At the beginning of 1934 Britten was 20 and his formal education was over. He was back in the family house in Lowestoft, determined to begin his career as a professional musician. He had one publisher and was soon to switch to another: Ralph Hawkes of Boosey & Hawkes agreed to take over the Sinfonietta and the Phantasy Quartet from OUP. They were to publish all his subsequent music until the 1960s. Faced with the responsibility of earning his living, however, Britten found himself in a creative block. On 3 January he wrote to his composer friend Grace Williams, whom he had met through the Macnaghten-Lemare concerts: I cannot write a single note of anything respectable at the moment, and so – on the off chance of making some money – I am dishing up some very old stuff (written, some of it, over ten years ago) as a dear little school suite for strings.59 This was the Simple Symphony, which he conducted with an amateur orchestra in Norwich in March. At the end of the month he set off with a school friend from South Lodge, John Pounder, for the International Society of Contemporary Music Festival in Florence, where his Phantasy was being played by its dedicatee, Leon Goossens, and members of the Griller Quartet. In Florence he met the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who was to have conducted the Sinfonietta in Strasbourg the previous year (the performance was cancelled) and his 14-year-old son Wulff; they were staying in the same pensione as Britten and Pounder. Britten made a day trip to Siena with the Scherchens; during a rainstorm he and Wulff shared a mackintosh, and a rapport immediately sprang up between them that was to assume much greater significance a few years later.
The following day he received a telegram from his mother summoning him home: ‘Pop not so well’. In fact Robert Britten had already died of a cerebral haemorrhage: he was 57. His father’s death brought Britten even closer to his mother. In the weeks following the funeral he stayed with her at the school where his brother Robert was now headmaster, in Prestatyn, North Wales. He began writing a set of songs with piano for the boys to sing, which was published as Friday Afternoons – Friday being the day on which Robert took singing practice. The world of children and school was still his only real subject; he was cocooned in his sequestered adolescence. But the vein of simple lyricism he was cultivating – as in the delightful ‘Sailing’ from the Holidays Suite – was perhaps the truest of his voices. In looking back over his boyhood pieces in order to put together the Simple Symphony, did he realise that his ability to invent unselfconscious melody – which he still possessed – was his most precious gift?
In October he and his mother went to Vienna, via Basel and Salzburg. Britten had hoped to meet Berg in Vienna, but he was away. He did, however, meet Erwin Stein, an editor at Universal Edition, who ten years later was to become his personal editor at Boosey & Hawkes and a loyal supporter of his music. Stein had been a pupil of Schoenberg and was a Mahler disciple; he and Britten would have had much to discuss. Britten was enchanted with Vienna, and especially with its opera. He immersed himself in Wagner: The five hours of [Die Meistersinger] didn’t seem as many minutes; the incredible vitality, richness: lovely melody, humour, pathos in fact every favourable quality,60 he wrote in his diary. While in Vienna he began his Suite, Op 6, for violin and piano, one of the most brilliant and accomplished of his early works. There are several Viennese features: the totally chromatic style of the Introduction continues his fascination with Schoenberg, while the finale is an elaborate and showy Waltz. In between come a March – a scintillating example of this favourite form – and a beautiful Lullaby, Britten’s first great evocation of sleep’s healing power.
WH Auden (1907–1973) was the outstanding English poet of his generation. His first volume of poems was published in 1930, and from then on he had a huge influence on his contemporaries, who included Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. His poetry of the 1930s, drawing on insights from, amongst others, Freud and DH Lawrence, dealt with all aspects of contemporary life, using intensely individual imagery to express universal truths. He moved to New York in 1939 and took US citizenship in 1946. Auden’s later poetry does not have the same immediacy and force as his earlier work (the Christianity that he espoused from the 1940s tended to soften its edge), but is always wide-ranging in scope and innovative in its language. With Chester Kallman, Auden wrote opera librettos for Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress, 1951) and Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, 1959, The Bassarids, 1963). In 1972 he returned to England, where he was given a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church, Oxford, his old college. Since 1957 he had spent his summers in Austria, and he died in Vienna in September 1973.
