It should not come as a surprise that Britten found the Royal College a disappointing place. The attitude of most of the RCM students was amateurish and folksy, he wrote in 1959. That made me feel highly intolerant.28 His later memories were no doubt coloured by an overall feeling that the College had not done justice to his talent. Certainly he had reason to complain that only two pieces of his – a Phantasy string quintet and the Sinfonietta – were played publicly there during his three years as a student. And the College offered no sense of liberation from his schoolboy life, as a university might have done; it seemed more like a continuation of it, and consequently Britten’s growing up was delayed for another three years – and more.
The Royal College of Music in Kensington had in fact been founded in 1883 to provide a more thoroughly professional training than the older Royal Academy. The Academy had produced few noteworthy composers in recent years, whereas Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, Bridge and Tippett had all attended the College in the first 40 years of its existence. So despite Britten’s criticism, it was still almost certainly the best institution on offer. Bridge had probably made the wisest comment in a thoughtful letter he wrote to Britten shortly before he went to the RCM – a letter in which he recommended John Ireland as a composition teacher: ‘Personally I think an institution only helps one to find one’s feet’.29
Harold Samuel had recommended RO Morris, a notable teacher of counterpoint who was at this time giving private postgraduate lessons in fugal technique to Tippett; but Bridge, who had been Ireland’s contemporary at the College, suggested that it would be preferable to ‘plump for a live composer whose activities are part of the present-day outlook with a heavy leaning towards tomorrow’s!’ He added: ‘I think you may have to do a certain amount of work to sharpen up your technique, which may appear to you, at first, as being a retrograde step.’30 Ireland duly became Britten’s composition teacher and, as Bridge had prophesied, he immediately set Britten to work on exercises in strict counterpoint and fugue, and then got him to write a mass in the style of Palestrina. But he was not a very reliable teacher: he failed to turn up for their first lesson, and when Britten later visited his house the puritanical boy was shocked by the squalor of Ireland’s Bohemian life. He told his sister Beth that he would sometimes find Ireland still in bed, with a hangover, and on one occasion he was quite drunk… foully so.31 Britten admired some of Ireland’s works at first, though he soon became critical, and ended up (as did Frank Bridge) more or less writing him off.
His piano teacher at the College was Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960), a composer too, known today principally for his Jamaican Rumba, but whose comic opera The Devil Take Her earnt warm praise from Britten. Benjamin was a friendly Australian and the two got on well immediately, even if Benjamin was critical of Britten’s playing technique and soon told him that he was not cut out to be a solo pianist: how I’m going to make my pennies Heaven only knows,33 was Britten’s diary comment. Benjamin was right in that Britten never did become a professional soloist, although in 1938 he did give the first performance of his Piano Concerto. He became, of course, an accompanist of the highest quality, one of the finest there has ever been. Britten always remained on good terms with Benjamin: he dedicated his light-hearted piano suite Holiday Diary to his teacher and in the 1934 letter in which he suggests the dedication he offers Infinite thanks for what you are doing & have done for me.34
Apart from weekly lessons with his teachers, Britten was largely free to compose and practise, and in the evenings to go to concerts, some of them at the adjacent Royal Albert Hall. For his first year he lived in a boarding house in Bayswater, across the park from the College, rather a nice place but rather full of old ladies;35 then in September 1931 he moved to new lodgings a few minutes’ walk from the RCM, sharing them with his sister Beth, who was learning dressmaking. His other sister Barbara was also in London, working as a health visitor, and Britten saw a lot of her too. Ben and Barbara were both members of the English Madrigal Choir, in spite of his bass voice being somewhat uncertain – the only one of his musical attributes that was not outstanding. Singing madrigals seems to have had an immediate influence on his music: the first major chamber piece he wrote at the College was a string quartet in D major whose lyrical melodic lines are in striking contrast to his recent experiments in Expressionism, and which he was to have published in revised form shortly before his death.
In his diary comments on concerts he often expresses irritation with his English contemporaries and predecessors. He had always found Elgar dull, and nothing he heard in these days made him change his mind. He did finally come to terms with Elgar towards the end of his life, conducting the Introduction and Allegro at the 1969 Aldeburgh Festival and recording The Dream of Gerontius with Peter Pears in 1971. Hearing Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, he found it v. beautiful (wonderfully scored),36 but had little good to say about anything else of his. Bax’s November Woods bored him (not much November about it).37 His huge admiration for Brahms, whom through his teenage years he had ranked second only to Beethoven, gradually waned, perhaps under the influence of fellow RCM students. By July 1934 he could write in his diary of Vaughan Williams’ Benedicite – music which repulses me as does most of Brahms (solid, dull).38
But he was also hearing all kinds of stimulating new music: Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps on first hearing was bewildering & terrifying. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I think it’s incredibly marvellous & arresting,39 and his Symphony of Psalms was Marvellous … the end was truly inspired.40 A performance of Schoenberg’s Erwartung under the composer’s baton was baffling (I could not make head or tail of it),41 but Walton’s Viola Concerto was a great turning point in my musical life,42 as he wrote in a 1963 letter to Walton.
