quantities of music, at first mostly for piano solo. In 1934 he selected a few of these early pieces and rewrote them for strings to make his Simple Symphony, and much later, in 1970, he had ‘Five Walztes’ published (he preserved the child’s spelling). Otherwise, in adult life he was quite nonchalant about his early compositions. These soon became more ambitious: from March 1925 to July 1926 he worked intermittently on a large-scale mass for soloists, chorus (often in eight parts) and an accompaniment which at first is a piano reduction but by the Credo has become a short score with instrumental indications. The Mass fills four notebooks: at the end of the fourth – in the middle of the Credo – it suddenly stops. The skilful choral writing had resulted from hearing his mother’s choir and studying vocal scores of pieces she was singing, such as Handel’s Messiah or Stainer’s Crucifixion; his knowledge of the repertoire at this time was almost entirely derived from scores he saw and played through, as there was no gramophone or wireless in the house. He had, however, also begun viola lessons in 1923 with Audrey Alston, a friend of Mrs Britten. Mrs Alston played in a string quartet in Norwich; Britten went to some of their concerts and on 30 October 1924 he attended his first orchestral concert, at the Norwich Triennial Festival, where he heard a piece by a living British composer, Frank Bridge’s The Sea, and in his own words he was knocked sideways.10 It is telling that it should have been a work inspired by the sea that so affected him; and interesting to note that three of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes in Peter Grimes correspond to movements in Bridge’s work. This opens with a depiction of a calm sea, with evocative phrases on violins, woodwind and harp, like Britten’s ‘Dawn’; its third movement is called ‘Moonlight’ and the finale is an evocation of a storm.
The next Triennial Festival, in 1927, was the occasion for the premiere of Bridge’s orchestral masterpiece Enter Spring. Britten was again present, and he was introduced to Bridge, who was staying with the Alstons. Bridge had only to talk to Britten for a few minutes before he realised that the boy was quite exceptional. Britten showed him some of his music and Bridge, greatly impressed, suggested that he should come to London during his school holidays for composition lessons with him, and for piano lessons with his friend Harold Samuel, who taught at the Royal College of Music. Despite some opposition from Britten’s parents – his father in particular was suspicious of Bridge’s flamboyant personality – it was agreed that Britten would begin lessons in the Christmas holidays. So began one of the classic musical apprenticeships, and a deep friendship that continued until Bridge’s death in 1941. He and his wife Ethel had no children, and Britten soon became a substitute son for them. Bridge’s letters, witty and wise, testify to the warmth of the relationship. Britten’s side of the correspondence is unfortunately lost. Bridge was a demanding teacher: his lessons were long and, as Britten recalled, often I used to end these marathons in tears; not that he was beastly to me, but the concentrated strain was too much for me.11 Bridge’s method was to play every passage slowly on the piano and say, ‘Now listen to this – is this what you meant?’… And he really taught me to take as much trouble as I possibly could over every passage, over every progression, over every line.12
Britten’s studies with Bridge soon bore fruit. Although Beethoven and Brahms were to remain his chief musical gods throughout his teenage years (and Beethoven well into his twenties), the 14-year-old, encouraged by his teacher, was now getting to know the music of contemporary composers and beginning to explore a more advanced musical idiom. In the past two years he had been writing orchestral music in earnest: between April 1926 and the time he met Bridge he had composed two large-scale overtures, five Poèmes, a Suite fantastique for piano and orchestra, a Symphony in D minor for huge orchestra including eight horns and oboe d’amore (117 pages of full score in five weeks of term-time at South Lodge, during which he also composed two of the Poèmes!) and a big Lisztian symphonic poem, Chaos and Cosmos. Two more orchestral pieces were composed in the first months of 1928, and show the influence of Bridge’s orchestral writing.
None of these works, however, is quite as remarkable as the Quatre chansons françaises he wrote in the summer of 1928 as a wedding anniversary present for his parents. Romantic world-weariness, a common enough symptom of adolescence, is expressed here in a sophisticated and exquisitely imagined way. In April he had heard a recording of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune and bought the score of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro; his new-found interest in those composers encouraged him to set the French language, which he does with assurance. It also gave him a model for an orchestral sound, though some of his sonorities are also quite original, for instance his use of piano and harp together. The harmony veers off in places towards what sounds like Bergian Expressionism (Bridge probably had a score of Wozzeck that Britten had seen). In his setting of Hugo’s ‘L’enfance’, where a mother lies dying while her five-year-old son innocently sings (a very Brittenish subject, though a somewhat morbid one in the context of a piece written for his parents’ anniversary), Britten weaves a French nursery rhyme in and out of the texture in a very Debussyian way; the final song, Verlaine’s ‘Chanson d’Autonne’, ends with a Tristanesque cadence on the word ‘morte’ in the Liebestod’s closing key of B major (notated by Britten as C flat). Britten owned thirteen Wagner miniature scores at this time, and his enthusiasm for Wagner, and for Tristan especially, went on for some years. He is the master of us all,13 he wrote in 1933. Was it because he soon outgrew this late-Romanticism that he made no attempt to have these extraordinary songs played during his lifetime? They were not performed until 1980, but they have since taken their place in the repertory as an example of youthful genius almost equal to that of Mozart and Mendelssohn.