Returning to England, he was soon living once again in London. Here he found a temporary solution to his career problem. As a result of a recommendation by the BBC, he was approached at the end of April 1935 by the General Post Office’s Film Unit to write music for a documentary film called The King’s Stamp, about the making of a special stamp for King George V’s Silver Jubilee. The film was directed by the painter William Coldstream. Despite misgivings about what he called this Godforsaken subject, Britten accepted the job. He was now something of a cinema aficionado, and so had an immediate understanding of what was needed. Over the next year and a half he would write music for 25 films, the majority short documentaries, but also one feature film, Love from a Stranger. The GPO Film Unit, for whom most of his scores were written, was a group of young artists and intellectuals, headed by John Grierson, the noted documentary film-maker. Almost all of them held the strong left-wing opinions prevailing at the time. The unit encouraged innovation, and Britten was only too willing to experiment with sound effects in devising his incidental music. His next assignment after The King’s Stamp was Coal Face, a film about miners at work. WH Auden was approached to write some words for Britten to set, and the two of them met at the Downs School at Colwall in Herefordshire, where Auden taught. Auden is the most amazing man, a very brilliant and attractive personality,61 Britten recorded in his diary. Britten seemed very young to Auden, who was six years older than him, but Auden soon recognised his exceptional musicality and included him in the ‘gang’ of artists, who under Auden’s leadership were to take on the world. He, Spender and Cecil Day Lewis were the gang’s designated poets, Christopher Isherwood was the novelist, Coldstream was the painter, and Britten now became the composer. Auden took Britten to the Westminster Theatre to see the Group Theatre’s productions of his plays The Dance of Death and The Dog Beneath the Skin (the latter co-written with Isherwood), and introduced Britten to members of the gang, including Isherwood and his Group Theatre friends, the director Rupert Doone and his partner, the designer Robert Medley. In fact virtually all the gang were homosexual or bisexual. It was essentially through his friendship with Auden, which soon became a close one, that Britten finally came to acknowledge the fact that he was homosexual himself.
For the time being, his friendships with boys and young men were still quite innocent. He formed a strong attachment to a teenager, Piers Dunkerley, who had been at South Lodge School, and took him to films and plays. But Britten’s puritanism and the continuing inhibiting presence of his mother presumably combined to prevent any amorous intentions he might have had from going further. (Dunkerley was later to become a Captain in the Royal Marines during the Second World War. In 1959 he committed suicide. He was one of the four dedicatees of the War Requiem.) Meanwhile Auden, whose attitude to sex was cheerfully and guiltlessly promiscuous, encouraged Britten to be more open about his inclinations, at first without success. A poem Auden sent to Britten, ‘Night covers up the rigid land’ might appear to suggest that he was in love with him – though at the time Auden was deeply in love with someone else. Another poem Auden wrote for Britten, ‘Underneath the abject willow’, spells out his advice with eloquent directness. Britten set both these poems to music, ‘Underneath the abject willow’ for two voices and piano in a detached and almost flippant manner that seems like a mild reproof to Auden’s earnestness.
Assuming the didactic role he was accustomed to take with his friends, Auden also acted as Britten’s intellectual and political mentor. Britten’s politics changed from a fairly unthinking conservatism to an emotional commitment to socialism and especially pacifism, which he was to retain for the rest of his life. His diary entries at this time become filled with despairing comments on Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia, and the Spanish Civil War. He found Auden and his friends intimidating at times, as his March 1937 diary also reveals. They [Auden, Isherwood and Coldstream] are nice people – but I am not up to their mark tonight, feeling dazed, stupid & incredibly miserable – & so leave them at 9.0 with an overwhelming inferiority complex & longing for bed.62 It was hard for him to acknowledge that in his own way he was quite Auden’s equal, and that both of them in fact had a similar cast of mind – which is why their collaboration over the next few years was so fruitful; but it was also perhaps why, at the point when Britten realised that he needed to be more independent, the relationship faltered.
Britten’s first important collaboration with Auden was the GPO film Night Mail, for which Auden provided the famous lines beginning ‘This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order’. Britten took his task of imitating train noises very seriously (as a boy, he had been a keen train-spotter). He spent an evening beside the railway line at Harrow, and tried to reproduce on an assortment of improvised percussion instruments the sounds he had heard. The percussionist at the recording session was James Blades, who was to go on working with Britten on a variety of innovative percussion effects until the end of the composer’s life. The film (like Coal Face, a milestone in the history of the documentary) was a success with the audience when first shown in March 1936.