His foremost discovery at this time, however, was Mahler, who was to become one of his most kindred spirits. Another was Schubert: in both composers he would have sensed the child’s vision to which the music always reaches back. An affinity with Mahler is already apparent in the nine-year-old Britten’s ‘Beware’: although he could not possibly have heard any of his music at that time, it sounds astonishingly like an early Mahler song, even ending with the classic Mahlerian device of the major triad fading to a minor one. His first actual encounter with Mahler’s music was a performance of the Fourth Symphony (the shortest) at a BBC Promenade Concert in September 1930, just before he started at the College, and on which he commented laconically in his diary: Much too long, but beautiful in pts.43 Twelve years later, he wrote about that first experience, perhaps with the hindsight of now knowing the work very well: the scoring startled me. It was mainly ‘soloistic’ and entirely clean and transparent. The colouring seemed calculated to the smallest shade, and the result was wonderfully resonant … the material was remarkable, and the melodic shapes highly original, with such rhythmic and harmonic tension from beginning to end. After that concert, I made every effort to hear Mahler’s music.44 A few months later he bought a score of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and heard the work at a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert in May 1931 (Lovely little pieces, exquisitely scored – a lesson to all the Elgars & Strausses in the world).45 He probably studied other Mahler orchestral scores at the RCM that summer: his ballet score Plymouth Town, composed in the autumn of 1931 but never performed in his lifetime, shows the influence of Mahler in its orchestration; at one point Britten asks the oboes and clarinets to play ‘bells up’ – an indication he could only have seen in Mahler’s symphonies.
Letter to Henry Boys (1910–1992), 29 June 1937:
It is now well past midnight & society dictates that I should stop playing the Abschied. Otherwise I might possibly have gone on repeating the last record indefinitely – for ‘ewig’ keit of course.
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
And the essentially ‘pretty’ colours of the normal orchestral palette are used to paint this extraordinary picture of loneliness. And there is nothing morbid about it. The same harmonic progressions that Wagner used to colour his essentially morbid love-scenes (his ‘Liebes’ is naturally followed by ‘Tod’) are used here to paint a serenity literally supernatural. I cannot understand it – it passes over me like a tidal wave – and that matters not a jot either, because it goes on for ever, even if it is never performed again – that final chord is printed on the atmosphere.
Perhaps if I could understand some of the Indian philosophies I might approach it a little. At the moment I can do no more than bask in its Heavenly light – & it is worth having lived to do that.
He soon changed his mind about the Fourth Symphony’s length, and this became a favourite Mahler work of his, which he eventually conducted at the 1961 Aldeburgh Festival (a performance that survives in a BBC recording). But the piece that was to make the greatest impression on him was Das Lied von der Erde. He first heard this on the radio in February 1936, and the inadequacy of the performance and his irritation at its being sung in English still couldn’t dim the beauties of this heavenly work. Was there ever such a touching Lebewohl as this? This music makes one think furiously more than any other today.46 The impact of the ‘Abschied’ from Das Lied in particular may be heard in Our Hunting Fathers, which he was writing at the time. The lean, chamber scoring in Das Lied was a continuing influence, right up to Death in Venice. Das Lied too, with its settings of Chinese poetry, its use of pentatonic scales and, in the ‘Abschied’, of heterophony, was Britten’s first contact with the oriental world and a profound musical response to it, which was to have huge repercussions in his later life. In 1937 he bought the famous Bruno Walter live recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, and wrote an extraordinarily insightful letter about it to his friend Henry Boys.