Britten’s largely happy time at South Lodge School now came to a close. He had ended up as head boy and Victor Ludorum (champion at games), though he blotted his copybook by writing an end-of-term essay on ‘Animals’ which turned into an attack on hunting and went on to condemn all forms of aggression, especially war. The essay was the first statement of his lifelong commitment to pacifism, which had been stimulated by talking to Bridge about the First World War; it shocked his teachers and he received no marks. In September 1928 he became a boarder at a public school about 50 miles from his home, Gresham’s School at Holt, in Norfolk, to which he had won a music scholarship. The poets WH Auden and Stephen Spender and the composer Lennox Berkeley had all been pupils there. Gresham’s was quite progressive for its day: boys were not forced to join the Officers’ Training Corps (and so Britten did not) and the music department was well established, with a school orchestra and regular chamber concerts. In spite of this, Britten was immediately and seriously unhappy. The swearing and vulgarity14 of his fellow pupils disgusted him, and he took a dislike to the music master, Walter Greatorex, who criticised his piano playing and was scornful of his love of Beethoven. Greatorex little realised what heresy he was committing. This was the boy who after listening to the Kreisler recording of the Violin Concerto had written in his diary: Oh! Beethoven, thou art immortal; has anything ever been written like the pathos of the 1st & 2nd movements, and the joy of the last?,15 and for whom the gift from his parents of the full score of Fidelio on his sixteenth birthday was a red letter day16 in his life. Britten in turn was highly critical of Greatorex. His diary, which he had begun at the beginning of 1928 and which he continued with daily entries for the next nine years, contains a number of caustic comments about him: how ever the man got the job here I cannot imagine. His idea of rhythm, logic, tone, or the music is absolutely lacking in sanity.17 (It is worth noting that this was a view markedly different from that of both Spender and Auden: the latter thought he was a musician ‘of the first rank’18 and compared his playing of Bach on the organ to Albert Schweitzer.) Greatorex’s attitude was no doubt influenced by his resentment that Britten was going elsewhere for piano and composition lessons; what is more, the precocious confidence of Britten’s musical opinions must have been a threat to his authority.
Britten longed for home and for the beloved mother who had sent him away. It is now that his letters to her rise to a new pitch of intimacy and painful intensity. His diary too – which until its last few years is mostly an unemotional record of things done – underlines his loneliness. Shortly after the start of the new term in January 1929, he became ill with ’flu and spent much of the term in the sickroom. He was finally sent home to recuperate, and the day after returning to school he recorded: I spend probably one of the most miserable days in all my life. Lying in bed in the dormetry, feeling absolutely rotten. Yearning for home and everybody there. Am sick once in morning. Why did they send me back, to go to bed directly?19 It is hard not to draw the conclusion that the prolongation of his illness was to a certain extent psychologically motivated. By remaining ill he could be certain of attracting the care and attention he sought. And he could read books as well as write music: bed was a favourite place to work. During this particular illness, he read Elizabeth von Arnim’s Caravaners, Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea and Scott’s Rob Roy. He composed a Rhapsody for string quartet, his most ‘advanced’ piece to date, which caused him much trouble. His music was now similar in style to the chamber pieces that Frank Bridge was writing, such as the Third String Quartet and the Rhapsody Trio for two violins and viola – a work that much later, in 1966, Britten was responsible for seeing into print.
