Britten and Pears arrived in Quebec on 9 May 1939, and the next day reached Montreal. After two days in the city they moved up country to the Gray Rocks Inn at St Jovite, where they stayed for the next few weeks in a log cabin at the side of a hill overlooking a grand lake & lots of forest.92 As soon as he had got some incidental music for the BBC out of the way (for TH White’s The Sword in the Stone, a favourite book of his), Britten worked on his Violin Concerto, another piece he had begun in England, for the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa.
As usual, he worked very quickly, unhampered by anything except mosquitoes (31 bites on one foot alone!93 he reported to Enid Slater). By the middle of June he had almost finished the Concerto and wrote to his publisher Ralph Hawkes: So far it is without question my best piece. It is rather serious, I’m afraid – but it’s got some tunes in it!94 The Concerto is certainly ‘serious’: it confirms the mature Britten’s essentially tragic vision of the world, first announced in Our Hunting Fathers. Both melody and accompaniment at the opening have a distinctive Spanish character, and according to Brosa, the events of the Spanish Civil War cast a dark shadow on the music. There is also much of Mahler in it, and it is appropriate that Britten should have dedicated the Concerto to his fellow Mahlerian Henry Boys. Tragedy is never far away, either in the elegiac falling melody of the first movement, or the aggressive energy of the scherzo; but it is in the finale that it comes especially to the fore, as the trombones, making their first entrance in the work, gravely announce the passacaglia theme. This was the first of his works to include this form of variations over a ground bass, of which there would be many later examples: Britten would not have forgotten the huge effect that the passacaglia finale of Brahms Fourth Symphony had made on him as a teenager. The movement eventually attains a climax in D major, the key that throughout has been the Concerto’s ideal goal; but it cannot be sustained, and the coda, which becomes more and more eloquent, vacillates between major and minor, the orchestra eventually settling on the open fifth D-A while the soloist plays an F-G flat trill: a profound ambiguity.
Living together in these idyllic surroundings, and given Pears’s already strong inclination, the inevitable happened: the two friends became lovers. A change that Pears remembered as significant occurred when they visited Toronto in early June to give a joint recital. A few days later they crossed into the USA and stayed with some acquaintances of Pears in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was here, it seems, that they consummated their love: ‘I shall never forget a certain night in Grand Rapids’,95 Pears wrote to Britten six months later. And yet, at exactly this time, Britten was writing to Wulff: It is awful how much you mean to me – I had terrific resolutions when I left – & I renew these resolutions every day (you know what these resolutions are!) – but I simply can’t help thinking of you & what you’re doing, & I can’t bear it if your photo isn’t grinning at me from the mantelpiece! I love you more everyday – and seeing all these people can’t put you out of my head. So there! There’s a declaration.96 Pears, rather extraordinarily, added a flippant postcript to this letter: ‘I am looking after Ben as well as he deserves, and am trying hard to keep him from breaking out, but the Canadian girls are terribly attractive!’ Britten’s declaration, however, was a safe one, for at present he had no intention of going back to England. I’m thinking hard about the future, he wrote to Wulff ten days later. This may be the Country. There’s so much that is unknown about it – & it is tremendously large & beautiful. And it is enterprising & vital.97
Most likely the truth was that, for the time being, Wulff was his muse but Peter was reality: the kind of situation that is often rewarding for an artist. Britten would frequently need such a muse; but Peter, true to his name – and as Britten acknowledged – was the rock on whom he was to rely for the rest of his life and Peter’s support never wavered. Peter sends his love, & says he’s looking after me – as he certainly is – like a mother hen! He’s a darling,98 Britten told Wulff a few months later.
After a short visit to New York, which Britten found exciting but bewildering, he and Pears spent the rest of the summer in Woodstock, NY, renting a studio near Copland’s house there. Many years later Copland recalled their games of tennis, which Britten always won (he was a brutally competitive player). At Woodstock Britten wrote some music quite different in tone from the Violin Concerto: two more Rimbaud songs, including ‘Antique’, dedicated to Wulff, and a ‘fanfare’ for piano and strings in a radiant A major which owed much to his new experience of American sunlight, but was also inspired by Wulff. This was Young Apollo, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for himself to play. The title came from the last lines of Keats’s unfinished Hyperion with its evocation of Apollo’s ‘golden tresses’ and ‘limbs celestial’. The thematic material is almost entirely based on scales and arpeggios, as in Les Illuminations. Why, after two performances, did Britten withdraw it? It was not played again in his lifetime: was this for musical or personal reasons?