It should be emphasised that Britten was in the vanguard of Mahler lovers in the England of the 1930s: most of the critics then, and the public, had no time for this ‘tolerable imitation of a composer’,47 as Vaughan Williams called him – a situation that continued right up to the centenary of Mahler’s birth in 1960, after which there was a dramatic change. Britten must have been sad that he could never convince Frank Bridge about the worth of Mahler’s music: We are in complete agreement over all – except Mahler! – though he admits he is a great thinker,48 he wrote in his diary in March 1936. During his RCM years he saw a great deal of Bridge, whom he still considered his real teacher; they often went to concerts together and compared notes on new pieces they heard. In June 1931, the 17-year-old Britten made his first visit to the Bridges’ weekend cottage at Friston, near Eastbourne in Sussex: he played tennis, enjoyed the surrounding downland countryside and met their next-door neighbour, the artist Marjorie Fass, who became a friend and confidante. He made a few friends among his fellow students, notably Remo Lauricella, a violinist, and Bernard Richards, a cellist: he played piano trios with the two of them. One friendship, with a fellow bass in the English Madrigal Choir, Paul Wright, led to his meeting with Iris Lemare, a conductor, and Anne Macnaghten, the leader of an all-female string quartet, who together with the composer Elizabeth Lutyens founded the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts. From the beginning of 1932 these concerts presented new British works at a tiny theatre in Notting Hill Gate. Since the RCM students seemed largely unable to cope with Britten’s music, the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts were a compensating opportunity for him. In the second series they played his Phantasy Quintet for strings, which had won the Cobbett Prize – an annual award for chamber pieces endowed by Walter Cobbett, a rich businessman and amateur musician – and also received a College performance (bad – but I expected worse);49 three Walter de la Mare part-songs, the first work of his to get into print; and most importantly, the first public performance of his Sinfonietta, which Britten designated, finally, as his Opus 1, and dedicated to Bridge.
The Sinfonietta, composed in a little under three weeks during June and July 1932, is the culmination of all the chamber pieces he had been writing throughout his teens. Its scoring – for wind quintet plus string quintet – is quite similar to that of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, to which Britten pays homage with the rising horn motif near the start. Schoenberg also served as the model for Britten’s thematic economy and the way he develops and transforms his material throughout the piece, yet stylistically Schoenberg’s influence is hardly discernible. The second movement, like much of the music that Britten was writing while he was at the College, has an English pastoral feeling about it, though it is more tightly composed than Ireland or Vaughan Williams. The tarantella finale is the most Brittenish movement, the first outstanding example of those hectic dances in his early music that seem to display nervous rather than physical energy. The Sinfonietta has a cool, steely brilliance that perhaps excites more admiration than affection. Those early critics who (to his intense annoyance) characterised Britten’s music as ‘clever but superficial’ were mistaken, although they had a point. It is perhaps because Britten at this time had a restricted emotional life that much of his early music lacks real warmth: he was still the brilliant boy who had yet to grow up.
His Opus 2, the Phantasy for oboe and string trio, is a more immediately attractive and incisive work than the Sinfonietta, perhaps because its manner, though equally skilful, is less self-conscious. The Englishness of the Sinfonietta’s slow movement is also apparent in the Phantasy’s central section; music for string trio of considerable tenderness and finesse. This manner was not to be pursued any further, unlike the shadowy march music that begins the Phantasy. Britten became rather obsessed with the march form over the next few years.
His next project was a large-scale suite for string quartet called Alla Quartetto Serioso, to which he gave the whimsical subtitle ‘Go, play, boy, play’ – a quotation from The Winter’s Tale. There was no programmatic connection with Shakespeare: Britten probably just liked the words for their association with school – the piece was to have been a series of portraits of school friends and evocations of school activities. He finished four of the projected five movements (one of them only sketched), and these gave him considerable trouble as he worked on them intermittently over three years, from 1933 to 1936. He replaced the original ‘Alla marcia’ (which was later reborn as ‘Parade’ in Les Illuminations) with a more forceful march full of Bartókian glissandi. The three completed movements were performed at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert in December 1933, rather against Britten’s wishes; he was unhappy enough to leave the concert without thanking Anne Macnaghten and the quartet. In their final state they were played by the Stratton Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in 1936 as Three Divertimenti, where they were received with sniggers and pretty cold silence.50 This was enough to make Britten lose faith in the work altogether, as on several other later occasions. Throughout his life Britten was to combine extremes of self-confidence and self-doubt, and the latter could so easily prevail over the former. His fine Temporal Variations for oboe and piano, however, which received a single performance later in 1936, was put back on the shelf not because of bad reviews but, apparently, because of a disagreement with one of the players.
Even though he abandoned Go, play, boy, play, it was an important stepping stone. Its school associations may be backward-looking, yet much of its music points forward. The March is inherently dramatic, and its fanfares anticipate Les Illuminations; the waltz in the second movement is not simply a waltz but a study of the form: a ‘waltz’. The idea of the ‘character piece’ was again something that became important to him in his post-RCM years.