By this time Auden and Britten were working on a more ambitious project: an orchestral song-cycle for the Norwich Triennial Festival that autumn. This was Our Hunting Fathers, in which poems about animals were used metaphorically to lament in general the misguided notions of human superiority that had led mankind to its present sorry state; and to make a particular comment on the current political situation, where the strong were brutally persecuting the weak. Britten does this most pointedly in Thomas Ravenscroft’s ‘Hawking the Partridge’, retitled ‘Dance of Death’, a hunting piece in which he juxtaposes two of the hawks’ names, ‘German’ and ‘Jew’ in a way that no perceptive listener could fail to understand. Two recent discoveries particularly affected the music: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, and a contemporary of Britten’s who had also been influenced by Mahler – Shostakovich. Britten had attended a concert performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in March and wrote an admiring account of it in his diary: I will defend it through thick & thin against these charges of ‘lack of style’… The ‘eminent English Renaissance’ composers sniggering in the stalls was typical. There is more music in a page of MacBeth than in the whole of their ‘elegant’ output!63 The immediate impact of Lady Macbeth can be heard in the brass band piece Russian Funeral which Britten wrote for the Communist composer Alan Bush and the London Labour Choral Union, and whose main theme is coincidentally a Russian folksong that Shostakovich was later to use in his 11th Symphony. Mahler’s influence on Our Hunting Fathers is most obviously heard in ‘Messalina’, with its lamenting high woodwind lines, and also in the closing ‘Epilogue and Funeral March’; but the xylophone ostinato that creeps through the texture of the latter is clearly indebted to Shostakovich, as is some of the satirical tone of the music.
The premiere of Our Hunting Fathers in September 1936 was an ordeal for Britten. He conducted, and at the first rehearsal with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, some of the musicians misbehaved disgracefully. Sophie Wyss, the soprano soloist, recalled how during ‘Rats Away!’ – a medieval imprecation on a plague of rats, set by Britten as a wild Allegro con fuoco – the players ‘ran about pretending they were chasing rats on the floor!’64 Things improved in Norwich the next day, and the performance went fairly well. The audience was polite but clearly discomfited. They had already found the new piece in the first half of the concert unsettling; Vaughan Williams’s Five Tudor Portraits, with its uncharacteristically bawdy Skelton text. After this, Auden’s provocative words and the apparently bizarre new sounds of Britten’s music must have thoroughly upset them. Even Frank Bridge was doubtful, and Mrs Britten, who had heard relatively little of her son’s recent music, commented to a friend: ‘Oh, I do hope Ben will write something that somebody will like.’65
Britten had already played through ‘Rats Away!’ to his mother on the piano and was secretly pleased that she thoroughly disapproved of it, as he was now half-consciously trying to break away from her influence. She had turned to Christian Science, the sect founded by Mary Baker Eddy who believed that illness could be cured by prayer. Britten found this inimical, and he himself had given up church attendance since his conversion to left-wing politics.
Britten had reason to be proud of Our Hunting Fathers: it is a score of extraordinary virtuosity, and it is hard to believe this was the first orchestral music of his own he had ever heard played. Despite its mixed reception, the performance must surely have boosted his confidence. He was, however, to retreat from the provocative stance he and Auden had taken. Mrs Britten had hit on a partial truth: he did want to be liked. Épater le bourgeois was a temporary need, but he would soon be glad to win the middle classes over to his side.
In October he moved with Beth to a new London flat in the Finchley Road, and returned to writing film and theatre music. He wrote, in a few days, a score to the feature film Love from a Stranger, starring Basil Rathbone; its title music was influenced by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (as was the later storm music from Peter Grimes). There was a room in the flat for his mother to stay in when she visited, and in the new year, when both he and Beth fell ill with ’flu, his mother came to nurse them, only to fall ill herself. Barbara now took charge, and a professional nurse was engaged when first Beth and then Mrs Britten developed pneumonia. While Benjamin recovered and Beth was now out of danger, Edith’s condition deteriorated rapidly. On 31 January 1937 she had a heart attack and died. Nothing one can do eases the terrible ache that one feels,66 he wrote in his diary, with a curious use of the impersonal pronoun. But he was certainly devastated, and it was a long time before he fully recovered from the shock, especially as he also blamed himself for some time afterwards for being the indirect cause of her fatal illness. Yet his mother’s death was also a great liberation for him.