In August the two of them moved again, to Amityville, Long Island, to stay with the Mayers, an immigrant German family Pears had befriended on his earlier visits to the USA. Elizabeth Mayer and her psychiatrist husband William lived with their four children in a house in the grounds of Long Island Home, the mental hospital where Dr Mayer worked. Mrs Mayer soon became enormously fond of Britten and almost a second mother to him. In a letter to Enid Slater, Britten described as her one of those grand people who have been essential through the ages for the production of art; really sympathetic & enthusiastic, with instinctive good taste (in all the arts) & a great friend of thousands of those poor fish – artists. She is never happy unless she has them all around her … I think she’s one of the few really good people in the world – & I find her essential in these times when one has rather lost faith in human nature.99 The original plan had been for Pears, at least, to return at the end of the summer, and he booked a passage on the RMS Queen Mary. Britten persuaded him to stay, however, and when war broke out on 3 September, the wisdom of this decision was confirmed. Britten had seen Auden again: the two of them were planning an operetta for children which would eventually become Paul Bunyan. Britten’s own pacifism had been strengthened by talking to his old friend who, in the euphoric state of his own discovery of love (for Chester Kallmann) was soon to write his poem ‘September 1, 1939’ with its famous line ‘We must love one another or die’ (which later, disillusioned by Kallmann’s betrayal of his trust, he would repudiate).
In Amityville Britten also met Colin McPhee, who introduced him to the music of Bali, where McPhee had lived for a number of years.100 This contact with Balinese music was eventually to have far-reaching results, beginning with a hint of gamelan music at the point in the opening scene of Paul Bunyan where the moon turns blue. Britten straight away got down to work and after finishing a sketch of A.M.D.G. (settings of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins initially intended for Pears’s madrigal group the Round Table Singers, but which he then abandoned for unknown reasons) he turned to the completion of Les Illuminations. On 19 October, just after he had finished the song-cycle, he wrote to Sophie Wyss: Les Illuminations, as I see it, are the visions of heaven that were allowed the poet, and I hope the composer.101 The visions are very direct: Christopher Palmer has pointed out that only a ‘naïve’ composer, in Schiller’s sense of the word, would have dared set these poems so simply.102 The marvellous opening, with its high trill for cellos and basses and trumpet-like fanfares for violas and violins in B flat and E major, leading to the soloist’s ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’ (‘I alone hold the key to this wild parade’), heralds the amazing variety of vivid scenes that follow. The kaleidoscopic dash through the cityscape of ‘Villes’ succeeds to the still, sensuous love poetry of ‘Phrase’ and ‘Antique’ (so much more sensuous when sung by the soprano voice for which the songs were conceived); the brilliance of ‘Royauté’ and ‘Marine’ to the rapt ‘Interlude’ and the loveliest song of all, ‘Being Beauteous’, which glides effortlessly in and out of the purest C major. ‘Parade’, which follows, is a picture of the underworld. It should be made to sound creepy, evil, dirty (apologies!), and really desperate.103 Does beauty already inevitably lead ‘to the abyss’, as Death in Venice was later to suggest? Yet this vision ends in the ecstasy of C major again, as the soloist exultantly shouts out the refrain. ‘Départ’ leaves the ‘parade sauvage’ with nostalgic regret, as the music winds down to silence. Almost all the melodic material of Les Illuminations is derived from arpeggios and scalic fragments; yet it all sounds completely fresh. It is the crowning masterpiece of these early years.