Britten’s attitude to modernism fluctuated. In February 1933, at the Queen’s Hall with Frank Bridge, he heard Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra conducted by the composer, and found the piece rather dull (an astonishing remark!), but some good things in it.51 He adds, tantalizingly, Meet Sch. In interval without further comment. At the end of 1933, when he had passed the Associateship of the RCM with his accustomed ease and had been awarded a £100 travelling scholarship, he hoped to go to Vienna to study with Alban Berg. Frank Bridge would certainly have encouraged him to do so: Britten had been impressed both by the Lyric Suite (astounding … The imagination & intense emotion of this work certainly amaze me)52 and the Three Fragments from Wozzeck which he had heard earlier in the year, and would probably have known other Berg pieces from scores. In 1963 he described what happened next: … when the College was told, coolness arose. I think, but can’t be sure, that the director, Sir Hugh Allen, put a spike in the wheel. At any rate, when I said at home during the holidays, ‘I am going to study with Berg, aren’t I?’ the answer was a firm ‘No, dear.’ Pressed, my mother said, ‘He’s not a good influence’, which I suspect came from Allen. There was at that time an almost moral prejudice against serial music – which makes one smile today! I think also that there was some confusion in my parents’ minds – thinking that ‘not a good influence’ meant morally, not musically. They had been disturbed by traits of rebelliousness and unconventionality which I had shown in my later school days.53 What kind of composer Britten would have become if he had studied with Berg is impossible to say. Certainly he remained attached to Berg’s music all his life. He was deeply affected by Berg’s premature death in 1935: I feel it is a real & terrible tragedy – one from which the world will take long to recover from,54 he wrote to Marjorie Fass. He attended the premiere of Berg’s Violin Concerto at the ISCM Festival in Barcelona in 1936 and found it just shattering;55 on buying the score later that year he wrote in his diary My God what a sublime work!56
The truth is that even though Britten was more thoroughly aware than almost any of his contemporaries of the Schoenbergian revolution and had himself become quite adept in a virtually atonal style, he was destined to be a tonal composer who, more than any other, would prove the truth of Schoenberg’s assertion that there was plenty of good music still to be written in C major – and did so at a time when many composers’ belief in tonality was faltering. The best and most personal music he was composing as a student is the most openly diatonic. In his later music he would occasionally flirt with Schoenbergian serialism by using a 12-note row as a constructive device – in The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cantata Academica, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice – but whereas the intention of Schoenberg’s 12-note method was to move completely beyond tonality, Britten’s rows always have strong tonal implications. The main work he was writing during 1933, A Boy Was Born, inhabits a world as far from Berg and from Schoenbergian Expressionism as it is possible to imagine. In various pieces written over the previous ten years, Britten had been working out a fresh relation to the English choral tradition. Lately, as a singer in the English Madrigal Choir and the Carlyle Singers to which he also belonged, the relation had become an active one. A Boy Was Born sets a sequence of (mostly medieval) poems on the theme of Christmas, in the form of a theme and six variations. With the sound of the all-male English cathedral choir in mind, Britten employs treble voices for the first time, thus inaugurating a whole series of works in which boys take part. The use of voices is one of the most distinctive features of his sound world. At this time Britten was still a practising Christian, so the words he set had real meaning for him. The music is certainly inspired, and sounds consistently new and fresh, nowhere more so than in the fifth variation, a combination of Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and the 16th-century Corpus Christi Carol. The passage where the boys enter with ‘He bare him up, he bare him down / He bare him into an orchard brown’ in a flowing 12/8 over the women’s gently dissonant overlapping phrases on the words ‘snow on snow’ is the moment when, at the age of 19, Britten reveals himself as a true genius instead of (merely!) a remarkable talent.
He dedicated the work to his father, who was ill with lymphatic cancer, though this was not yet diagnosed. The BBC, who were already aware of Britten’s potential, recorded the piece for broadcasting. Victor Hely-Hutchinson, one of many composers on the Corporation’s music staff (Britten had described his Carol Symphony as utter bilge57 after hearing it on the radio in December 1932), had written in a memorandum in June 1933: ‘I do whole-heartedly subscribe to the general opinion that Mr Britten is the most interesting new arrival since Walton, and I feel we should watch his work very carefully.’58 The broadcast of A Boy Was Born took place on 23 February 1934. By a remarkable and significant coincidence, this was the day of Elgar’s death.