On 5 March 1937, just over a month after her death, his diary records: I lunch with David Green [an architect friend, also from Lowestoft] who is very decent – & he emphasizes the point (very truly) that now is the time for me to decide something about my sexual life. O, for a little courage! We cannot tell for how long he had known he was homosexual, but it would appear that his response to his mother’s obsessive love had effectively barred him from sexual feelings towards other women. In 1915 Freud noted a common pattern among the homosexuals he had observed: ‘in the earliest years of their childhood, [they] pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and … after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, proceeding from a basis of narcissism, they look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them.’67 Whether or not Freud’s observation is universally true, Britten’s sexual development seems to have proceeded closely along these lines. As a teenager he had been attracted to younger boys from South Lodge School, but had sublimated any sexual feelings into those of fraternal and later quasi-paternal care. Donald Mitchell cogently sums up his emotional life before his mother died: ‘all the evidence points to her son existing in a strange kind of void, in which the most intense human relationships were extensions – or perhaps attempted replicas – of the friendships and above all the hierarchies of school.’68 There are occasional hints of self-awareness: tell it not in Gath,69 Britten writes at the beginning of his 1936 diary of his friendship with Piers Dunkerley, referring to the biblical David and Jonathan; and a month later, after a train journey to London: Have some tea on the journey & some buns, but rather because of the nice little restaurant-boy who brings it & talks a bit. Quel horreur!! But I swear there’s no harm in it.70
‘Quel horreur’ is characteristic: Britten’s puritanism was still a powerful inhibition. Visiting Barcelona in the spring of 1936, where he and Antonio Brosa played his Suite for violin and piano at the ISCM Festival, he visited the red-light district with Lennox Berkeley, another featured composer he had met at the Festival, and a young critic, Peter Burra. Britten was shocked by the sordidity – & the sexual temptations of every kind at each corner.71 One cannot help thinking here of Picasso’s rather different attitude to Barcelona’s brothels! Britten writes similarly about a visit, shortly before his mother died, to a brothel in Paris with Henry Boys and Ronald Duncan, a young writer he had recently met and befriended: we … are presented in the most sordid manner possible with about 20 nude females, fat, hairy, unprepossessing … It is revolting – appalling that such a noble thing as sex should be so degraded.72 The constant emphasis in his music on innocence, and the horror of innocence being corrupted, points both to his idealistic puritanism but perhaps also to a darker side within his own experience, of which we cannot be certain, but to which he himself referred in conversation with two of his librettists who were also close friends. Britten revealed to Eric Crozier that he had been sexually abused at South Lodge School by the headmaster, Thomas Sewell; he also told Myfanwy Piper that his father had homosexual inclinations, and had sent him out to procure boys. The first story may be an exaggeration or a distortion of his or his friends’ experience of being beaten: we do know that Sewell had something of a fixation – not uncommon at that time – on beating boys. It is also possible that Britten’s horror of sadism and of violence in general concealed a repressed attraction to both. The second story sounds, on the face of it, preposterous, and may have been pure fantasy – but it is worth recording if only because Britten did relate it.73 Certainly there are other hints that the Britten family life was not the untroubled and happy one that it was supposed to be, and Mr Britten’s real character is puzzling. So much around Britten’s upbringing remains – and will probably always remain – secret and unknown.
If this story was fantasy, a psychoanalytic explanation might be that Britten was attempting to transfer some of his own guilt about his attraction to boys on to his father. That he did feel guilt is certain: his last opera, Death in Venice, spells out very clearly his mature attitude towards this side of his sexuality. In the present climate of intense suspicion about paedophilia there is a tendency to suppose that anyone who falls in love with boys will abuse them; but Britten’s strong moral sense always acted as a constraint, however insistent his feelings may sometimes have been. Moreover, a large part of his lifelong attraction to children and teenagers can be related to his unfulfilled desire for children of his own. I am getting to such a condition that I am lost without children (of either sex) near me,74 he records revealingly in another diary entry from 1936 about Piers Dunkerley.
In July 1936 while Britten was on holiday in Cornwall finishing Our Hunting Fathers, Lennox Berkeley visited him there. He was ten years older than Britten and a fine pianist. He and Britten found their musical tastes were very similar. Berkeley was at this time having a homosexual affair with José Raffalli (he eventually married and his son, Michael, became Britten’s godson and a composer) and he may have wanted to begin an affair then with Britten. If so, Britten discouraged him, continuing to stay aloof the next spring when he stayed with Berkeley in Gloucestershire, during which visit they composed a joint orchestral work, Mont Juic, based on Catalan folk songs. He is a dear & I am very, very fond of him, nevertheless, it is a comfort that we can arrange sexual matters at least to my satisfaction,75 he confided to his diary. Britten was also seeing Peter Burra, and was attracted to him, though again he held back. Then on 27 April 1937, Burra was killed when a small plane in which he was flying with a friend crashed. In helping to sort out Burra’s possessions, Britten got to know another of his friends, a young singer he had met briefly at a lunch party a few weeks before: Peter Pears.