Britten found time to compose yet another piece before the end of the year: the orchestral suite Canadian Carnival, based on Canadian folk songs. It is a more serious piece than it appears, culminating in a disturbingly ironic setting of ‘Alouette’ which was surely provoked by the sadistic words of this disingenuous children’s song. In January he gave the US premiere of his Piano Concerto in Chicago and shortly afterwards, exhausted by all his prolific composition as well as the emotions of the past year, he fell seriously ill with a streptococcal infection; he did not recover for six weeks. He would surely have been painfully aware that this was the illness that Mahler had died from. One of the Mayer daughters, Beata, a trained nurse, looked after him.
Recovered, he embarked upon his next project, a symphony, which was his response to a commission from the Japanese government for a piece to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of the Imperial dynasty. It is hard to believe that Britten really imagined that the Japanese would think a Sinfonia da Requiem, with Christian associations and moreover dedicated to the memory of his parents, suitable for the occasion; a work whose central ‘Dies Irae’, a Dance of Death like many of his scherzos and here raised to a new pitch of violence, was a clear response to the war that was raging in Europe. In fact it looks like a deliberate attempt to disconcert, as Our Hunting Fathers had been. The Japanese commissioners were duly upset and the Sinfonia was rejected (Britten meanwhile had spent some of the money from his commission on a car), though it was soon taken up by John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic, who gave the first performance in March 1941. The opening movement, ‘Lacrymosa’, begins with doom-laden Ds on the timpani, recalling the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which is in the same key. The climax of the ‘Dies Irae’, with dissonant ‘fluttertonguing’ brass and screaming glissandi, is so disruptive that it needs a special kind of calming, which the D major ‘Requiem Aeternam’, the movement Britten had hoped might appease the Japanese, then provides. At its climax, the mourning theme of the ‘Lacrymosa’ is gloriously transfigured, with cymbal clashes suggesting the sound of the sea104 – the symbol of ultimate peace. This was Britten’s third successive orchestral work in D: one may feel that the serene ending of the Sinfonia lays to rest the unruly passions of the two concertos as well as its own, and also much else that had caused anxiety in the past few years of his life. For a while, his music now tells us, he was happy.
An ebullient joie de vivre is certainly evident in the score of Paul Bunyan, which occupied him for much of the next year. Auden had devised a story based on an American myth: the legendary giant Paul Bunyan (represented by an off-stage speaking voice) presides genially over a lumber camp, symbolic of progress and the taming of nature. There are Swedish lumberjacks, headed by the irascible Hel Helson; an intellectual loner, the writer Johnny Inkslinger; and an archetypal boy-girl romance between Slim, the camp cook, and Bunyan’s daughter Tiny. Both Helson and Inkslinger discover themselves through their contact with Bunyan, Helson by losing a fight with him, Inkslinger by making his idealistic ambitions practical: at the end of the operetta he is offered a job in Hollywood, perhaps eventually to write Paul Bunyan. The story is uplifting in the spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, certainly music for the people, but music that avoids compromising artistic integrity. Though it was conceived as a high school piece (with the result that some of it has high school band scoring), Auden and Britten at one point hoped Paul Bunyan would be produced on Broadway, as it could have been if the circumstances had been right. There is no lack of potential hit tunes: Britten’s melodic gift was in full flow, and some of the songs are as catchy as those of Richard Rodgers. The cabaret songs with words by Auden that he had been occasionally writing over the past four years for Hedli Anderson served as a model, particularly for the superb ‘Blues for the Defeated’ in Act I. Auden’s libretto is somewhat self-indulgent in places – and Britten omitted the two most wayward numbers when he revised Paul Bunyan in 1974 – but being the work of a genius, it sparkles at times like no other libretto Britten was ever to set. It was also a work unusually free from the burden of personal guilt. In some ways it is sad that their partnership was not to continue. Britten might have learnt how to control his friend’s excesses, and as for Auden, neither Stravinsky nor Henze would be on the same musical wavelength for him as Britten had been.