More chamber works followed, each more radical than its predecessor. Several of these pieces were for Britten to play during the holidays with his friends Basil Reeve (piano) and Charles Coleman (violin). The Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano, composed in November and December 1929, are atonal in places. In his diary for 29 November he wrote: I am thinking much about modernism in art. Debating whether Impressionism, Expressionism, Classicism etc. are right. I have half decided on Schönberg. I adore Picasso’s pictures.20 A few months later, hearing a marvellous Schönberg concert21 on the radio, which included a performance of Pierrot lunaire, he is more positive about the controversial composer. It was just at this time (April 1930) that he was writing his Quartettino for string quartet, which marked almost the fullest point he reached, though it is still centred on C sharp, the note on which it begins and ends. His later music would sometimes employ both a high level of dissonance and a blurring of tonality (for instance the grinding climax of the first movement of the Spring Symphony, or the first movement of the Third Quartet) but, with one small exception, no complete piece would ever be so thoroughly chromatic as this. Schoenbergian modernism, the language of an isolated and anguished prophet, was for a while an appealing path for the ultra-sensitive, lonely schoolboy, conscious of the superiority of his taste and abilities to those of his so-called elders and betters.
He was not using this highly chromatic language exclusively. At the same time as these experimental pieces, he wrote a Hymn to the Virgin for unaccompanied chorus which is more characteristic of his mature style. He composed it in a few hours while recovering from another bout of illness, and it was one of the pieces accepted by his first publisher, Oxford University Press. Nor should his two years at Gresham’s be seen in an entirely negative light. His school friend David Layton remembers him as being much happier than his diary would suggest, and an enthusiastic participator in school games.22 In his second year Britten took a more active part in the school’s musical life, playing the viola in Saturday chamber music concerts, giving solo piano recitals to great acclaim; finally having one of his more adventurous pieces played in public, a Bagatelle for violin, viola and piano, with Britten playing the viola and Greatorex, no less, the piano. These concerts, however, were no substitute for the chamber music he played in his holidays with Basil Reeve and Charles Coleman, and home was still the refuge he longed for. Britten was due to take his School Certificate at the end of his sixth term, and it was clear to him that after this he could stand no more of Gresham’s.23
A way out presented itself: in May 1930 the Royal College of Music in London offered a music scholarship and Britten entered for it. He sent a portfolio of recent compositions, including two vocal works which were later published: a song, ‘The Birds’, to words by Hilaire Belloc, and A Wealden Trio for female voices, a setting of a poem by Ford Madox Ford. After an anxious few weeks of waiting, he was asked to come to London for an examination. He found the written examination in compositional techniques very easy, and was interviewed in the afternoon by Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and a harmony and counterpoint teacher, Sydney Waddington, who according to Ireland thought it wasn’t ‘decent’24 that an English public schoolboy should be writing music like this – a remark that foreshadows much of the criticism of Britten that was to come. They nevertheless awarded him the scholarship, somewhat to Britten’s surprise. A few weeks later he left school, having passed his Certificate and collected a number of prize books that he had chosen himself, including scores of Strauss’s Don Quixote and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Perhaps he finally realised that a school that raised no objections to his choice of the latter wasn’t such a bad place after all. His diary records: I am terribly sorry to leave such boys as these25… I didn’t think I should be so sorry to leave.26 And yet, the day after he arrived home, he was to write the ne plus ultra of his modernist pieces, a short, untitled not-too-nice piece for Viola Solo27 (it has now been published as Elegy). Unrelentingly atonal from the start (ten out of the 12 chromatic notes are used in the first phrase alone), the piece rises to an anguished climax, marked ffff, before its muted ending. What private thoughts the prodigious 16-year-old had while playing to himself this unhomely music we can only guess.
From the Musical Times, May 1929
SIR – The other day, when playing Beethoven’s C major Sonata for ’cello and pianoforte, Op 102, No 1, I noticed a great similarity between a theme which appears in the Finale several times:
and the last line of Davy’s song, ‘The Bay of Biscay’.
I have never read anything about this in any book on Beethoven, and I wonder if any reader has. I suppose it is not possible that Beethoven could have known the song; and I should be grateful if a reader could inform me as to the date of it.
May I add how I wish that there could be more performances of this beautiful Sonata by first-rate artists; as far as I know there is not even a gramophone record of it. – Yours, & c.,
E BENJAMIN BRITTEN
21, Kirkley Cliff Road, Lowestoft.
… Which received this reply in the June issue:
SIR, – In reply to Mr Britten’s letter in your May issue, I think it extremely probable that Beethoven was acquainted with Davy’s song ‘The Bay of Biscay’, for Davy’s songs and incidental music to the plays of his period had an enormous vogue, if we can trust reference books. Moreover, we know that Beethoven took great interest in the wars of his time.
Davy was a contemporary of his, being born at Exeter, December 23, 1763, and dying in extreme poverty in St Martin’s Lane, London, February 22, 1824. – Yours, & c.,
REGINALD SILVER
Micro Cottage, Colyton, Devon.