Peter Pears was born in 1910. His family were rather grander than Britten’s, and unlike Britten he spent most of his childhood away from his parents, who were frequently abroad. Nevertheless, he was deeply attached to his mother, while very remote from his father. He had been a boarder at his preparatory school, and afterwards at Lancing College in Sussex, and his holidays were mostly spent with relatives. At Lancing, where he was ‘immensely happy’, he formed romantic, though it seems chaste, friendships with boys, in particular Peter Burra. Pears was handsome and had a patrician charm. After a year studying music at Oxford he failed his preliminary examinations and took up teaching. In 1934, encouraged by Burra’s sister Nell, he tried for and won an operatic scholarship to the Royal College of Music, just at the time Britten left it. He soon left the RCM too, dissatisfied with the tuition there, and joined the BBC Singers. His voice was still quite small and he was uncertain whether he was a tenor or a baritone. His life up till now had been unfocused and dilettantish, and had he not met Britten it is highly unlikely he would have transformed himself into the extraordinary singer he was to become. Britten’s first diary entries on his new friend spell his surname ‘Piers’ – a nice Freudian slip. He refers to him as a dear – the same term he had used for Berkeley and Burra, but it would be several years before their relationship would go any further than close friendship. Britten’s continued reluctance at this crucial time in his life to enter into any sexual relationship is very understandable. He may have been moving in homosexual circles, but it has to be remembered that homosexuality was illegal in Britain in the 1930s and punishable by imprisonment, and it remained so for many years afterwards; the Wolfenden Report in 1957 recommended decriminalisation but the law was not changed until 1967. Britten himself was interviewed by the police as late as 1954 (no action was taken). Looking back from our more liberal times, it is hard to imagine the full extent of fear and guilt that homosexuals could be made to feel, especially a highly sensitive and conscientious young man such as Britten.
As his new friendship developed, Britten was continuing to collaborate with Auden, for whose play The Ascent of F6 (again written jointly with Isherwood) he had composed incidental music in February. Isherwood remembered Britten around this time as ‘pale, boyish, indefatigable, scribbling music on his lap, then hurrying to the piano to play it’.76 The song texts Britten set, in both ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ styles, reflect Auden’s then ambivalent feelings about love, and seem to have corresponded to Britten’s too. It was at this time that he wrote the letter to Henry Boys quoted on p.22 about Das Lied von der Erde and its evocation of never-satisfied love. In the song-cycle On This Island, which he dedicated to Isherwood, the pure, aspiring joy of the opening ‘Let the florid music praise’, fades into the second stanza’s resigned ‘O but the unloved have power’; while the second song, ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’, is full of anxious hesitation:
Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.
In further contrast, both ‘Seascape’ and ‘Nocturne’ sustain a mood of quiet ecstasy: the latter’s vocal line gently rises and falls throughout the song, like breathing (as Donald Mitchell has noted).77 The cycle ends ironically, undermining the stoicism of the text – almost a statement of Rilkean Dennoch preisen, praise in spite of all – with its jazzy roulades, but finishing with a defiant D major chord. This splendid song-cycle is one of Britten and Auden’s finest collaborations.