‘Once in a while, the odd thing happens, Once in a while the moon turns blue’, the chorus sing near the beginning of the operetta (in E major, a key that would always have special connotations of security). That was Peter,105 Britten said, when he heard Paul Bunyan again just before he died. During the summer of 1940 he wrote a declaration of his love for Peter in the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo for tenor and piano: love here is not without its hesitations and anxieties (and there must in any case be strong contrasts in a song-cycle), but there is ardour and joy too in the expansive vocal lines, and the strength of the emotion is obvious. Meanwhile Wulff Scherchen was fading from his life: after the outbreak of the war he was interned as an alien and sent to Canada, and for a long time they had no contact. When Britten finally located him in Canada, their correspondence was censored by the authorities. He saw Wulff again after his return to England in 1942, but the relationship had inevitably changed. Wulff married some years later, and now presides over an extensive family dynasty in Australia.
By the autumn of 1940 Britten was having second thoughts about staying on with the Mayers: one gets abit tired of it, he wrote to his sister Beth, you see the Home is really a small village where everyone knows everyone & everyone’s business, & the intrigues & scandals are unbelievable.106 They decided to take up Auden’s offer of a room in a house owned by his friend George Davis in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, which was filled with a motley assortment of artists of all kinds, including the novelist Carson McCullers, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, the striptease dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, and Chester Kallman, Auden’s wayward partner. Auden acted as the Paul Bunyan figure in the household, collecting rent and organising communal meals. Conditions in the house were somewhat squalid and life was a trifle too bohemian for my liking,107 Britten wrote to Beth. Nor was the atmosphere particularly conducive to work, though he continued to compose Paul Bunyan and completed several other works including Diversions, a large-scale set of variations for piano left hand and orchestra, for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in the First World War. Paul Bunyan reached the stage in May 1941. It was liked by the audience but not by most of the critics, some of whom seem to have been offended by the very idea of two clever Englishmen appropriating an American subject. Both Auden and Britten in fact thought the work needed revision. Auden would soon be unhappy with its naïve idealism; Britten lost confidence in his music, though he regained it when the opera was revived in the last years of his life.
Soon after the Paul Bunyan performances Britten and Pears drove west to California to stay in Escondido, near San Diego, with Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, a married couple and piano duo for whom Britten had already composed the Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca for two pianos, and was also to write a companion piece, Mazurka Elegiaca, and the Scottish Ballad for two pianos and orchestra. He was still hoping to be asked to write a film score for Hollywood, but soon after they arrived, Britten received a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the famous patron of music, for a string quartet. He eagerly set to work, composing in a tool shed in the garden to avoid hearing the sound of the Robertsons practising. The atmosphere became tense when Ethel Bartlett fell in love with Britten and her compliant husband offered her as a ‘gift’ to the embarrassed composer. The work, published as Britten’s First Quartet, seems free of all this emotional turmoil. Britten’s thorough knowledge of the classical quartet repertoire and his experience of the string quartet medium since his early teens, enabled him to approach this great test of a composer’s ability with huge confidence. It is yet another D major work: the overall mood is fiercely happy. The first movement’s integrated slow introduction looks back to Beethoven’s Op 127 and 132, and the energy of the Allegro is Beethovenian too, as is the spirit of the exuberant finale. The slow movement, in B flat, is a calm sea piece, anticipating (especially in its closing bars) the ‘Moonlight’ interlude in Peter Grimes.
This opera was first conceived while Britten was in California. Happening to read EM Forster’s article on the 18th-century Suffolk poet George Crabbe in the BBC’s magazine The Listener, he was straight away filled with nostalgic feelings about Suffolk. Pears found a copy of Crabbe’s works in a second-hand bookshop and Britten read the poem ‘The Borough’, which contained the tragic story of the Aldeburgh fisherman Peter Grimes. He said later: in a flash I realised two things: that I must write an opera, and where I belonged.108 His continued uncertainty about whether he should stay in America now gradually changed into a firm determination to return to England. At the end of September, following the premiere of the First Quartet, Britten and Pears made another cross-country journey by car back to the Mayers’ house in Amityville. Britten dashed off a new overture for the Cleveland Orchestra, but soon afterwards he seems to have experienced a creative and emotional crisis. On a previous occasion he had told his friend David Rothman, an amateur musician who ran a hardware store at Southold (a name that would have stirred memories of Southwold in Suffolk), that he wanted to give up writing music and come and work in his store on the tip of Long Island. He said the same sort of thing now, but was also influenced by the complication of his close attachment to the Rothmans’ teenage son Bobby. For a while Bobby became a muse figure and Britten wrote a folk song setting for him, ‘The Trees so High’, with poignant words about a girl whose father has ‘tied me to a boy when you know he is too young’. The tone of the letters Britten wrote after his return to England is affectionate in an avuncular way and Bobby never realised the depth of Britten’s feelings.109 We do not know if these caused Britten anguish; maybe he had hoped that his relationship with Pears might end such infatuations. David Rothman at least was able to reassure him that he should continue to compose. A few weeks later Auden wrote a now famous letter in which he delineated with extraordinary precision Britten’s personality as man and artist.