At the end of May 1937, Boyd Neel, who had conducted the music for Love from a Stranger, asked Britten if he could compose a piece for his string orchestra to perform at the Salzburg Festival that August. Britten jumped at the chance, undaunted by the need for haste, and finished a 25-minute piece in just over a month. Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge was his first work to become a popular classic. The reasons are clear: the piece brims over with vitality and is full of instantly memorable ideas. The titles of the ten variations clearly differentiate them as ‘character pieces’ – the culmination of this preoccupation. Britten also intended them to provide a rounded portrait of his teacher. He originally headed all the variations with additional titles denoting Bridge’s personal characteristics: thus ‘March’ was headed ‘His energy’, ‘Romanza’ was ‘His charm’, ‘Aria Italiana’ was ‘His humour’, and so on. Bridge was greatly touched by the score’s dedication – ‘a tribute with affection and admiration’ – writing in a letter of thanks: ‘It is one of the few lovely things that has ever happened to me.’78 The theme, preceded by an introduction which forcefully presents the notes F and B, is taken from Bridge’s Idyll no 2 for string quartet (1906), which Britten had already used for an unfinished set of piano variations he began in 1932. The intervals of a falling fifth and fourth with which it begins are present in almost all the variations: these vary widely in mood, from boyish jollity to the Mahlerian tragedy of the ‘Funeral March’. The fugal finale was originally headed ‘His skill’, but the skill that is on spectacular display is Britten’s: Bridge had been right about the value of counterpoint lessons with Ireland. In its second half the 11-part fugue combines with Bridge’s theme plus a series of five more quotations from Bridge’s music, including the opening theme from The Sea that had so struck Britten 13 years before.
Shortly after the first run-through of the Variations, Britten lunched with Walton, so obviously the head-prefect of English music, whereas I’m the promising new boy,79 he recorded in his diary. They continued a somewhat uneasy friendship until Britten’s death: their letters to each other are always warm and admiring, though behind his back Walton showed extreme jealousy of Britten’s success. Britten was to commission the one-act opera The Bear for the 1967 Aldeburgh festival, and in 1970 Walton wrote a set of orchestral variations on the theme from the slow movement of Britten’s Piano Concerto.
During the race to complete the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Britten somehow found time to buy a house, the Old Mill at Snape, a village a few miles outside Aldeburgh. He decided to share the Mill with Lennox Berkeley, but there was much work to do on it first. Meanwhile he was sharing the Finchley Road flat with Pears – since his sister Beth had moved out to get married – and composing a large-scale piece of incidental music, The Company of Heaven, for a BBC religious programme about Michaelmas. One of the numbers was a setting of Emily Brontë’s poem ‘A thousand gleaming fires’ for tenor and strings – the first music he wrote specifically for Pears’s voice. In March 1938 Britten and Pears found a new flat in Earl’s Court, and Britten had begun a Piano Concerto for himself to play at that year’s Promenade Concerts. In April, the Mill was finally ready, and Britten moved in, amidst general fears that war was imminent following Hitler’s march into Austria and his threats against Czechoslovakia. Britten brought with him a Basque refugee boy, a victim of the Spanish Civil War, whom he had rashly agreed to help for a year by giving him accommodation and employment. The arrangement did not work out, and after a fortnight Beth took the boy back to London, where he was found another home. A few weeks later, Berkeley arrived from Paris with José Raffalli, and Britten went to London to entertain another old school friend, Francis Barton, with whom nothing further was to develop, despite Pears’s encouragement.
After several interruptions caused by these domestic and emotional complications, the Piano Concerto was finished in early July and the full score was ready by the end of the month. Shortly before its completion, Aaron Copland, whom Britten had met at the London ISCM Festival in June, and whose El Salón México he had singled out as the outstanding work played there, visited the Mill. Copland was a fellow homosexual and the two felt a sympathetic comradeship. Copland played through to Britten his new school opera The Second Hurricane, ‘singing all the parts of principals and chorus in the usual composer fashion’.80 Britten was impressed and, in return, played his Piano Concerto to Copland.
Britten dedicated the Concerto to Berkeley. The premiere, conducted by Sir Henry Wood, took place at the Queen’s Hall on 18 August, and was a great success with the public, though not with the critics nor, perhaps more seriously, with the Bridges or Marjorie Fass. The latter wrote: ‘if Benjy develops some day later on, he will see the insignificance of this work as it must be to all real musicians.’81 Nor did many others seem to discern much beneath the surface brilliance, though all acknowledged this at least. Yet, one might ask, why should anyone have demanded more? Wasn’t a young virtuoso allowed to write a display piece, to show off his own playing technique and his spectacular command of the orchestra? The opening Toccata is much concerned with display: the piano writing is brilliant, the orchestration ebullient; the second theme is soon given to the whole string body almost in the manner of Tchaikovsky or Rakhmaninov. The first and second subjects are cunningly recapitulated together (an idea that Britten first employed in his Sinfonietta, and would use again in his first two string quartets) and the second theme achieves a poetic apotheosis. Admittedly his critics were mostly untroubled by this opening movement; it was the rest of the Concerto they objected to. Though he was hurt, Britten must have come to accept that they were partly right, for in 1945 he replaced the original third movement, which prolonged the skittish, mildly sarcastic mood of the preceding waltz, with a gravely reflective piece called ‘Impromptu’, which is in fact a passacaglia. This both deepens the Concerto and makes the finale more ambivalent, with its Prokofiev-like march tune strides through the movement and reaches a somewhat grotesque climax just before the apparent triumph of the end.
‘And what about its effect on a certain person of importance?’82 Auden wrote to Britten about the Concerto from Brussels. The ‘certain person’ was Wulff Scherchen. Britten had met his father Hermann again at the ISCM Festival and had learnt that Wulff, who was now 18, was living in Cambridge with his mother. Britten wrote to Wulff on 25 June: I don’t know if you will remember me or not … I should very much like to see you again.83 Wulff replied immediately and enthusiastically, and Britten invited him for a weekend at the Mill. Britten had by now given up writing his daily diary, so we cannot follow the progress of their friendship there, but in numerous letters – for this was a relationship quickened by absence – they give expression to new and intense emotions. Britten was surrounded by devotion: Peter Pears was probably now himself in love with him and Lennox Berkeley certainly was. Around Christmas 1938 Berkeley sent several anguished letters to Britten confessing ‘insane and horrible jealousy’,84 to which Britten responded with deliberate detachment in a New Year letter: I’m sure you’re feeling fine now that you’re in Paris with José & all those friends of yours … Much love, my dear; cheer up.85 Meanwhile Wulff’s friendship with Pears was also evolving. He recalled later: ‘to me Peter was a father figure, and I thought in a sense that he was the father to Benjamin at the same time … He had this air of stability that Ben didn’t have. I mean Ben was ebullient, outgoing, and Peter was the quiet, steadying influence.’86
Did Wulff even at this time have a sense of what was eventually to happen? At the height of the friendship, when both of them wrote of being ‘lost to the world’87 – a Mahlerian reference – Britten was already thinking about leaving England for America. The idea may have begun with Pears’s tour of the USA with the New English Singers in October 1937. Copland’s visit to Snape had helped encourage it, and the realisation of the idea was undoubtedly hastened by Auden and Isherwood’s departure for New York in January – neither of them was to return permanently, and Britten must have been bereft at the loss of these sustaining friendships. Montagu Slater (a left-wing writer for whose play Stay Down Miner Britten had written incidental music) and his wife Enid gave him a collection of American folk songs and ballads; Britten wrote in his letter of thanks: I am now definitely into my ‘American’ period, & nothing can stop me.88 In February, Britten saw a Hollywood producer with a view to writing a score for a film about King Arthur: he was excited, and though ultimately nothing came of it the project was kept alive for several months. He himself said in an interview in 1960 that he had felt Europe was more or less finished,89 and that his future lay in America. Meanwhile, as well as composing Ballad of Heroes, his tribute to the British members of the International Brigade who had fallen in the Spanish Civil War, which included a setting of Auden’s ‘Danse Macabre’ (the draft took him only five days), he wrote some other music which is directly related to the inspiration this new relationship had brought him and the feelings it aroused. Some months previously, Auden had introduced him to Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry, which greatly excited him, and in March 1939 he set two poems from Les Illuminations, the extraordinary sequence that Rimbaud wrote as a teenager, mostly in London when he was living out his stormy relationship with Verlaine. The two songs were ‘Being Beauteous’ (eventually dedicated to Peter Pears) and ‘Marine’. He wrote them for Sophie Wyss, still his first choice of singer, and they were broadcast, as part of an all-Britten concert, a week before he and Pears set off for Canada on 29 April. After a farewell party, at which Wulff was ill at ease – ‘I really felt I didn’t fit into this crowd’,90 he said much later – Britten saw him to Liverpool Street to catch the last train to Cambridge. They were not to meet again for over three years.
At Southampton, before Britten and Pears boarded the liner RMS Ausonia, the Bridges unexpectedly appeared to see them off, and Frank gave Ben his viola as a parting gift. Britten was never to see Bridge again; he died two years later. On the voyage, Britten wrote to Copland: A thousand reasons – mostly ‘problems’ – have brought me away … I got heavily tied up in a certain direction, which is partly why I’m crossing the ocean!91 And it was Wulff’s photograph that was on his cabin table.