Britten and Pears were now waiting for exit permits and a passage on a North Atlantic convoy, ‘at the height of the submarine menace’,110 as Beth Britten later put it, emphasising that her brother had not shirked danger in voyaging back to England at that time. On 16 March 1942, four months after America had entered the war, they left New York in the Swedish cargo ship MS Axel Johnson. When they embarked, the Customs officials impounded the sketches of a clarinet concerto intended for Benny Goodman and a choral setting of Auden’s ‘Hymn to St Cecilia’, imagining that these might be coded messages! Britten never went back to the concerto; he had also left the manuscript of the overture for Cleveland, unperformed, behind. The manuscript resurfaced in New York in the 1960s, but Britten at first denied it was his. When he was persuaded that it was, he wanted it destroyed; after his death it was performed as An American Overture. This little story seems symbolic of his definitive farewell to America and all that he had experienced there, including his relationship with Auden. For the moment, his old friend was much on Britten’s mind: Auden was writing the text of a large-scale Christmas oratorio which, when finished, was certainly far too long, but Britten did not immediately reject it, as is sometimes thought: he described it to Elizabeth Mayer as grand stuff. He had worked closely with Auden on the Hymn to St Cecilia text and Auden had made many revisions to his original draft. Britten did eventually decide not to write the oratorio, but by that time Peter Grimes had taken over his life, and Pears’s wariness of Auden’s influence on Britten was helping to break up their friendship, which seems eventually to have come to a definite ending in 1953 after Britten returned a critical letter of Auden’s (probably about Gloriana) torn into shreds.
Britten reconstructed what he had written of the Hymn to St Cecilia on the month-long voyage (the effortless memorability of the opening would at least have made this a simple task) and finished it. It is perhaps his finest unaccompanied choral work. The text is a resumé of Auden’s advice to Britten to come to terms with himself, culminating in the superb admonitory line, ‘O wear your tribulation like a rose’, which rings out in one of Britten’s characteristic fanfare motives, though with a blurring of the triumphal tone on the word ‘rose’. He also wrote another choral piece (one had to alleviate the boredom!111 he told Elizabeth Mayer), which was also symbolic of his return to England and the English choral tradition. This was A Ceremony of Carols, a sequence of medieval texts that Britten had found in a bookshop when the ship docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia. He set them for boys’ voices and harp, and they are one of his most thoroughgoing explorations of childhood innocence; but they end in joyous acceptance of innocence lost in the final setting of ‘Adam lay ibounden’, with its ecstatic peals of ‘Deo Gracias’. At this point in his life he could still set religious texts with apparently full conviction. And at the back of his mind as he sailed back home was the new opera, for which, just before he left, he had secured a commission for $1000 from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and with which he would reach his full maturity.
Auden to Britten, 31 January 1942:
I have been thinking a great deal about you and your work during the past year. As you know I think you the white hope of music; for this very reason I am more critical of you than of anybody else, and I think I know something about the dangers that beset you as a man and as an artist because they are my own.
Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention.
Bohemian chaos alone ends in a mad jumble of beautiful scraps; Bourgeois convention alone ends in large unfeeling corpses.
Every artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other … For middle-class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the second. Your attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles, ie to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, ie sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.
Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do, eg Elisabeth, Peter (please show this to P to whom all this is also addressed). Up to a certain point this is fine for you, but beware. You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, ie to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy.
If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have; ie you will have to be able to say what you never yet have had the right to say – God, I’m a shit.
[Britten’s response, sadly, is lost, as Auden threw away all letters he received after he had read them.]